Quote:
Originally Posted by cairpre
My post isn't personal, but theoretical. I will point out though that many games of skill can be, and are, played at odds. Especially when money is involved.
Lets phrase the question differently. Lets say you are a bookie and you want to create action on each game in an open backgammon tournament. (open meaning all levels)
Assuming you want to even up the action like football lines do, how would you establish betting odds between unequal opponents?
The secondary part of the question was do ratings in backgammon have the same predictive value as they do in chess. Do the same expectations hold?
Also what is a PR?
Cheers
Establishing betting odds -- the players who want to bet on a match make educated guesses as to the odds they want or are willing to give. Sometimes players can agree on a number, often not. It's most commonly seen when players of obviously unequal strength are paired in a finals match and they want to hedge.
Do ratings have the same predictive value as in chess? -- No. There are no official ratings for players to begin with, although from time to time someone makes an attempt to create one. (And usually abandons the effort within a few years.) Even if you had numerical ratings, the variance would be colossal.
PR is a measure of your error rate, which you can get by playing matches against a bot like Extreme Gammon, or having a live match recorded and analyzed by Extreme Gammon. The number measures the amount of equity lost per move, averaged over all the non-forced moves in a match. A lower number is obviously better. The best players have PRs in the 2.5 to 3.5 range. Intermediate have numbers in the 10-20 range. A beginner might have PRs over 30.