(Un)Popular Opinion on Fargo Rate
- Thread starter kollegedave
- Start date
Maybe someone need explain what is so great about FARGO, it is like affirmative action, that is reverse discrimination against Best Skilled Players.
I’ll bite.Maybe someone need explain what is so great about FARGO, it is like affirmative action, that is reverse discrimination against Best Skilled Players.
I think your general complaint is about handicapping, and not FargoRating specifically (which can also be used for handicapping).
Have you ever gambled with anyone getting or giving weight? Or did you only ever gamble even?
Have you ever played in a tournament where you were getting or giving weight? Or you only ever played in scratch tournaments?
I think you have already demonstrated the best use of Fargo. The tournaments you have been putting on, using the hottest match. The better player still has the advantage, just not as much.
Well, with that question the importance of credible source comes to mind. I avoided that sort of question with, "well there's one way to find out." I never wanted to knock anyone's action.
I Shirley didn't want any part of the Blame if they lost the game.In my 650 score with the "beat this guy he's a drug dealer", I did notice him interviewing a player that knew me well (we were even). He didn't knock my action. We are definitely friends....now.
InsertCleverNameHere
Well-known member
Do you get paid per character? Always so unnecessarily wordy.
Your lack of an attention span is not my problem, sir. Go watch some shorts on Facebook or summin. Let the intelligent adults converse amongst themselves, please.
Was that short enough for yah, brocephus?
InsertCleverNameHere
Well-known member
I just think it’s funny how even when people agree with you, you spend 20 minutes typing a novel about why they’re wrong. Gives me the giggles.
You are a moron!
Coming from you.. That is quite the compliment.. Thank you!
I didn’t have a FR until a trip to Austin 5 years ago when I couldn’t seem to get a 1P action match so I played in Skinny Bobs 9 ball tournament and happened to have a great night. My FR has been dropping ever since. The two US Open 1P tournaments I played in reported to FR.
I don’t think he was talking about the local $50 entry tournament, lol.
Lou Figueroa
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I resemble that last remark.
It is debatable whether Fargorate is more "accurate" than chess ratings or not... But one thing that is not debatable is that the vast majority of the data a player might be interested in, is hidden from the player base.. Unless you subscribe to the app. And even then.... Players interested in hiding their speed have the right to not have their game data be public in the app.
And the site... Absolutely atrocious. Compare fairmatch.fargorate.com to this - https://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmtHst.php?12585343
USCF's MSA site looks like it was programmed in 1985... And still has LOADS more data, and is more usable, than Fargorate could ever dream to be. Fargorate has been around much too long to still be as bare bones as it is. Mike Page seems to have cobbled together a million different Fargorate submission avenues, whereas in USCF there is ONE submission method, and a clearly defined process to become a tournament admin...
Fargorate in my opinion, is still being majorly handicapped by the American gambling mentality, and Mike not wanting to antagonize people looking to keep their speed under the radar. He will never get universal adoption in the way that USCF/FIDE rating have, as long as some portion of the data is kept private.
If I thought it was on the table... I would totally offer to buy Fargorate, and first order of business would be to rebuild the website, and make all match data public, and if the gamblers don't like it, they can suck it. I would do it the same as USCF does, and make it one small fee to submit ANY tournament to Fargorate. The goal would be to make it the de facto international standard pool rating, and every business decision would be aimed at that goal. I'd be targeting countries that already gather lots of data on important "non-tournament" match games. (I.E. Deutsch Billard Union league reporting..) And I either write the code, or pay someone to write the code to automatically ingest their data. DBU results are all on public websites, and the data can be tucked right in with a 50-100 line script. I know it can.. Because I wrote that script with very barebones programming knowledge, and some ChatGPT help.
I mean, Jaysus.. I am not even a real coder... But I built a script and just GAVE it to Fargorate to ingest DBU league results. (I don't know if it is being used..) Germans as a whole like data, and their league system gathers tons of data.. They see Fargorate as superfluous, as it literally gives nothing but a single number, unless subscribed to the app. Fargorate doesn't seem to be doing much to encourage adoption in other countries.
It is really as simple as finding a way to capture the data these players "already" care about.. For free... And then finding a way to present the player's Fargorate alongside the current data in their country's tracking system. Think: Player's Fargorate being shown beside their name in the league site software. This will start the conversation.. "Waymint! I think I play better than Felix Spielermann!! What is this Fargorate thing??? I need to practice more!!!" And these players get better, and play more tournaments to improve their Fargorate.. And will actually start demanding more Fargorate submitted tournaments. That's where Fargorate will make the money.
In chess... Two players within a club can have similar ratings and have a bit of a rivalry... And then one starts studying and increasing their rating.... And then the other player sees their rival eclipsing their rating, and then starts studying too. There is NO reason this should not work in pool. The ability to accurately measure ourselves against another player, and to have that measurement right up in our face every time we play a rated game, is what drives improvement efforts.
