Michael Kim is playing better
Would not be surprised if he got a W this season
I think he can do some damage in the playoffs, maybe make Top 25 to get a card for next year
Glad to see CH3 is taking the Saudi money, will save DG telling everyone that he’s double the odds he should be in every PGA tour event.
5 Likes
I mean he is-- what do you want DG to do?
Now he will be underpriced on LIV.
1 Like
The ultimate “high floor, low ceiling” player.
3 wins in 22 years on the tour, tied tenth is his best finish in 50 majors, yet he’s 19th in the PGA’s all time money list.
Even in his 40s he’s still in the top 200 of the world with a grand total of 3 top 10s since the start of 2020. It’s ridiculous how good he is at finishing tied 23rd.
I don’t understand why 5 people have liked your previous post. If odds imply a 1 in 200 chance of winning, but DG has him winning 1 in 100 times, are you really suggesting that DG is wrong because he hasn’t won in a while?
Or similarly after like one round when DG has him 30-1 but books have him 40-1, are you saying DG is wrong because he doesn’t win?
To me, CHII is like a player that the DG model captures really well. He is what his strokes-gained numbers say he is. Just because he doesn’t win every year doesn’t mean he can’t win next week.
I’m going to guess that they liked it because they agreed with it.
It can’t be a surprise to you that someone would discuss a player who they believe to be consistently over-valued in the win market in a thread entitled “Notoriously over- and undervalued”.
1 Like
In this debate I feel that the “popular” players tend to be overvalued by the market, especially by the softer books on Missed Cuts and Matchups which can lead to an overinflated EV. A lot has been said about Kisner (See Here) on previous threads here about how the model has a tough time handling them which I think could be extended to other mid-tier popular “fan-favorite” guys.
These are off of more qualitative observations, but I would like to do a more data driven analysis on it at some point. Kisner has had a huge jump in popularity due to Foreplay and I have a running joke with some other guys that some “expert” on action network or ESPN will pick Leishman in some fashion every week he is in the field. Similar case when Zalatoris finished Top 5 at the Masters and everyone flocked to him.
While I think the model does the best job in accurately predicting the probabilities and skill levels of these guys, this popularity factor may influence and over estimate the EV of them to miss the cut with the amount of public money on the other side.
It will be interesting to see the effect of LIV and how the public treats those players. If they will get the “Kisner bump” or “Patrick Reed downgrade”
Just a few thoughts and would love to hear everyone’s opinion.
1 Like
There is no way that a guy like Kisner’s popularity had any dampening effect on your realized outcome. If he lost at the rate the model expected him to lose at, his popularity would only mean you make more dollars, not fewer (I think the popularity thing is a bit overplsyed, myself). Hint: it’s probably about putting and decay rate. The model tends to struggle with really good putters because they are an anomaly, IMO.
I should have clarified more, it tends to overvalue vs the book in missed cut or matchup markets (ones where you can “bet against” him) leading to higher EV values which will increase the recommended Kelly stake. Could be more noise than signal but it is something I have always wondered about.
Edit: I just checked my bet history and am positive $ on betting against Kisner. How the markets treat guys like him and those I mentioned above have been a point of interest for me.
I strongly disagree that the model fails to accurately model Kevin Kisner.
I understand he played well at the match play, but lifetime he is the single most profitable player to bet against (in my experience, with the only the possible exception of C Schwartzel).
WIth respect to CHIII, why does everyone think he is a terrible player? Look at his scores. They are pretty good! I don’t know what else to say about it.
CH3 is a very strange player in that it’s not like his round-level ceiling is that low (he is still capable of shooting 62s), it’s more that his event-level ceiling seems extraordinarily low. And that is something that our model doesn’t really address, given its focus on capturing the round-level distribution of performance primarily. (We do account for pressure effects and other things within an event, but generally not at the player level, e.g. allowing CH3’s performance to be more negatively affected when near the lead than a typical player).
I don’t really have an intuitive explanation for why this could be the case with CH3, though (maybe @jrwfsl147 does). He must play poorly on weekends when he has a good first 2 rounds and vice versa (but this is just mechanically true… given we know his event-level ceiling is low). I think the market probably does undervalue CH3 on something like T20s, but on wins I don’t know, they could have it right. It could be random of course, anything is possible. But I don’t know if that’s the most likely explanation at this point.
1 Like
So decided to look into this quickly. CH3’s event-level SD is low, but not historically so. It would require a more detailed analysis, but basically I just looked at SD in event-level SG by season, and then averaged over a player’s seasons. I didn’t want to just do event SD for an entire career because that will capture long-term changes in skill. Restricting to players who have played at least 5 seasons with 15 events or more, CH3 comes in at about 30th lowest event-level SD (out of 322). Notables with lower SDs are Luke Donald, Matt Kuchar, ZJ, Bill Haas, Rahm (!), Berger.
I’m not sure this is even the best way to do it as number of missed cuts plays a big role probably in your SD. So seems like the explanation for CH3 has to be more along the lines of “he’s a loser”.
2 Likes
Agree with pretty much all of this. Nobody could have ever had such a long, lucrative career with so few highlights.
That major statistic is shocking to me. Surely nobody else in the history of golf would have been good enough to qualify for 50 majors with a tied tenth best finish.
I think in simple terms, he must hate pressure but love money. If you look at his owgr career history, year in and year out he was playing about 30 events a year, well above the average for a player of his quality. Think he must just have been happy turning up everywhere he could and collecting a cheque.
I have had a lot of success taking CHIII in matchups, and almost always see the price worsen after taking him to place or win.
The sample size on both of these is small, but both indicate to me that DG’s model has a better handle on him than the betting markets.
If the claim is that the model is wrong because a bunch of long-odds bets wagered on CHIII did not hit, I have a problem with the logical structure of the claim. That is what I am saying.
Yeah I again should’ve worded it better and looked at my historical bet sheet before posting…
The model does an excellent job in providing the true odds on Kis’ performance. I am just interested in if the books apply extra juice to a more popular guy like him as compared to a similar skilled player like Min Woo Lee or Sam Horsfield.
I think that they definitely do. If all the casual bettor flow is on Kis, why not sell him at a worse price? The books like betting against Kisner as much as we do.
1 Like
Quick note back to CH3: Among players with > 20 rounds played this year, his downside (neg SG) round level SD is low; similar to JT, Cam Smith and Morikawa. Which may help explain his round matchup success
1 Like
Thanks for this-- that is interesting and appreciated.
1 Like
I didn’t say anything about his match-up or top 20 value, nor did I say he was a terrible player.
I said that, like a lot of members of this site and the gambling community as a whole, when I see him as value in the win market my bullshit detector comes on and I scroll on without parting with any of my money. Pick the logical structure out of that one.