Thursday, June 24, 2010

Travelers Championship

This week the US PGA Tour heads all the way across the country to play the Travelers Championship in Connecticut.

Below is the list of the top 15 players in the CLi rankings for the Travelers Championship.



# Player CLi
1 Justin Rose   9.35
2 Scott Verplank  9.35
3 Bo Van Pelt  11.50
4 Kenny Perry  13.05
5 Boo Weekley  14.35
6 Corey Pavin  15.55
7 Stewart Cink  15.85
8 Jay Williamson  18.30
9 David Toms  19.50
10 Brian Davis  22.65
11 Kris Blanks  25.35
12 Ricky Barnes  29.40
13 Johnson Wagner  30.40
14 Bryce Molder  32.00
15 Billy Mayfair  32.60

I am going to stick with the top 5 in the CLi rankings to make it easy on myself since I am late in posting this week's picks.

Below are my 5 picks for the Travelers Championship:


# Player CLI
1 Justin Rose   9.35
2 Scott Verplank  9.35
3 Bo Van Pelt  11.50
4 Kenny Perry  13.05
5 Boo Weekley  14.35


Below is the top 5 players in the Power Rankings from Rob Bolton:

  1. Scott Verplank
  2. Bo Van Pelt
  3. Hunter Mahan
  4. Bubba Watson
  5. Justin Rose
Here is a link to Bolton's Power Rankings so that you can read more about his thoughts on his top players in this week's Power Rankings:

Bolton's Power Rankings: Travelers Championship

We have 3 players in common this week: Verplank, Van Pelt, and Rose.

Below are the settings for the CLi calculation I used for the Travelers Championship:

Number of Past Tournaments Looking Back
Number Scoring Avg Weight (SA1) Earnings Avg Weight (EA1)
5 25% 25%
Number of Days Looking Back
Number Scoring Avg Weight (SA2) Earnings Avg Weight (EA2)
30 5% 5%
Number of Tournaments Looking Back
Number Scoring Avg Weight (SA3) Earnings Avg Weight (EA3)
4 20% 20%
Posted by at 7:53 AM

3 comments:

  1. Again, your CLi settings couldn't uncover this week's champion. I'm not trying to point this out to be a jerk, just curious what might be the reason. Especially considering it tagged two of the three golfers in the playoff but couldn't qualify Bubba Watson for the Top-15. Even worse, Bolton had him in there.
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  2. I am trying to looking at this objectively as well (i.e. am not taking offense to your accusation). I have not replied with further analysis to your previous posting as I have not had the time to do a full analysis for why the Golf CLi "seemingly" has performed poorly this year as opposed to the previous 3-4 years.

    But do remember what the Golf CLi is for:

    The Golf CLi is about determining which players have the best chance of playing well. It is NOT about picking a winner. There is a big difference with that. To explain that in more detail, you can see an answer of this on the FAQ page on Golf CLi web site.

    Golf CLi FAQs - How it is used
    http://golfcli.com/faqs.php#how_used

    So that said, having had 3 players in the top 6 of the CLi rankings (Pavin, Verplank, and Rose) place in the top 10 is a very good result. If Rose had not played poorly the last day, he would have won the tournment, and Watson would not have.

    That said, I am not trying to evade your question about the results of the Golf CLi "seemingly" to have performed poorly this year. I just need to spend time looking into a full analysis of the results of the Golf CLi as compared to the previous years. The analysis will need to look at the CLi figures and see if there is more parity in the field, which would show in the Golf CLi figures being higher overall. Higher Golf CLi figures imply that the Golf CLi is having more difficulty in isolating players that have a good chance of playing well.

    As well, the Golf CLi calculation uses multiple statistics to come up with an aggregate result to rank the players. This is different than looking at only ONE statistic (i.e. scoring average). It could be that there is one statistic that is more important than another. And as such, I have not put the proper weight on that statistic. That could be the argument with this tournament as you can see that Bubba Watson is 5th in the ranking of the "Scoring Average Leaders" when looking at the past 3 instances of the tournament.

    Travelers Championship - Field Analysis
    http://fanooz.com/tournaments/tournament_field_analysis.php?id=3769

    Then if you look at the past 5 instances of the tournament (as opposed to the past 3 instances of the tournament), Bubba Watson drops out of the top 5 in the scoring average leaders. Then there are other statistics on that page one can look at to try to figure out who will play well, which adds to the complexity of trying to figure out who will play well in a tournament.

    This shows there are a lot of factors involved in trying to figure out which player will play well in a tournament, much less WIN a tournament.

    That said, trying to predict who will win a golf tournament is difficult. If I had the 100% accurate answer for which player would win, I would not be giving my picks away for free. However, there is a large variance and randomness in golf tournament results. So to pick winners or even top 10 players 30% of the time is considered good. So if one is able to improve one's results by 3-5 percentage points, there is a benefit for people.

    Do you have any suggestions on making better predictions? Feel free to post your predictions each week to this blog.
    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for that reply - really good stuff! And I would agree with you that your CLi settings do a nice job of finding players that perform well every week. I'm just hung up on predicting the winner and that is my own problem.

    It might be fun/interesting to recap why a winner didn't crack the Top-15 of your CLi like you just did with Bubba.

    Is looking back five past tournaments unjustly punishing some of the younger up and comers? I don't know, but like you said I just need to pony up the bucks and play around with the CLi myself.
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