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Live PRs

Posted By: Matt Cohn-Geier
Date: Saturday, 8 February 2014, at 1:49 p.m.

In Response To: Dual Duel, PR's, chasing Ego and etc... (Stick)

So, this thread got me to thinking. And I started looking through just the live matches from the past 2 years that I had currently saved on my hard drive. These include the 5 that Stick already mentioned. So here are the ones I had currently saved. There shouldn't be any selection bias since these are the sum total of what I had. There could easily be more matches of mine out there. I have never tracked my PR average. Selection bias is one reason that I just let others accumulate data on me instead of recording and transcribing everything myself--I wouldn't ever want to get into a situation where there was cherry picking, or even where a person could accuse me of cherry picking (whether reasonably or unreasonably). So I usually try to avoid telling people "what my PR is", or saying that "these are all my matches from this tournament" (but leaving out those other tournaments), etc.

However, when I see the data being blatantly manipulated and misrepresented, I feel compelled to speak out. So I started looking. Here are the PRs I played in the past 2 years from the matches I have saved. I have my opponents and opponents' PRs, but I decided not to list them all publicly. There were 23 live recorded matches in total summarized here.

Adding it all up gives me an average PR of 2.95 with 2.73 checker play and 4.22 cube play for 2012-2014. Which, believe it or not, is pretty close to the online error rate I have on Iancho's list--almost exactly the same and even a little bit better live, in fact. In my recorded matches, I averaged 2.89 in NY and 1.99 in San Antonio this year (2.58 overall so far for 2014).

Note that this is in spite of the fact that I have several bad matches thrown in there. Matches where I altered my play to account for my opponent's tendencies and try to maximize rather than just play for PR. Matches where I had become tired from playing the tournament for days, or where I didn't give my best effort because I was still 12 rounds away from cashing even if I happened to win, or whatever. I'm not making excuses. I am simply saying that even after you have taken all that into account, it all comes out in the wash in the average: the bottom line is I play around a 2.95 (give or take, maybe I play 2.7, maybe I play 3.3, whatever). My live PR isn't mysteriously somehow more than double my online PR.

Now sure, if you take my 5 worst matches, I will be over 4. And if you take my 5 best live matches from the past 2 years, I will be under 1.5. That doesn't really tell you very much information, other than that cherry-picking works wonders. But if you take 5 randomly selected matches, there is a good chance that it will be relatively close to the long-run average.

Again, I'm not a great player. I made far too many mistakes in all of those matches where my PR was over 1. There are some players out there who are just as good as me, maybe even better. Mochy was a deserving champion in San Antonio. As far as how his PR compares to mine, I'll leave that to the peanut gallery, but Mochy is an excellent player and deserves every accolade he gets.

Here you said Mochy would be a favorite against you in a PR match. I don't know what the hell you are talking about. Mochy is good, but he isn't close to 2.3. Even if he tries really hard. I'm OK, but I'm not anywhere close to 2.3. In fact, I'm not even in the same league as 2.3. Sure, maybe some day 10 years from now I might be, but at the moment I'm not even playing the same sport. 2.3 would crush me & Mochy. If you're actually that good where you play a 2.3 on average, you would be a truly mammoth-sized favorite in the Dual-Duel. Like, you might be over 90% to win outright. 2.3 is unbelievably strong.

In fact, even if just your checker play was 2.3, and your cube was around a 4 or 5, you would still rate to crush Mochy. There is an enormous gulf between 2.3 and 2.7-2.9 or whatever (presumably no one thinks Mochy averages better than 2.3). This is still to say nothing of 2.0, where there is an even bigger gap between 2.0 and 2.3.

I think it does a tremendous disservice to those who are actually playing as well as they can to try to craft and maintain an image of transcendental perfection, yet never allow that expertise to be demonstrated in real-life competition.

I know that you are eager to bet me on the PR, so consider the bet accepted. If you average 2.3 then you rate to beat me on the PR bet a hefty percentage of the time. Again, I'll believe it when I see it.

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