In a gambling match with no brackets, no eliminations, no sitting around waiting to play things can go much different than Fargorate predicts with a given two players.
While I am addressing and responding to your post, a lot of the following was also intended to address things that you and others have said in other posts as well so if some things seem seem a little out of place to this particular post that is why...
What some people still aren't comprehending is that FargoRate does not try to predict the winner of a match. In fact, it tells you that both players can and will win the match at times and it even tells you how many times out of a hundred that each player would win. For example it may say that if they played the match a hundred times player A might win 73 of them and player B might win 27 of them. Now we can absolutely derive from this that player A is more likely to win any particular match up, but both results will happen at times and what actually happens in any particular match up means absolutely nothing about the accuracy of FargoRate since it predicts both will happen at times.
People that don't understand that basic concept are trying to argue things like "well player A did in fact win the match so FargoRate proved its accuracy" or things like "well player B won the match so clearly FargoRate is not accurate". Neither of those arguments are valid and by themselves both of those match results say absolutely nothing--zero--zilch--nada--- about the accuracy of FargoRate. In the case where player A wins, well it just happened to be one of the 73 that he is going to win for every hundred times they match up just like FargoRate predicted. And for the case where player B wins, it just happened to be one of the 27 times out of a 100 that he was going to win just like FargoRate predicted.
I will say it again. Individual matches say nothing--nada--zero---zilch about the accuracy of FargoRate. It would be like if, using your own personal knowledge, you picked SVB to win a match over Tony Robles, and then when Tony pulls out the win everybody tells you what an idiot you are, that your accuracy sucks, that you don't know how to pick winners, you don't know how to judge people's speeds, when in fact none of those things they are arguing might be true at all. You did accurately pick who was better and who was more likely to win, but this was just one of those cases where Tony managed to win anyway, which incidentally is a result you were well aware would happen sometimes. It is the exact same thing with FargoRate. The results of individual matches tell you nothing about how accurate FargoRate is regarding who is better than who and by how much, just like the fact that Tony beat SVB tells us nothing about your ability to judge who is better than who and by how much.
In regards to what you said above, yes, anything can happen in a match. FargoRate agrees, as do the rest of us. Yes, certain conditions can also change who is favored by how much. FargoRate once again agrees, as do the rest of us. FargoRate accurately tells you what people's average performance level is under a variety of conditions. On any particular day sometimes people are going to play above their average level, and other times they are going to play below their average level. Some people gamble better than others. Some people play better on the bigfoot table than others. Sometimes people have the flu and it affects their level of play. Etc.
All you have essentially said is that FargoRate can't predict who is going to be playing their best that day, and FargoRate absolutely agrees with you but says that this is an unreasonable expectation, and/or you have said that FargoRate doesn't specialize in every type of circumstance that could come up and every type of condition that could be played under and that particular conditions and circumstances can make a difference, and once again FargoRate agrees with you and says that there would need to be a FargoRate tweaked for every circumstance and condition possible in order to do that, which would result in many thousands of them, but having one system that gives you a good accurate average of a player's abilities is by far more usable and useful and you should just use your knowledge about who has the flu, or who handles gambling pressure better than who and things like that to determine who you think is most likely to perform above or below their average level and by how much based on particular conditions and circumstances.
I play and gamble cheap with a local player here frequently. We both have plenty of robustness and are rated just about the same by Fargorate. In fact I'm 5 points lower. The thing is the actual results of our frequent matches head to head would place me about 60 points higher.
You and he are essentially the same level of player if you both have plenty of games in the system. Maybe you play particularly well against him for some reason. Maybe he just can't play well against you for some reason. Maybe it is just sheer luck and is a matter of variance that is bound to happen at times, like how red is going to come up ten times in a row in roulette sometimes but we can't use that information to surmise that red is more likely to come up than black because this would be incorrect conclusion, rather it just means that streaks happen sometimes purely by luck. If I flip coins against a lot of people and I always call heads, there is a good chance there is going to be one of those people where I got ten heads in a row against them, but it doesn't mean that I flip coins better than they do, it just means that streaks happen and they were one of the people I happened to get a random lucky streak on them even though we are dead even in our flipping abilities.
No matter what rating system we try to use, it's always solved on the table.
That is the beauty of FargoRate actually, it relies solely only on the results of what happens on the table. There is zero subjectivity involved as there always is with any human's judgment.
