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perfomance rating

Posted By: Jake Jacobs
Date: Thursday, 10 September 2009, at 12:31 a.m.

In Response To: perfomance rating (ed olaughlin)

Hi Ed:

Number 2 is, perforce, Ed O'Laughlin. That's one of our few guidelines, that the voter place himself #2. One year a player voted for TD Gammon as the #1, and we could only speculate that the voter couldn't bring himself to admit that any human played better than he did.

Phil's first comment to this thread mentioned the lack of guidelines, but that is actually a strength of the Giant 32. Elsewhere he had criticized Calcutta auctions and proposed a parimutuel pool. (And let me just say that auctions will or won't die under their own weight. So far they seem to remain popular enough. The idea that they are primarily a revenue tool for tournament directors is silly. They are a means of entertainment, like pig rolling or the like. If you happen to be bored by them, sleep in.) One of the interesting things about parimutuel pools is how accurate they are. While they are hardly the most accurate possible model for predicting outcomes they are far from random. If you see a horse going off at 19-1 the horse might or might not win the race exactly 5% of the time were it run over and over, but it probably will win 3-7% of the time.

And, big big "and," suppose you wandered into a race track, knowing nothing about the horses, and you wanted to know which horse was the best horse, the #1 Giant, as it were. Not the horse that would make you the most money; that might be the 19-1 shot that really did rate to win 7% of the time. But the best horse, unless the race was close, would be the favorite.

Somehow, through tout sheets (like BG Online), through word of mouth (again like BG Online), through timing trials (Snowie ratings), through past performance as found in the racing form (read Flint Area BackgammoNews to find out who has been winning lately) the public has a damned good idea who the best horses really are.

Best,

Jake

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