A BBO Player Rating Methodology

[Lestat]

;)

 

Various BBO members have suggested we come up with some kind of ratings methodology.  Let's think about how we might do this.  

 

Major factors to consider:

1. +/- Imps

2. Anomalies to account for gifts and disasters

3. Skill level of opponents

 

Let's create a continually evolving "BRIDGE HANDICAP" for each player, similar to the way in which golf handicaps are calculated.

 

a. Base each player's handicap on, say, the last 50 hands they played.

b. Of the 50, select the best 25 hands played by a player (e.g. highest Imps scores) to automatically eliminate the disaster factor and to showcase those hands where the players were at their best.  For each BBO player, almost all of these 25 scores should be pluses.

c. Average all of the BBO players' handicaps at the time to create a BBO PRIME Handicap. This number should also be a positive.

d. Adjust the Imp scores on each hand by the ratio of the average opponents' ratings divided by the BBO Prime Handicap, thus weighting each player's scores according to the skill level of the opponents.

e. Throw out the five highest, to negate the gift factor

f. Average the 20 remaining adjusted Imp scores to create each player's handicap.

g. Update monthly or periodically.

h. Finally, sort the players according to the skill level CATEGORY they rate themselves: one for beginners, another for intermediates, one for advanced, one for expert, and a final one for world class.  This, I believe is a necessary step for a variety of reasons which I won't go into now.

 

An interesting feature of this methodology is that PLAYERS WILL BE ABLE TO MEASURE THEIR PROGRESS OVER TIME.  E.g. As they advance to the top of the beginner's list, they may choose to change their announced skill level and move up to the intermediate category.

 

There would not be any restrictions preventing any player from playing with any other player, unless table minimums (and maximums) were established by the table host.  

 

I suspect that such a rating system would have the effect of AIDING EACH BBO MEMBER TO PROPERLY ESTIMATE THEIR SKILL LEVEL.  Each player could choose to display their rating or keep it private as they wish, however, the table host could establish a table category and minimum and maximum rating to maintain the skill level integrity of the game.

 

As mentioned above, an overall BBO Prime Handicap could be calculated based on all BBO players, or one could be calculated based on only those players within each category.  E.g. Create a Prime for each category.  I think this might be better than a single overall Prime.

 

As in golf, one might use the players' handicaps to enable beginners to compete on an equal footing with intermediates, advanced, and experts.  And, when tournaments are indeed set up on BBO, one could also weight tournament scores heavier than casual game scores to penalize "sandbaggers."

 

This approach is somewhat preliminary in that one should work with the data to fine tune the approach.  

 

Best, Jim   :)

[TheZerg]

average/level

 

computing an average (imps/mp) for each category of players (novice/beginner/etc...) seems a v nice ideea, so one can look at his averages (e.g. clicking movie from lobby) and find if what he wrote in his profile about his level is a gross misstatement or not

 

adjustment/level

 

what does a handicap system? it penalizes my ops for playing better then me and it rewards me for playing badly ;) not a great incentive to improve anyone's game

 

though it will be quite fun to play vs star players and consistenly win every time they make 4S+1 while the rest of the field does only 4S  ;D

 

if we want golf-like equilibrium, we might consider having deepfinesse compute the par score for each deal and comparing our results with that (but afaik since DF is not owned by fred's team there are some limitations in the way it can be used)

[Cave_Draco]

There is one... lol.

 

I log in, select  Movie, select My MPs & More as many times as allowed and it gives me a %...

 

Not sure what it is actually counting, I don't think it counts all scores, but it may do. Certainly the result is within acceptable parameters,  ;D.