Alaska PDGA Winter Series #13
December 7, 2020 at 7:19pm
Pools Clarification
Hi - we've had less opportunity for people to shoot the **** before and after rounds, and a lot of new players (which is great!) this league, so I wanted to clarify how I'm doing the pool assignments since there's just one cryptic message about it above.
If you are a propagator, meaning you have 7 or more rated rounds, your rating determines your pool. 900 and up is A, 800-899 is B, and less than 800 is C.
If you have a player rating but you're not a propagator, then I will give you your pool request, within reason. If you have a few tournament rounds averaging 870, I'm not putting you in C pool, but if you're at 815 and you want to play in C, that's ok. HOWEVER, if you're consistently shooting in the 800s in the league, I'm going to move you up to B pool. Same thing in the other direction if you're an 870-rated non-propagator, but you've been throwing 750-rated rounds...I will move you to C pool if you want.
Similar reasoning applies for folks without ratings at all - I'll put you in whatever you request to start out, but if you start dropping 800-rated rounds, you're going to B pool.
I apologize to folks who think this is unfair - I get that there's a big gap in skill between 800 and 899. But unless we move to a pure handicap system, this is how we've always done it...this is the best mix between having decent-sized divisions and keeping people competing with roughly their skill level. I don't particularly like handing my cash to touring pros James and Seth every week in A Pool, but I view my rating just nudging over 900 as a sign that I can maybe compete with the big dogs. Plus, the courses and conditions we play in are pretty good equalizers - I've thrown some of my highest and lowest-rated rounds in winter leagues.
Happy to take questions on this either here or in direct messages.
I want to say that Brian used 910 and 810 as the cutoff points when he ran these leagues. I'm not sure how much of a difference that would make, but going to a handicap system could work too.
Yeah, maybe that could matter a bit - I think the tricky thing for me is the number of players we have who don't have a player rating - so regardless of whether the precise cutoff is 800 or 810, there's some inexactness. If we do a second winter league (I'd like to), I'll definitely look into a handicap system.
What was the rationale behind 810 and 910 as the cutoffs?
I'm not sure really, I think it was just what he decided on. I think the difficulty with handicaps is that they'd need to be course specific, which requires people to have some established average. For players that don't it makes it difficult to set a fair handicap off the top of your head.
You could create handicaps based on player ratings, but again you'd have to assign them to players without ratings.