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BGonline.org Forums
Perspectives on PR Ratings
Posted By: Phil Simborg
Date: Tuesday, 5 April 2011, at 4:39 p.m.
I have been spending a lot of time going over matches and match records with students lately, and a lot of time looking at my own performance. Primarily we do this by looking at the Player Profile in XG.
I am more and more convinced that the PR rating is the best measure of skill and progress—far better than W/L or any test of knowledge or quiz. However, it is ONLY an accurate measurement when you look at it for a large sampling of matches and look at it in terms of trends and patterns.
If you are improving and learning, over time, your PR rating will go down. In the short term, it may take a spike the wrong way, but that may simply be because you have had some particularly difficult matches with some very tough decisions, or you might have had a bad stretch in terms of concentration. But if your progress line isn’t going down over time, it’s a pretty good bet you are not improving. Naturally, if you are a 2.5 player you are not likely to see much movement, but if you are a mortal, like most of us, and not a Giant, if you aren’t seeing movement in the trend line you need to stop playing so much and start studying more.
XG is particularly good at helping you find your cube weaknesses, as it tells you if you are doubling too soon or too late, taking too much or too little, in the “details” section of your Profile. To find out specific areas of checker play weaknesses, the summary will not help you and you must simply study and categorize your errors.
But a big problem I see with many of us is to take too seriously what we see in the results of a single match. You get dinged for 4 cube errors if you fail to double 4 times in a row when you think you don’t have a cube, or if you think you are too good, and you’ve really only made one conceptual error. You can get dinged many points for one huge blunder where you either completely missed the play (didn’t see the hit or didn’t see the cover), or you have a hole in your game in that specific area of play. It is fair that you lose points for this, as seeing obvious plays is a necessary skill to play well, but while you should be concerned with the blunder, you might have played extremely well the rest of the match. (You can right click on the play and select "remove analysis" and see what your PR would have been had you not made that blunder.)
A second problem with putting too much weight on the results of a single match is that in matches where we are playing humans, we might well make decisions we would not make if we were strictly playing for the lowest PR rating. I will cube if I am not sure it’s a cube if I think I might get a drop. I will play differently against a far better or far worse opponent. I will take into account the difficulty of play going forward in deciding whether to cube or take or drop. XG will ding you, appropriately, for any of these adjustments.
And a third problem with putting too much weight on the results of a single match is that we forget about luck. I know that if I play amazingly low or amazingly high, it is often not just because I had a bad day or a good day, but because that particular match I was lucky enough either not to have a lot of tough decisions, or unlucky enough to find myself with a lot of very complicated decisions. And that is a part of the luck of the game that won’t show up in the “luck factor” column. (I often play fairly equal opponents on XG and we bet on who has the better luck factor, and often, when I win, I know that I might well have made the same mistakes they made if I had their decisions to make. However, if you really want to sharpen your game, I recommend this form of wagering.)
Bottom line, the PR rating is, in my opinion, the true benchmark of your skill, but don’t take it too seriously in a single match or in the short run. Don’t pat yourself on the back too much when you played great, or beat yourself up too much if you have a donkey rating.
Comments and perspectives invited.
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