Volatility is the name of the game in golf, and picking winners isn’t easy. With fields of 150-plus golfers sometimes separated by how a putt or two falls each week, predicting golf can be absurdly challenging.
We’ll never be able to capture everything that goes into a golfer’s expectations for a week, but we can try to account for that by simulating out the weekend and seeing what happens.
The Process
Over the years, I have made plenty of tweaks to my original golf model, which uses a combination of the OWGR’s field strength numbers and datagolf’s field strength numbers to adjust each golfer’s score relative to the field (on the PGA Tour, the European Tour, and the Korn Ferry Tour).