by McChazzz » 22 Dec 2014 Read
"True champions raise their game when in trouble" is a contentious, narrative-stamped phrase (i.e you tend to forget the times when even the best have just capitulated in matches), but I'm willing to agree with it here. Why? Because that is actually an argument in favour of using frames won as opposed to matches. If a true champion wins the matches he should win, and then raises his game in matches others would lose, that will be reflected in winning more frames than his peers.
Both routes (matches and frames) will lead to very similar numbers, as shown by the passes made at outright prices for the Masters by elonmerkki and myself. The difference is that frames won is using more of the information you have to hand than simply 'Player A won, Player B lost'. Think of the number of fine margins there can be in a frame of snooker. A good example might be the recent Allen - Williams semi-final at the International Championship; using elonmerkki's numbers, Allen will have gained ten or so points for his win, WIllo will have lost the same, and the next time they face Allen will be expected to win 65% of the time (up from 62%).
But what if Willo had made the do-or-die red and won the decider? Why, he'd have gained 15 points, Allen lost the same, and the next time they played Allen would have been about a 58% favourite. Do you really believe that one shot was the difference between 65% and 58%? By using frames won instead, as memory serves the two ratings remained unchanged (Allen may have actually lost a fraction), which is a much better reflection of the match.
I say again, consider how many fine margins there are in a single frame of snooker. The kick you did or didn't get, that did or didn't send the object ball off-line. The last red that wiped it's feet and dropped/stayed up. The incredible, mind-blowing, could-not-be-repeated-if-you-tried in-off after you went into the bunch. The fluke that kept your clearance alive. If you strip out all of these things and boil it down to just who won in the end, you have a) something that reads like a World Snooker report and b) a very simplistic approach to the data.
From a technical standpoint, snooker is very difficult to model as there is only one set 'state', the one at the start of each frame. Whereas in baseball you can talk with some certainty about the probabilities with (say) a man on first and two outs, in snooker everything goes out the window as soon as the white strikes the reds. You can come up with convincing estimates for (say) how often a player clears the colours, their long-potting percentage or their ability to win from snookers behind, but they will be only estimates - it can vary wildly based on a single ball being a few centimetres off! Effectively then, we can only talk about how proficient a player is at converting the starting state into a win or a loss; everything else is conjecture, albeit quite enjoyable conjecture!
I'm not Snookeranalyst (I've had a look and agree with a lot of his stuff, though), but I do firmly believe that how good a player is at winning a frame is a better indication of his abilities than his matches won. You can find some players who have surprising differences between the two, and this frequently indicates a player that cannot deal well with pressure situations, which is normally the first counter-argument. However, dealing with pressure is often just a matter of repetition. Recent players to fit the description? Barry Hawkins and Stuart Bingham. Hawkins consistently buckled under pressure, before his Shootout win gave him some confidence; he turned it into the Australian Open title, and two Crucible losses to Ronnie at the final/semi-final stage. Bingham has been even more successful (though not yet in Sheffield), yet still inexplicably struggles to shake the 'journeyman' tag.
In short, if you are really good at winning frames of snooker, you will eventually be really good at winning matches, simple as that sounds. If judging how good a player was involved looking only at their matches won, snooker bookmakers like myself would be out of a job!