British Open

This week the US PGA Tour and the rest of the professional golfing world heads to the U.K. to play (or turns their head towards the U.K. to watch) the British Open in Scotland at St. Andrews.

Below is the list of the top 15 players in the CLi rankings for the British Open.

#	Player	CLi
1	Tiger Woods	1.34
2	Steve Stricker	7.30
3	Lee Westwood	8.11
4	Padraig Harrington	8.44
5	Jim Furyk	11.70
6	Ernie Els	12.56
7	Retief Goosen	14.63
8	Phil Mickelson	17.11
9	Justin Rose	22.41
10	Ryan Moore	24.76
11	Rory McIlroy	24.99
12	Robert Allenby	25.26
13	Ian Poulter	25.88
14	Tom Watson	26.35
15	Luke Donald	27.44

There are some good names in this list of players in the top CLi. The CLi shows that Woods has a clear advantage based upon historical results, which is signaled by his 1.34 CLi figure. With all of his troubles personally, and the British media hounding him because of those personal issues, it would seem that he might be flustered and blown away in this tournament. However, he seems to pull through in the major events more often than naught. So I am going to keep him in my picks.

I will then pick Stricker for my second choice. Coming off a win last week at the John Deere, and doing so in strong fashion, he should have a high level confidence to knock it around St. Andrews. St. Andrews, and links golf altogether, is much different than the course he played on in Moline at the John Deere. However, he has a strong short game that will help him get through some of the possible roadblocks links golf will confront him with during the 4 days of the tournament.

I am going to pass over Westwood and Harrington. Even though Westwood has been playing well and Harrington plays well in the British Open, both are coming off injuries. That makes picking them a little risky. If there were not good players further down the list, I would pick them. But there are good players that follow both of these players, which makes my eye and mind lean towards those players.

For my 3rd and 4th picks, I am going to go with Furyk and Els. Furyk is a player I like to have in my stable on tough courses. He might not win the tournament, but he will not play poorly. So he is usually a "loss avoider" pick for me. Whereas, picking Els provides me a chance to win the tournament, but also a risk in missing the cut. He likes St. Andrews and loves playing here in tournaments. So hopefully that will spur him to play well this week.

For my final pick, I am going to go with Rose. Yes, I skipped over some good players in Goosen and Mickelson. However, Rose has been playing very well of late, having won the AT&T National two weeks ago. As well, he is British and would love to return to form in the British Open like he did when he first played here as an amateur in 1998.

Below are my 5 picks for the British Open:

#	Player	CLi
1	Tiger Woods	1.34
2	Steve Stricker	7.30
3	Jim Furyk	11.70
4	Ernie Els	12.56
5	Justin Rose	22.41

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

1. Tiger Woods
2. Ernie Els
3. Lee Westwood
4. Phil Mickelson
5. Retief Goosen

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: British Open

We have 2 players in common this week: Woods and Els.

Below are the settings for the CLi calculation I used for the British Open. If you have read my past postings, you will see that I used a different strategy for this tournament. The British Open is a difficult tournament to predict who will play, and I have not been very good at predicting which players will play well in the British Open in the past. So I have changed the configuration settings rather drastically compared to what I have normally use. I am making the weights basically be equal and increasing the number of days and tournaments to take into accont the entire years. This is normally not good in my opinion as the results will not favor the players that have the recent spurt of good play and thus have a higher confidence level. So I am going against my normal wisdom with this configuration setting of the CLi.

Number of Past Tournaments Looking Back
Number	Scoring Avg Weight (SA1)	Earnings Avg Weight (EA1)
7	16%	17%
Number of Days Looking Back
Number	Scoring Avg Weight (SA2)	Earnings Avg Weight (EA2)
360	17%	17%
Number of Tournaments Looking Back
Number	Scoring Avg Weight (SA3)	Earnings Avg Weight (EA3)
25	16%	17%