The Official Golf Thread

[greengrass]

Good luck to Lowry he's a superb player but I reckon if he had a bit more control over himself and his emotions he'd be consistently in the world top 10. That he isn't is down to him. He's not a kid anymore. I don't like the way he conducts himself on the course with people who are only doing their jobs for a fraction of the money he is getting. He's treated his caddies very poorly at times too and for all the "Ah he's a lidgind" that gets thrown around on social media when he uses foul language, he's in a professional environment and I'd say most of us if we reacted like that towards subordinates or in front of paying customers in our workplaces would have a few questions to answer.

Agreed.But apparently you can counter all the ignorant stuff by buying a couple of pizzas.

 

[Nollaig O Muracu]

Xander win, Henley place and Henley top 20 all came in.

Based on my staking plan (1pt e/w and 3pts per Top X bet) that's a tidy 152% profit (35pts profit on an outlay of 23pts)

My 2024 Majors betting record

The Masters 2024 - 12.5% loss
PGA Championship 2024 - 151% profit
U.S. Open 2024 - 89% profit
The Open Championship — 152% profit

The Open Championship 2024: Who are the value bets?

If we smash the golf statistics up against the Betfair Exchange odds, which golfers jump out as being worth backing…?

medium.com

Very impressive.

 

[Nollaig O Muracu]

@Philby just wondering have you been plugging your model into any tournaments outside the majors?

If so, how's it going?

 

[Philby]

@Philby just wondering have you been plugging your model into any tournaments outside the majors?

If so, how's it going?

Ya. I do a run of the model for most weeks in the PGA.

It's been running for around a season and a half (~315 bets) so not a particularly large sample size for an event like golf, but still it's big enough to at least start drawing some working assumption.

So far it's broken down as follows:

Elite tournaments (i.e. majors and Ryder Cup) - 69% profit
Signature events - 56% loss
High quality non-signature events* - 100% profit
Regular events - 9% loss

So far my total stakes have been about 40% each on Elite and Regular, with the remaining 20% on the other two categories.

The model & staking has not been entirely stable either across the period. At various points in the last 18 months I've added extra factors to the model and I've trended towards adding more Top 10/Top 20/Top 30 bets, to smooth out the variance a bit.

* This was a bit of a judgement call. I went for BMW Championship, Fedex St Jude Championship & Tour Championship

 

[Carmona]

So Philby, for the mathematically challenged, where would ya be from a 100 euro stake? Sounds like you're doing well M8.

 

[Philby]

So Philby, for the mathematically challenged, where would ya be from a 100 euro stake? Sounds like you're doing well M8.

Tough to say, because I didn't back them with a standard stake size.

But with the actual stakes I bet with I'm about 20% up overall.

It's a high variance thing though. I probably make a 100% loss on about a third of the events I bet on.

 

[Nollaig O Muracu]

Would you say there's a reason for the gap between the majors and non majors?

Variance, or is your model more suited to top level events? Bit of both?

 

[Philby]

Would you say there's a reason for the gap between the majors and non majors?

Variance, or is your model more suited to top level events? Bit of both?

A very good question and can't say I know for sure. But a few thoughts come to mind...

- Variance has to play a part in this volume of bets. Maybe even a pretty big part.

- If we assume that, at the upper end of the game, players are more consistent then perhaps that means metrics-based models can be a bit more predictive/reliable?

- At the lowest quality events sometimes you're working off a small-ish sample size of events per player.

- Relatively recently I introduced a fairly heavily weighted model input around player's recent form (and the relative quality of the event). It was present for all 4 majors but only a subset of the bog standard events

- I bet on the top 10/20/30/40 markets more for the majors than for the bog standard events

- Even though Scheffler was rated hands-down the best by my model almost every time I didn't back him that often, because his odds were so skinny. He's won 6 of his last 11 tournaments. My model tries to identify guys whose odds are too long relative to their rating - it doesn't (yet) guide me on whether the highest rank player is value or not at a certain price

 

[Philby]

3M Open this week.

I'm on the following:





A mix of (a) top of the market (b) golfers my model rates and (c) guys who look value at their current price

 

[jeepers]

I'm not at all supportive of the Open being in Ireland, unless the R&A is looking to expand it to other countries, as well.

Govt to explore potential of hosting Open Championship

The government has announced its intention to explore the possibility of hosting the Open Championship and the AIG Women's Open in Portmarnock Golf Club.

www.rte.ie