How it works

Rating

Everybody starts at 1500. The number next to it — 1500 ± 700 on a first night — is how wide the guess still is. After a few events that window shrinks. Stay away and it slowly opens again.

8-ball, 9-ball, 10-ball and snooker are kept separate. Being strong at one says very little about the others, so a single combined number would be a lie.

The big figure on a profile is the rating. Draws use a cautious version of it: rating minus that ± window. A noisy 1700 ± 400 seeds behind a settled 1600 ± 80, because we are much less sure about the first player. Match count is how much you have played, not how much we trust the number — the window is the trust.

The ladder is sorted the same cautious way. See the leaderboard.

What counts

A rating moves when a public singles event finishes, and only from matches that were actually played at an even race. Every result that night is taken together, so beating someone in the first round does not change the number underneath the semi.

Walkovers, doubles, handicap races (different race targets), private events and quick matches do not move it. They still show on your record.

History on a profile is one line per event — 1863 → 1926 — not a delta per match. If a result is reopened, the points that night gave out are taken back.

Draws

The director picks how to seed: by our rating, by Fargo, at random, or in the order people entered. Rating and Fargo are never averaged. Anyone without a number in the chosen system goes last.

That decision only assigns seed numbers, 1 through N. What those seeds do depends on the format.

Formats

These are the recipes a director picks when they create an event. Stages can still be tweaked after that — a different race on the loser side, a cut into single elimination, more groups.

Knockout

Round robin

Multi-stage

Season tables are a different layer: place points and attendance across stops. They do not feed the skill rating, and the skill rating does not feed the season.

Running a night

A format decides which matches exist. This is what happens to them once the doors are open: who gets called, to which table, and in what order.

Tables

An event uses the tables its venue has, or a subset the director picks when two events share a room. A table under repair is left out. Whenever a table comes free, one waiting match is sent to it, and both players are told where to go. Nobody is ever sent to two tables at once, including across a club’s A and B flights running side by side.

A match that has been called holds its table until it is played, moved by a person, or voided. The players are walking over; the table is not free.

Rounds in a round robin

A round robin is drawn by the circle method: everyone sits around a table, the first player is pinned, and the rest rotate one seat per round. Every rotation is a fresh set of pairings, and after n − 1 of them everyone has met everyone.

The useful consequence is that a round is a real sitting of the whole group, not just a label. Each round pairs every player exactly once, so an odd group gives exactly one person a bye each round, and across the whole group every player sits out exactly once. A group of five plays ten matches over five rounds, and nobody rests twice.

Matches are called a round at a time to keep that true. Within a round, whoever has been waiting longest goes first. Rounds are a preference rather than a barrier: if no match in the current round can start, because the players it needs are still at a table, the next round’s match takes the free table instead of leaving it empty.

Two groups at once

Splitting a field into groups exists to cut the number of matches: sixteen players is 120 fixtures as one round robin and 56 as two groups of eight. That only pays off if the groups run at the same time, so the room’s tables are shared between them rather than worked through group by group. A group with nothing left to play drops out, and the last group standing gets every table.

How many tables a group can use is capped by its own size, not by the room. Five players can only ever field two matches at once, however many cloths are free, because the fifth is sitting out. That is usually what decides how long a group stage takes.

Knockout

A knockout needs no round pacing: a match cannot be played until the matches feeding it are decided, so the draw enforces its own order. There the longest wait decides, and the feature table goes to the biggest match waiting.

When you are up

The wait shown on a player’s card is not a guess at the draw. It plays the rest of the event out on paper: it takes how long matches in this event have really been running, per rack rather than per match, and seats what is left the way the desk will, table by table. A table nobody can be sent to stands empty in that plan, exactly as it would in the hall.

It moves as the night does. Every rack scored on a table ahead of you changes it, and between racks the number counts itself down. A wait with somebody still in front of you never counts all the way to zero, because nothing is getting closer while the room is stopped.

When somebody goes home

Withdrawing gives away only what has not been played. Matches already on the board keep their result and stay in the standings. Everything still to come is conceded to the opponent, as it comes up, on both sides of a double elimination, so the event can still reach a champion with half the draw gone.

What this is not

FargoRate is optional on a profile. Some draws use it instead of our number. Linking Fargo never changes PoolHub rating.

This is not the Swedish national ranking, SPT class, or tour points — those stay on FargoRate and the federations that publish them. It is the club ladder, used here for seeding when the director asks for it.