Fargo Ratings and Table Size
June 29, 2016 | Author: Mike Page
“They mix 7-foot and 9-foot results; those can’t be compared”
“There is no way a rating established on […] tables is going to translate to […]”
“Everybody knows 7-foot tables are way easier.”
The table-size issue is one we have studied - a lot. The short answer is your established Fargo Rating is a sound measure of your skill regardless of the equipment, regardless of whether you play on big tables, little tables, tight-pocket tables, or buckets-for-pockets tables. The reasons for this are subtle and require some explanation.
Absolute Versus Relative Performance
Absolute measures of performance are things like heights, times, successes, balls pocketed, pins knocked down, words per minute, strokes taken, weight lifted, and worlds conquered. Most ratings in most activities included reliance on some absolute measure. The key point is FargoRate never considers any measure of absolute performance - none, nada, zilch - not whether you make a particular shot, not how many balls you make, not whether you run a table - none of these. FargoRate considers only whether you or your opponent won the game at hand.
Golf
Compare this to golf, where there is a score relative to a course on a given day - an absolute measure. You then need course and slope ratings to make even a crude comparison to another player’s performance somewhere else. Even then, you fail to consider the length of the grass in the fairways and the rough, the rain, whether the ground is dry and hard or wet and soft, the wind, and a host of other factors. This is the curse of absolute measures of performance. Sure the player who consistently dinks the ball short distances down the middle of the fairway doesn’t care how tall the grass is in the rough. And the player who hits the ball unusually far benefits less from hard ground that helps carry the ball extra distance. But those relative distinctions are small compared to the absolute differences in performance.
If FargoRate was rating your golf round, it would record, for each hole, only that you scored -1, or 0, or +1 or +2 relative to the score on that hole on that day of a particular rated player golfing in your group. Note that this simple “+2 relative to Tiger Woods” for that hole already includes any effects of wind, rain, length of the grass and so forth.
Track & Field
Everybody knows a tailwind helps you get a better time in a 200-meter race. In fact, the tailwind must be less than 2.0 meters per second for your time to be registered as an official record. Once again, a 1.9 meter per second tailwind one day and no tailwind the next day is the curse of absolute measures of performance. Interestingly, relative measures of performance in track and field are still official with any tailwind. If you beat Tyson Gay in a 100-meter race with a 5.0 meter per second tailwind, your time does not count - but the fact you beat Tyson Gay does. The idea is you are both subject to the same conditions and the presumption is if you beat Tyson Gay with a tailwind, you would have also beat him with no tailwind.
And so it is with pool. So long as you consider only relative performance, the vast majority of the reasons our performance differs from one condition to another is inherently considered.
Unfamiliar Conditions
Still, some differences remain. The most obvious is a person playing under unfamiliar conditions. For example, someone who nearly exclusively plays on a 7-foot table will likely underperform on a 9-foot table. It is tempting to suggest this player should have one Fargo Rating on a 7-foot table and another Fargo Rating on a 9-foot table. But there is a difference between these two performance measures. The player’s 7-foot performance is a true measure of skill that reflects perhaps years of experience and is hard to improve without truly meaningful changes. The 9-foot performance - as real as it is that day - is a reflection of unfamiliarity, a performance that can improve with tens of hours of effort rather than thousands of hours of effort. In short, the 7-foot performance is a true skill level, and the 9-foot performance would approach that same skill level with a modest amount of effort as familiarity improves. FargoRate captures that true skill level because a player’s Fargo Rating comes from conditions that contribute the most games for that player, conditions under which he or she is most familiar.
An example of this at the pro level is Skylar Woodward. Many of our 2,500 or so games for Skylar - and much of his early reputation as a top US player - come from play on 7-foot tables. Some might wonder whether his position as number 58 player in the world according to FargoRate is a reasonable assessment for international competitions that are held on 9-foot tables. For this reason, we computed what Skylar’s Fargo Rating would be if we considered only play on 9-foot or 10-foot tables and only from the past 12 months. So this would include events like the 2016 Super Billiards Expo, 2015 US Open 9-Ball Championships, the August 2015 Turning Stone Classic, The Bigfoot Challenge at the Derby City Classic, the 2015 Mosconi Cup, and his challenge match last summer with Oscar Dominquez. The result is that Skylar’s Fargo Rating would be the same as it is now within three points.
