INTRODUCTION

This is a proposal for a variation of 9-ball based on assigning values to balls, and changing the rating of two competing players based on what they pocketed, in order to factor in their success rate.

ABSTRACT

Relatively few people play 9-ball because of the randomness of the results IMHO. If you look at the stats, snooker and 8-ball generally tend to have about the same number of users logged in at any time, while 9-ball generally has about one third of that. So there's no doubt that 9-ball is less popular than snooker and 8-ball. Now for the reasons, randomness is a personal opinion, but I feel it's pretty strong among other users as well -- both 8-ball and snooker allow the player to plan and build their game, and better players are rewarded on merit. In 9-ball, chance has a lot more to do with winning or losing. Of course, la creme de la creme will always end up at the top, I'm not denying that, but in the mid-range the ratings tend to reflect the luck of the player, rather than their skill.

PROPOSAL

This is what I propose as a variation of 9-ball (the regular 9-ball should obviously be kept because that's the official version, this could be a custom "FlyOrDie 9-ball"). The rules are to be the same as per the official rules, but the balls will have values as follows (in order from ball 1 to ball 9): 25, 15, 10, 5, 5, 10, 10, 20, 100. When the game ends, instead of computing the ratio change as usual (take x from the loser and pass it to the winner), the change will reflect the ratio between the loser and the winner's scores in the game. For instance, if one player hasn't pocketed anything by the time the game ends, then the usual rating change occurs. If one player pockets all balls on the table but the other one pockets the 9 alone, then no change in rating occurs (balls 1 to 8's scores add up to 100, equal to ball 9's score). If one player has twice the rating than the other at the end of the game then (s)he is awarded x/2 points.

In other words, if s1 is one player's score, s2 is the other player's score and s1 is conventionally the winner (i.e. s1>s2), then player 1 is awarded x/(s1/s2) points if s2 is non-null, or x if s2 is null.

FINAL WORDS 

I believe that this variation will still allow good players to stay on top, and even to get there sooner, while it will help create a better distinction between the mid-range players. I also think it may end up drawing users because it would be another challenging billiard game where every successful ball counts, thus more similar to the more popular snooker and 8-ball in this regard.

I would welcome comments on this proposal. If you're curious how I came up with the scores for the balls, I tried to follow the average game's progress and reward the player according to how difficult each ball tends to be. Try following a game with these scores next to you and you will generally find it's fair; if you don't think it is, do post a reply and comment on that too!

Thank you for reading this!

--Gutza