Reformulating a Formulated Formula

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It has come to this. In every sport it's possible to find predictions, whether in the Las Vegas sports books or in your weekly fantasy league. But what if you could have a slight advantage over the rest of your league mates? What if you could predict the future?

 

 

Well, you're looking in the wrong place! This article is basically just a proof of concept from my last article in that I am going to make some minor tweaks to the 40-30-20-10 Rule to see if they can predict the outcome of a tournament more effectively than The Golf Channel's WinZone.

 

 

This Week's Field

From the looks of the PODS Championship field this week, it doesn't appear to be a very exciting tournament. Most of the big names are taking some time off for practice. However, there are a few tournament winners in the bunch with Vijay Singh (#9) being the low World Golf Ranking golfer in the field with Sergio Garcia (#13) next in line.

 

 

The field does have six 2007 tournament winners. This is a point of interest in my revised formula as I believe a player that has won already in the current year has shown they have the game to win.

 

 

My Revised Formula

If you are unfamiliar with the 40-30-20-10 Rule, please first read up on it… the abbreviations will make more sense that way:

 

 

(0.4 GIR) + (0.3 P) + (0.2 DD) + (0.1 DA)

-----------------------------------------

(WINS * 0.05) + 1

This is essentially Dave's 40-30-20-10 rule, with one change: the divisor. I added a divisor to account for wins in this year's tournaments.

 

 

The Predictions

I know our readers have said it's not possible to make meaningful guesses based solely on statistics, and I completely agree with you. However, for the sake of this article I would at least like to take a stab at predicting the outcome. Here are my predictions for the tournament finish:

 

 

Pos Player My Rank 40-30-20-10 Rank

--- ------ ------- ----------------

1 Charles Howell III 32.5 * 34.1

2 Vaughn Taylor 38.9 38.9

3 Vijay Singh 40.3 * 42.3

4 Charles Warren 45.1 45.1

5 Jeff Quinney 46.6 46.6

6 Ted Purdy 47.7 47.7

7 Nick Watney 48.4 48.4

8 Bubba Watson 51.0 51.0

9 J.B. Holmes 51.1 51.1

10 Stephen Ames 51.3 51.3

* 2007 Tournament Winner

It is interesting to note that only two of the six winners from this year are in the top ten in my list. Could this prove they just had a lucky/good week? Possibly, but I also see two of this years winners in the top three of my predictions. It just so happens that Vijay is also on my fantasy roster for this week!

 

 

Let's take a look at how the rest of this year's winners finished up using my new formula:

 

 

Pos Player My Rank 40-30-20-10 Rank

--- ------ ------- ----------------

16 Mark Wilson 53.2 55.9

17 Charley Hoffman 53.3 56.0

19 Paul Goydos 56.1 59.0

38 Fred Funk 71.0 74.5

Now you may have noticed something here. A little earlier I had said Vijay and Sergio were the two highest ranked players in the field, but Sergio is nowhere to be found in my predictions. Why? He hasn't played much golf on the PGA Tour, so adding the weight of his statistics would be frivolous. He falls wherever he falls, but on a week-to-week basis. His rank, by the way, in both systems is 90.9 (0.4 * 169 + 0.3 * 10 + 0.2 * 11 + 0.1 * 181).

 

 

The Debate

Sure anyone can come up with a method to predict the outcome of a sporting event, but how truly accurate can it really be? As stated in some comments in the previous article, golf has too many individual player variables to really have any type of chance of predicting any outcome. On top of that, there are 143 players in the field that could realistically win this tournament. Sure, some of them may be playing hurt or not in the right mental state, but they are still in the field and still have a shot at the title.

 

 

Take this for what it is, and for what it isn't. It is just a humble IT professional's measly efforts at trying to come up with an easy-to-use formula based upon Dave's 40-30-20-10 Rule to predict the outcome of a tournament. I am about 90% certain that my top ten will be lucky to be 10% correct.

 

 

With that, I open this article up to comments. What could be changed or added to my new formula to help predict the outcome of a tournament? Do we factor in the weather and course conditions? Do we calculate if a player is on a "hot" streak? What about if they have won on the course the tournament is being played at? Let your mind run wild, and then let me know what you think!