Shot Aptitude: A New Pool Game Sabermetric

Shot Aptitude: A New Pool Game Sabermetric

May 7, 2020
Damian
Analytics, Metabase, Pool Metrics, Pool Stats, Posts, Sabermetrics
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Shot Aptitude (Pool Stat) — Shot Aptitude

We are proud to announce the release of a new pool metric (sabermetric): Shot Aptitude. It measures a player’s ability in decisive action and execution in shooting the ball. It takes in the factors of, time to shoot, shot difficulty, miss or made or foul or defense.

The main contributor to this metric is time to shoot. The quicker you decide your shots and execute them to perfection the higher your Shot Aptitude will be. Think of Josh Filler, who rarely takes a whole 60 seconds on a complex shot. His ability to decide, and decide quickly factors into this equation.

A player gets awarded a set of points for shooting faster and making the ball, weighted according to how difficult the shot was (shot probability). When a player takes a long time to decide their shot and ends up missing the pot, this is factored inversely proportional to a fast shooter making the ball. Again it is weighted inversely for shot difficulty. A foul is weight heavier than a missed shot as they occur less often and are a greater factor in shot ineptitude. Now, we understand that some fouls are forced, but this all figures into the equation as it levels off for all players committing fouls or otherwise not.

As said earlier, the dominating factor of this metric, is time to shoot while weighting the equation for the various occurrences at the table. Aptitude is an inherent ability, therefore we feel that if a player has the ability to think and execute quickly they should be awarded a higher figure than a player that takes their time on the shot while still executing it. It makes sense to us. Our hopes are to refine this metric further down the line, but we think for the first run, it is an excellent gauge at a player’s inherent ability at shooting and making shots, while fouling or missing less and playing defense often.

Below you will find the current rankings for all players with a minimum of 120 data points. As the infographic mentions, confidence goes up for this metric significantly for each doubling of the minimum required data points. At 120, you can expect 75% confidence in the metric. At 240, around 80%, and 480 at around 85-90% and at 960 data points we measure a confidence of +95%.

So check back often as more games are recorded. Download the app and add your own data to be crunched by us. Or sign-up for our membership programs and get even more access to the data and metrics we have created that haven’t been formally released.