And this is what we see elsewhere. If Ko Pin Yi played on 7-foot tables today, he likely would perform below his near-800 Fargo Rating...at first. On his 10th or 20th day of play, we would expect no real difference. Ko Pi Yi’s Fargo Rating, based on playing on 9-foot tables, is a true measure of his skill.
What’s Left?
So once we acknowledge that 1) the lion’s share of the differences between different sized tables are wiped out by considering only relative performance, and 2) the biggest part of what remains is just unfamiliarity with playing conditions not experienced regularly, what’s left?
What’s left is the different subtle mix of skills that lead to success under different conditions. A player better at pocketing balls will find that skill exploited more on a big table with small pockets. A player who loses accuracy when stroking hard will have more trouble muscling the cue ball around on slow cloth with dead rails. A tall player will have less problem reaching shots on a big table. These effects are all real; they just add up to a smaller overall impact than many people realize. Yet when players discuss these small effects, it is easy to be tripped up by the large glaring differences in absolute performance - the ones that have already been washed out by considering relative performance (shots are easier so I will do better, or shots are harder so I will do worse).
FargoRate actually does separate optimizations of, for example, 8-Ball on 7-foot tables, and rotation games on 9-foot tables. In time and with enough data, this will tease out the subtle effects discussed in the previous paragraph and we will share the results. We can say now though, that the results - at least in terms of differences in ratings for different table sizes - are underwhelming.
Summary
FargoRate includes 8-ball, 9-ball, and 10-ball games on any size table, and individual players have ratings influenced most by play under the conditions they experience the most. Because the approach considers only your performance relative to an opponent who is playing on the same equipment, even large variations in equipment matter little to your rating.
“There is no way a rating established on […] tables is going to translate to […]”
“Everybody knows 7-foot tables are way easier.”
The table-size issue is one we have studied - a lot. The short answer is your established Fargo Rating is a sound measure of your skill regardless of the equipment, regardless of whether you play on big tables, little tables, tight-pocket tables, or buckets-for-pockets tables. The reasons for this are subtle and require some explanation.
Absolute Versus Relative Performance
Absolute measures of performance are things like heights, times, successes, balls pocketed, pins knocked down, words per minute, strokes taken, weight lifted, and worlds conquered. Most ratings in most activities included reliance on some absolute measure. The key point is FargoRate never considers any measure of absolute performance - none, nada, zilch - not whether you make a particular shot, not how many balls you make, not whether you run a table - none of these. FargoRate considers only whether you or your opponent won the game at hand.
Golf
Compare this to golf, where there is a score relative to a course on a given day - an absolute measure. You then need course and slope ratings to make even a crude comparison to another player’s performance somewhere else. Even then, you fail to consider the length of the grass in the fairways and the rough, the rain, whether the ground is dry and hard or wet and soft, the wind, and a host of other factors. This is the curse of absolute measures of performance. Sure the player who consistently dinks the ball short distances down the middle of the fairway doesn’t care how tall the grass is in the rough. And the player who hits the ball unusually far benefits less from hard ground that helps carry the ball extra distance. But those relative distinctions are small compared to the absolute differences in performance.
If FargoRate was rating your golf round, it would record, for each hole, only that you scored -1, or 0, or +1 or +2 relative to the score on that hole on that day of a particular rated player golfing in your group. Note that this simple “+2 relative to Tiger Woods” for that hole already includes any effects of wind, rain, length of the grass and so forth.
