Understanding FargoRate: A Tournament Director's Guide to Pool Ratings

If you're new to running tournaments, one question comes up at almost every check-in table: "What's my rating?" Whether you're setting up brackets for a weekly bar tournament or a regional event, understanding FargoRate — and how it stacks up against APA, ABCD, and CompuSport CSR — is one of the first things every tournament director needs to get comfortable with.

So, what is a Fargo rating, exactly? And what do you do when a player shows up with no rating at all? Let's go through it properly.

What Is a Fargo Rating?

A Fargo rating is just a running scorecard of who's beaten who. Every player in the system — bar league regular or touring pro — sits on the same number line, and that number moves purely off real match results. There's no test to pass and no fee to earn it.

As a rough feel for the scale: pros generally sit between 700 and 800+, most solid league players land somewhere between 400 and 600, and a brand-new player usually starts well under that. There's no fixed ceiling and no fixed floor — the number just tells you, at a glance, what kind of match you're setting up.

What Is a "Starter Rating" in FargoRate?

Here's something most people get backwards: a starter rating isn't actually part of the FargoRate system. It's a workaround bolted on top of it, and once you know why, the whole rating conversation makes a lot more sense.

Strictly speaking, FargoRate doesn't hand out a real Fargo Rating until a player has logged 200 games. Before that, what the system has is a performance rating, a number built purely off how that player has actually done at the table. The problem is, a performance rating built on ten or twenty games is basically noise. Anyone can run hot or cold over a handful of racks. So instead of showing a shaky number and hoping for the best, FargoRate lets a starter rating step in, a sensible guess based on local knowledge, like a player's APA skill level or what a room owner already knows about them, and blends it with whatever performance data exists so far.

The blend isn't a coin flip, it's weighted. The more games a player has actually logged, the more their real performance counts. The fewer games they have, the more that starter guess carries the number. Say a player's got 50 games in and their performance rating sits at 580, but their starter rating, based on how they looked coming in, was 540. What shows up on their profile isn't either number on its own, it's a weighted blend that lands at 550, tilted toward the starter guess because 50 games isn't much to go on yet. Play another 150 games and that starter number gets phased out entirely. At 200 games, it's gone for good, and what's left is just them.

Understanding Robustness

This is where robustness comes in, and once you've got the starter rating logic, robustness is simple: it's just how many games are actually backing up that number. Not matches, games. A single race-to-7 can hand a player up to 13 of them in one sitting.

FargoRate draws a hard line at 200. Below it, a rating is unestablished and still leaning on that starter guess we just walked through. Cross 200, and the training wheels come off. The number is now built entirely on what the player has actually done, and it stops swinging around every time they have one good or bad night.

Two things worth carrying into your next event. First, don't panic if a brand-new player shows up with a number that looks broken, something rock-bottom or even negative. That's not FargoRate glitching, it's just a rating with almost nothing behind it yet. Second, these numbers aren't frozen in time. FargoRate runs a full recalculation of every rating in the system every single night, so don't be surprised if someone's number ticks a point or two after they've played somewhere over the weekend.

One more thing worth knowing before you lean on this too hard for every game in your room: Fargo only counts 8-ball, 9-ball, and 10-ball, played on a 7-foot or 9-foot table. Run a one-pocket or bank pool event, and none of it touches anyone's rating, good to know before you tell a player their tournament results are going to their Fargo.

So if a player's rating jumps after a good weekend, don't panic.

Where Do You Actually Find a Player's Fargo Rating?

• The FargoRate app (iOS and Android) — search a player's name, see their current rating and robustness right on their phone. Fastest option at check-in: just ask them to pull it up.
• fargorate.com — the same lookup from a browser, useful if you're building brackets ahead of time on a laptop.
• If a player genuinely has no rating anywhere, that's your cue to assign a starter rating yourself and move on — don't hold up the whole bracket over it.

What Are the Other Rating Systems You Should Know?

Fargo isn't the only number floating around a pool room. As a director, you'll also run into:

• APA Skill Level — a 1-9 scale used only inside APA and CPA leagues, tracked separately for 8-ball and 9-ball. Drives their own "Equalizer" handicap and doesn't convert cleanly to anything outside APA.
• ABCD — the letter-grade system a lot of rooms still use informally, D through A. No official body runs it — it varies by region and even by room, so treat it as a local convention, not a standard.
• CompuSport CSR — a number from roughly 1000 (beginner) to 2200 (pro), generated by the CompuSport platform. Mostly shows up around VNEA and CompuSport-run events.
  
  

How Do Fargo, APA, ABCD, and CSR Compare?

Here's a simple side-by-side so you can eyeball where a player sits across all four systems:

A quick honesty note: treat this table as a starting point, not a certified conversion. The Fargo/APA/ABCD figures come from a published league-operator conversion chart used to assign starter ratings, and the CSR column applies the widely-used CSR ≈ Fargo + 1200 approximation. Always confirm against whichever sanctioning body your event actually runs under.

Official Sites to Check a Rating

• FargoRate — fargorate.com — player lookup, event history, the Find Race calculator
• APA / CPA — rules.poolplayers.com — official rules and Equalizer handicap charts
• CompuSport — compusport.ca — CSR lookups and league and tournament management
• VNEA — league rules and CSR-based tournament placement
  
  

Conclusion

Getting comfortable with player ratings is one of the first real skills a new tournament director picks up. You don't need to master all four systems on day one — just get the FargoRate app on your phone, learn to look a player up, and pick one system for your event so you're not refereeing four scales at once. Everything else comes with reps.