A Fargo Rate alternative for players who will never play 200 league games

First, credit where it is due

Fargo Rate put amateurs and world champions on one scale and made pool handicapping something you can argue about with numbers instead of reputations. If you play league matches every week against other rated players, it works, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Keep it.

The question this page is about is narrower: what do you do if you are not that player? If you practise alone, play casually with friends, travel, or simply want to know how good you are without signing up to a season of matches, a relative rating has two structural problems — and they are structural, not bugs.

Pain point one: the number is not real until 200 games

FargoRate calls the size of your game history robustness, and states plainly that a robustness of 200 games is the minimum for it to consider a rating “established”. Under that threshold your official rating is a blend of your actual performance and a starter rating — an initial guess — with the guess losing influence as you close the gap to 200.

Count what 200 rated games costs a normal person. It means finding a league that reports to the system, paying its fees, being free on the same evening every week, and playing out most of a season or two — before the number in the app is a measurement of you rather than a weighted opinion. A player who wants a single honest answer to “how good am I?” has to buy a year of commitment to get it.

And there is no way to shortcut it, because there is nothing to shortcut: a relative system genuinely cannot know anything about you until you have generated enough results against people it already knows.

How to get a pool rating without joining a league →

Pain point two: your rating partly describes your city

A relative rating is computed from who beat whom. That means your number is only as anchored as the chain of games connecting your local players to the rest of the rated world. Where that chain is thick — big cities, strong touring scenes, players who travel to open events — ratings line up well. Where it is thin, a local group can settle at a level that does not match the same numbers elsewhere.

This is not an outsider’s complaint. FargoRate’s own writing describes two nearly isolated groups of players, one rated too high relative to the other, as a particularly vexing problem — one that only corrects itself through a lot of cross-play over a long time. Its definition of a reliable rating likewise notes that games against opponents with established ratings count for more.

So if your region is packed with strong players, or barely connected to the wider network, or new to the system, the number you carry is telling you something about your surroundings as well as about you. Move somewhere else and it may not mean what it meant at home.

Absolute vs relative ratings, explained →

What an absolute rating does instead

Runout Rank removes opponents from the measurement altogether. Instead of asking who you beat, it puts a defined layout on the table and asks whether you can run it out.

You play ten generated tables at one level, one attempt each, no retries and no skips, and record each as a run-out or a miss. Ten answers become a score, a 0–100 rating and a tier from Rookie to Master. Seven of ten clears the level. The whole thing takes about an hour on the table you already play on.

Because the layouts are the yardstick and the yardstick never changes, the number means the same thing whoever else is in the room, and the same thing next year as this year. It is earned from the first session, not accumulated over a season.

Side by side

Be clear about what Runout Rank is not

It does not replace a league rating for handicapping, and it will not get you seeded in a tournament. No governing body recognises it. It is also honest about its own variable: you are playing on your own equipment, so a tight-pocketed table with slow cloth will read differently from a bar box. Take the test on the table you actually compete on, and compare like with like over time.

What it gives you is the thing a relative system cannot give you cheaply: a real number today, from your own play, that does not depend on anyone else.

The obvious answer: use both

They measure different things and they do not conflict. If you play league, keep your Fargo Rate for matches, and use Runout Rank between them to tell you which part of your game is behind — a run-out test names the level that beats you and hands you practice at it, which a match-result rating cannot do. If you do not play league, Runout Rank is the number you can actually have.

Runout Rank is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to FargoRate. Everything said here about Fargo Rate is drawn from FargoRate’s own published material and is described as fairly as we know how; it is a good system, and this page is about where its design does and does not fit a particular kind of player.