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I think Fargo could be improved to be more like golf handicapping. I will try to explain. Just stick with me as it requires some tangent to talk about difference in how a golf handicap is derived vs a Fargo rating. I dont want to get far into the weeds on calculating USGA handicaps. For those who do not know I will explain the broad strokes, no pun intended. A golfers handicap is determined from the individual players scores and the difficulty of the courses played. The players handicap number translates into which holes they would receive stroke deductions per the course being played. The golfers handicap has nothing to do with who they played against. So clearly a major difference between how the two systems arrive at skill ratings. But I can’t help butI think a pool players Fargo rating could be used to determine a spot akin to how a golfers handicap determines stroke deductions. Seems enough data exists to determine spots comparing players Fargo ratings.
I think a Fargo calculated spot would be better than flighting the tournaments based on Fargo ratings. Using a spot would give weaker players a chance to compete on a level playing field with stronger players. I think there is a benefit for the stronger players too. I would bet that with the current system of flighting tournaments there are players with a high Fargo rating but sub world class are finding themselves on the outside looking in. Using a Fargo calculated spot would alleviate anyone in this situation.
For the record, when I was younger man I thought handicapping systems were stupid and drove away incentive to get better. Now than I am less than old but no longer young. With a family and job… I understand handicapping a little more.
I think a Fargo calculated spot would be better than flighting the tournaments based on Fargo ratings. Using a spot would give weaker players a chance to compete on a level playing field with stronger players. I think there is a benefit for the stronger players too. I would bet that with the current system of flighting tournaments there are players with a high Fargo rating but sub world class are finding themselves on the outside looking in. Using a Fargo calculated spot would alleviate anyone in this situation.
For the record, when I was younger man I thought handicapping systems were stupid and drove away incentive to get better. Now than I am less than old but no longer young. With a family and job… I understand handicapping a little more.
The number of One-Pocket games streamed by Accu-Stats in any single DCC is too small from which to make generalizations. The stats can be interesting for seeing what happened that particular year, but generalizations from a single year's results are not warranted. Yes, the breaker won 51% of the games this year. But it was 68% last year and 49% just 3 years ago. As I mentioned in my thread on the 2025 stats, the breaker won 55.6% of the games streamed on the main table (235 of 423) for the last 7 DCC events combined. I think that is a more reasonable figure with which to judge whether breaking is still an advantage for pros -- roughly 6 to 5 in favor of the breaker.
Fargorate already gives a "handicap" calculator, that is very accurate in predicting outcomes.
But herein lies the problem... It's right there in the site fairmatch.fargorate.com. The entire site is built off of the idea of figuring out what two players need to "gamble" somewhat fairly. But gambling between big Fargorate skill levels is a dying thing. It's too easy to determine that player 1 stands no chance to win against player 2, but not only that, it precisely illustrates that the true "even game" is nowhere close to what it would have been believed to be, when there were a bunch road players running around. So, when the data is completely opened up, it results in a handicap that the better player is never gonna wanna give..
So... The true "future" of Fargorate in pool is to encourage improvement by giving you an extremely accurate assessment of where you stand versus players A, B, and C. To trigger that psychological response to get that rating higher, which will result in actual "skill" getting higher. So you can actually "prove" you are the better player.
And we don't really have to "theorize" about how all this works. Chess has a rating system in America that is ubiquitous, and everybody in the whole system knows exactly where they stand in the food chain. This does NOT stop young players from doing the work to improve that rating, and as a result, skill. Encouraging young players to get better is THE defining aspect of whether a game/sport is going to successful long term. NOT providing a system for people to gamble fairly.
The difference between Fargorate and USCF rating is.... Fargorate is not being completely adopted in pool, and the data is not 100% public. So it gives the gamblers/sandbaggers "gaps" to operate in, making a ton more work for the Fargorate peeps to wade through.. It is my opinion that Fargorate should make all the data 100% public, so everyone can see that the supposed "550" Fargorate player beat a 750 Fargorate player 9-3 in a tournament last year.. The other players in the event will be quick to identify players that should not be allowed in under a specific cap, and the TD can easily review the player's match history to see they obviously undertook a sandbagging effort over a period of time. But everybody NEEDS access to any player's complete match history, to crowdsource the effort to prevent sandbagging.
What Fargorate should be doing is talking to an organization like the USCF, determining how they manage to detect sandbagging, and discussing the various psychological underpinning that cause many thousands of rated tournaments to be held every day, when there is not really much money to be won. Tune Fargorate to facilitate those psychological aspects, and the whole idea of sandbagging becomes much harder to execute.
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I'd be curious as to how the stats play out in the year that the pockets were 4 1/8", versus the larger pockets this year. I think the winning expectation changes for the breaker, depending on tightness of the pockets..
The year with smaller pockets was 2023. But from what I heard that year, they were 4¼". The breaker won 55% (42 of 76) of the games streamed by Accu-Stats that year.
There is no stroke play in pool So the system can’t be that similar. This gets discussed sometimes and pool is just different. You don’t play multiple sessions of 18 racks of equal offense on different tables with ratings and slope and get an index. It wouldn’t work really. The Fargorate fair match spot works IMO.