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Toggle navigation Home LMS Videos Top Players FAQ Contact Us 0 Players 0 Games 0 Countries Search for Player Ratings What is ? computes pocket-billiard player ratings called Fargo Ratings that rate amateur and professional players worldwide. Coupling game win/loss data across local leagues, regions, countries, and continents insures players everywhere are rated on the same scale. a Fargo Rating of 620 means the same thing in Halifax, Nova Scotia as it does in Christchurch, New Zealand as it does in Phoenix, Arizona. Fargo Ratings are as useful for handicapping a small-town league as they are determining top players by country. To achieve its vision of a new era for pocket billiards in which all players everywhere are connected, has created a league management system called LMS that is available for use by all leagues. has a special relationship with CueSports Internationsl (CSI) such that all CSI players have full access to LMS and all things . About Who We Are How about a brief overview of Fargo Ratings? Unlike high jumpers, who have height, swimmers, who have time, and javelin throwers, who have distance, pool players –pocket billiard players—have no absolute measure of performance. Skill at pool, like skill at chess, must be based on relative performance—upon who beats whom. rates pool players worldwide on the same scale based on games won and lost against opponents of known rating. We compute the optimum set of ratings—also known as maximum likelihood ratings—as those that best predict the outcome of all of the games amongst all of the players. Professional players generally have ratings between 700 and 800. A random company holiday party might have many players rated between 50 and 200. Most people who play pool in leagues and tournaments are between these ranges, i.e., between 200 and 700. There is no top and no bottom to the scale. The rating difference between two players determines the chance each will win a game. Two players with the same rating, i.e., a 300 and another 300, or a 600 and another 600, have equal chances of winning a game between them. If the two players play multiple games, they will tend to win them in a ratio of 1:1 (one to one). When two players are 100 points apart, say a 300 versus a 400, the ratio of game wins will be near 1:2, as in 5 games to 10 games, or 50 games to 100 games. A 200-point gap leads to a game win ratio of 1:4 A 300-point gap leads to a game win ratio of 1:8 A 400-point gap leads to a game win ratio of 1:16 Two players with a 34-point gap, like a 530 and a 564, will win games in a 4:5 ratio. A 50-point gap predicts a 5:7 win ratio. A new player can establish a rating by performance against an opponent of any rating. For instance, a new player who consistently wins 2 out of 3 games against a 350 is performing like a 450. That is, the two win games in a 2:1 ratio and thus are separated by about 100 points. A group of players who are well coupled to one another, like in a local league, can become coupled to the rest of the world by a few players or even a single player playing outside the group. Games are added to our dataset every day. And a new rating optimization, coupling everybody together around the globe, is performed every day. The result is a system that is as useful for rating two-dozen players in a small-town league as it is for rating players in a regional tournament tour as it is for rating world-class completion. And a byproduct is each of these groups knows exactly where it stands relative to the others. What level of play is a Fargo Rating of 'XXX'? While Fargo ratings are defined by relative performance, the ratings very much take on an absolute meaning. Once players in a region become accustomed to Fargo Ratings, the ratings become at the center of discussions of player ability. There is no top or bottom to the scale Fargo Ratings have the following approximate correspondence: 800 A top world-class player. Fewer than 20 players worldwide have ratings that exceed 800. 700 A top regional player in the US – There are about 300 players at this level in the United States. – a threat to run six in a row if the break is working. World-Class female player. 600 Has run three-in-a-row multiple times and maybe four-in-a row a time or two. High Run in 14.1 of 50-60. There are generally around 30 players at this level per million population 500 A good local league player. Runs out first time at the table in about 5% of the games. Close to the median of players in the system 400 Runs out first time at the table in about 1% of the games—once or twice a league season. 300 A common level of play for league player. Maybe has run a table, and maybe not. 200 beginner level – modestly coordinated --Most likely has never run an 8-ball table 100 beginner level – somewhat uncoordinated What does a particular Fargo Rating difference mean? Fargo ratings are on a logarithmic scale like the Richter scale for earthquakes. What that means is that for each gap of 100 points, the higher rated player is twice as good as the lower rated player in the sense that a fair match between them would be 8-4 or 10-5, i.e., the higher rated player wins twice as many games as the lower rated player. This would also be true for any other 100-point gap, such as from 550 to 650. Tables are easily constructed that show fair matches for any rating difference. For instance, when the stronger player goes to 9 games, a fair match is one for which the weaker player goes to the following number of games: Rating difference Weaker player goes to 17 8 36 7 58 6 85 5 117 4 158 3 217 2 317 1 What is robustness? Robustness is a measure of the reliability of a player’s Fargo Rating. For now, it is simply the number of games a player has played that contribute to his or her rating. A robustness of 200 is a minimum standard for us to consider a rating “established.” In general, a rating is more reliable not only by being based on more games but also by more of those games being recent and by more of those games being against opponents with established ratings. Robustness will likely incorporate these latter two factors in the future, and that is why we don’t simply call it number of games. Players with a robustness under 200, i.e., those with an unestablished rating, have an official rating that may be influenced by a starter rating. [see What is a starter rating?] How frequently is a rating optimization performed? Ab Initio global optimizations are performed every day at 6am GMT. What pocket-billiard games are included in the rating optimization? Fargo ratings are based on the results of 8-ball, 9-ball, 10-ball games played on either 9-foot or 7-foot tables. What other games or activities use a similar rating system? Many. The basic relation between rating differences and win probability is characteristic of ELO schemes. Arpad Elo was a Hungarian-born American physicist who first applied these ideas to rate chess players several decades ago. These ideas are still core to chess ratings and also form the basis for world ratings in football (soccer), NFL football, baseball, a variety of competitive video games, the game Go, and many others. These equations even made an appearance in the movie Social Network (the facebook movie) as part of facemash, an elo-based scheme to rate the attractiveness of female university students at Harvard. What is the history of Fargo Ratings? There were two implementations of ELO-type schemes in the 1990s. One was by Ron Shepard, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago, who implemented the scheme for 8-ball players in the Argonne Pool League. The other was by Bob Jewett, who used an ELO-type scheme as the basis of the NPL (National Pool League) rankings for 9-ball players largely in the San Francisco area. More recently the idea of an Ab Initio Global Optimization of ELO-type ratings was described by Michael Page in a 2002 Billiards Digest article, Sizing up with the Pros. Fargo Ratings were later...