Track & Field
Everybody knows a tailwind helps you get a better time in a 200-meter race. In fact, the tailwind must be less than 2.0 meters per second for your time to be registered as an official record. Once again, a 1.9 meter per second tailwind one day and no tailwind the next day is the curse of absolute measures of performance. Interestingly, relative measures of performance in track and field are still official with any tailwind. If you beat Tyson Gay in a 100-meter race with a 5.0 meter per second tailwind, your time does not count - but the fact you beat Tyson Gay does. The idea is you are both subject to the same conditions and the presumption is if you beat Tyson Gay with a tailwind, you would have also beat him with no tailwind.
And so it is with pool. So long as you consider only relative performance, the vast majority of the reasons our performance differs from one condition to another is inherently considered.
Unfamiliar Conditions
Still, some differences remain. The most obvious is a person playing under unfamiliar conditions. For example, someone who nearly exclusively plays on a 7-foot table will likely underperform on a 9-foot table. It is tempting to suggest this player should have one Fargo Rating on a 7-foot table and another Fargo Rating on a 9-foot table. But there is a difference between these two performance measures. The player’s 7-foot performance is a true measure of skill that reflects perhaps years of experience and is hard to improve without truly meaningful changes. The 9-foot performance - as real as it is that day - is a reflection of unfamiliarity, a performance that can improve with tens of hours of effort rather than thousands of hours of effort. In short, the 7-foot performance is a true skill level, and the 9-foot performance would approach that same skill level with a modest amount of effort as familiarity improves. FargoRate captures that true skill level because a player’s Fargo Rating comes from conditions that contribute the most games for that player, conditions under which he or she is most familiar.
An example of this at the pro level is Skylar Woodward. Many of our 2,500 or so games for Skylar - and much of his early reputation as a top US player - come from play on 7-foot tables. Some might wonder whether his position as number 58 player in the world according to FargoRate is a reasonable assessment for international competitions that are held on 9-foot tables. For this reason, we computed what Skylar’s Fargo Rating would be if we considered only play on 9-foot or 10-foot tables and only from the past 12 months. So this would include events like the 2016 Super Billiards Expo, 2015 US Open 9-Ball Championships, the August 2015 Turning Stone Classic, The Bigfoot Challenge at the Derby City Classic, the 2015 Mosconi Cup, and his challenge match last summer with Oscar Dominquez. The result is that Skylar’s Fargo Rating would be the same as it is now within three points.
And this is what we see elsewhere. If Ko Pin Yi played on 7-foot tables today, he likely would perform below his near-800 Fargo Rating...at first. On his 10th or 20th day of play, we would expect no real difference. Ko Pi Yi’s Fargo Rating, based on playing on 9-foot tables, is a true measure of his skill.
What’s Left?
So once we acknowledge that 1) the lion’s share of the differences between different sized tables are wiped out by considering only relative performance, and 2) the biggest part of what remains is just unfamiliarity with playing conditions not experienced regularly, what’s left?
What’s left is the different subtle mix of skills that lead to success under different conditions. A player better at pocketing balls will find that skill exploited more on a big table with small pockets. A player who loses accuracy when stroking hard will have more trouble muscling the cue ball around on slow cloth with dead rails. A tall player will have less problem reaching shots on a big table. These effects are all real; they just add up to a smaller overall impact than many people realize. Yet when players discuss these small effects, it is easy to be tripped up by the large glaring differences in absolute performance - the ones that have already been washed out by considering relative performance (shots are easier so I will do better, or shots are harder so I will do worse).
FargoRate actually does separate optimizations of, for example, 8-Ball on 7-foot tables, and rotation games on 9-foot tables. In time and with enough data, this will tease out the subtle effects discussed in the previous paragraph and we will share the results. We can say now though, that the results - at least in terms of differences in ratings for different table sizes - are underwhelming.
Summary
FargoRate includes 8-ball, 9-ball, and 10-ball games on any size table, and individual players have ratings influenced most by play under the conditions they experience the most. Because the approach considers only your performance relative to an opponent who is playing on the same equipment, even large variations in equipment matter little to your rating.
