English Blackball Pool Federation

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The hearing is scheduled for 7th-11th April at Canterbury County Court.

Tribunal Tweets will be following the case…

Live tweeting sessions Abbreviations
J - His Honour Judge Parker
HH - Harriet Haynes, claimant
RW - Robin White, claimant’s barrister
CC - Colman Coyle, claimant's solicitor
EBPF - English Blackball Pool Federation
PT - Paul Thomson, defendant
AG - Anna Goodwin, defendant
SC - Sarah Crowther KC, defendants’ barristers, and
SS - Sapandeep Singh Maini-Thompson
JRL - JR Levins LLP, defendants’ solicitor
JG - James Goodwin, witness for defendant

The original thread has been deleted for “breaking Mumsnet guidelines”. Not sure why but possibly “misgendering” or possibly making it too easy to find the crowdfund @mumsnet it would be good if you could let us know so this thread can stay up. Do we have to pretend that the Claimant is female?

Right - he did 5000 simulated breaks, which he says is a very low number of simulations, but that's ok, and doesn't affect the validity of his data. So, why would he normally do more?

I do not understand this at all. Why is the judge asking questions that allow the witness to bring in lots of things he didn't bother putting in his report?

If HH wins this they might just as well do away with the women’s category in Pool. What would be the point?

Help us defend our female Blackball competitions from litigation has now had 378 donors and is at £9573. The support being shown should make the volunteers feel a little better when they are home tonight.

I think Emma Hilton is a great alternative and has a lot of knowledge/ expertise to share

So, he was not concerned about fewer examples before because he could just scale it up. Whereas comparing the top 100 men with the top 100 women was a concern because of the fact that 6 times more men than women play.

Will anyone ask him if there is any concern if men claiming to be women distort the integrity of the women’s examples?

Id be happy with them both! I think they have collaborated on papers 🤔

Emma is giving evidence, according to Sex Matter’s blog on Monday.

I noticed at one point he was talking about how in England pool is separated so people of different 'genders' play in different tournaments so it was harder to compare. At that point I expected the judge to say 'That's what we are here to discuss, you numpty' and give up!

Thank goodness for that. PF’s data were from a lot of things cobbled together. Bits of other people’s work which may have issues too. I also think his bamboozling language might have been a bit obfuscating. Consider, because it was plain to see, that he could be picked up on the fact he didn’t even know the rules. With the ‘Science’ it may not have been as easy to pick up on other flaws.

PF lost me when he was mooting that not only did women have no disadvantage compared to males, but males could be actually disadvantaged (and certainly had no advantages) because of their physiology. But he is not an expert on physiology. And what he was saying did not seem to be the case to me. I’ve played badly once or twice, and my OH could easily arrange themselves to cover anywhere on the table, whereas I couldn’t. Even from my limited experience of playing, I thought it was a bit of a worry on how he easily construed something which did not seem true to me. What about if he was stretching stuff in very technical language as it is not as evident to the ordinary person.

I suppose it is easy to sound plausible when using scientific language with authority. I think he strayed from his area of authority. It is more difficult to pick up on if and where the science was junk or not.

The points will not be in bamboozling language with EH.

MIT must have really gone downhill.

Did you ever in your life think you would type out this sentence 😂?

To be fair, Sheldon Cooper was always dismissive of MIT, if I recall correctly. Not a patch on Caltech.

I was going to say that Sheldon was right....

EBPF fund is now standing at £10,260

Was my thought too!

Which is why men typically lose at pool? I guess that's what he's saying. Poor men, must be awful.

£11,155 now. Picking up steam.

Taking huge logic leap, it's a bit rape apology isn't it. Power but no control over it, not my fault, your honour.

WhyOhWhyOhWhyOhWhy then do we need men's and women's leagues, if men had no advantage? And why wasn't HH happy playing in the existing open league?
It's a mystery.

not only did women have no disadvantage compared to males, but males could be actually disadvantaged (and certainly had no advantages) because of their physiology

WON’T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE MENZ

They badly need evidence from an expert pool player about what actually matters. Or even the basic rules of the game.

This expert PF's simulation data is quite limited. What he's looking at is the physics of balls ricocheting around a table.

He's saying if the cue ball goes off faster at the start there's more chaos on the table - the balls get spread around more (good), there's more chance of potting a ball (necessary in the UK game, not necessary in the US game), there's more chance of accidentally potting the white (bad). He wasn't told the rules of the UK game (!!) so didn't include the odds of potting a non-white ball in his report but I think he's saying he does have data and it does increase with speed.

What he hasn't looked at at all is the control/speed aspect of male and female players. Which is kind of critical. Someone operating comfortably within their limits has more control over both speed and direction.

They were discussing a paper by a different expert talking about women having less speed. I'm not entirely clear where the different expert comes in and if they're going to appear, or if it's just a paper the first expert used for reference.

Also some discussion at the end about the rating system. Where again nobody in the discussion actually seems to know how it works, so evidential value dubious. PF is of course correct in saying that the women's top 100 ratings being lower than the men's top 100 ratings is to be expected with there being far more men playing. (For an extreme case imagine there were just 100 women and 600 men - the women's top 100 would be all players, the men's all within the top 20%). But without knowing anything about the overall distribution of ratings we don't know if the values seen are evidence of something or not.

Also lol about RMW asking why they didn't ask a TW along to their discussion about what was fair for the women's league so that they could tell everyone how sad they'd be if they were excluded. Perhaps they should have asked a drugs cheat along to the discussion about athletics anti-doping policy too so they could lament how their lives would be ruined if they were banned?

I feel that RMW's personal situation is not helping RMW's clarity in arguing this case.

PS it took me a 30 second google to find a chart of the approx distribution of men's and women's Fargo ratings. Which are clearly different. So not sure why anyone's trying to deduce anything from top 100s.

PF is of course correct in saying that the women's top 100 ratings being lower than the men's top 100 ratings is to be expected with there being far more men playing. (For an extreme case imagine there were just 100 women and 600 men - the women's top 100 would be all players, the men's all within the top 20%).

I agree with this. "If as many women as men played the game...". That's the thing about pool; at the non-elite level, women can be pretty much as good as men, there are a lot of very talented female players out there. Hence genderists seeing it as a 'wedge' issue. But at the elite level, of course the male advantage will show through. Plus,of course,why the hell shouldn't women have their own comps, in any sport, without having to demonstrate any disadvantage? They always did, in all sports, up until a few years back. Is it ground that's lost, that that seems to be a hill no-one's prepared to die on now?