I know the US Open just finished but it’s never too early to talk the next major! The Open will be played at Royal Portrush and I was curious if anyone could provide insight on the course fit. Will it prefer distance or accuracy? Longer or shorter irons? ARG/Putting importance?
@will_courchene and @matt_courchene if one or both of you could provide your insight that would be greatly appreciated. I always enjoy being able to utilize your course fit feature to help spot gems in the market a few weeks prior to a major. Obviously Royal Portrush is not listed so I’m fairly in the dark. Any and all insight would go a long way!
Courses that host the Open tend to share characteristics (e.g. all being Links courses) which favour certain players. We wrote this blog post a few years ago about which nationalities over/underperform at Opens. And then according to this blog post Opens tend to devalue skill in general and are high variance (not surprising), which will favour lower-skill players.
For Royal Portrush in particular, we do have course fit data from the 2019 Open, which shows that distance was slightly overvalued while accuracy was slightly undervalued. The other attributes were all slightly undervalued as well.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll definitely look into those links. Just want to clarify your 2nd paragraph, you’re sharing that distance is slightly more important than a normal golf course while the other skillsets are slightly less valuable/correlated to success?
Hi Matt, @matt_courchene Can the information you have on Portrush please be shared. Not sure why its not been made openly available, even if it is once every so many years its good to see it when we need it.
Also did this weeks numbers get prepared the same way as the open will be. No real reason why not I suppose with both I am also not a huge fan of rating down an entire nation such as the US which you did a few years back. There are obviously some fantastic links players from there and whilst I appreciate a lot do not travel well to rate down some players because they are american and mark up some british players I think is wrong. Just my thoughts.
@matt_courchene@cgolf I read this differently from you. Matt Can you clarify. Distance being overvalued is less important and the other elements are all slightly more important.
At the same time all skill levels are down from what they would be due to the randomness of links?
12 posts in chat and 2 questions asked and you answered neither. Also @cgolf asked you a queston days ago re the course fit and you didnt respond …
Was asking as you said distance was overvalued and the other parts undervalued on the course set up at Portrush. I read that as Driving distance was less important whereas CGOLF thought more important. Was just asking you to clarify.
If you make zero effort in writing your post, you can’t expect me to spend time trying to decipher what you meant.
@cgolf ’s interpretation is correct, that’s why I liked his post. The course fit for Portrush was also posted a few days ago, so that should clear up any uncertainty around what I meant.
I can see why you were confused but your tone isn’t the best.
Matt said distance was overvalued… I can see where interpreting that may be confusing. What he likely meant was more predictive than the average course
My tone was off due to matts reply. Was perfectly courteous initially and replied to previous post where I thought I should which I didn’t think had been answered. Not sure how it was thought zero effort had been made as was clearly related to that post and was a genuine question that made sense when both quesrions were taken together. Missed matts like of it.
Second post was related to course fit which I think should be made available quite a bit prior to event for the majors such as open and us open where courses are used maybe one every 5-9 years. Appreciate there may be modifications to them given how the course has been set up in the last few days but it gives a good insight into how the model will take shape. It wasn’t for us open till very late either.
Appreciate the open is a very tricky event to model as it’s so unique. I have been modelling/trading BF and punting full time for the last 20 years and have plenty experience of it. American regular tour pros were by and large always huge value based on the numbers but I disagreed with the general marking down and marking up of players based on where they were from. as there are always exceptions to that. The blog is fascinating and accept the numbers and whilst I disagree with certain parts there is no easy solution.
The other part of the question related to whether the Scottish Open and the Open modelled in the same way with regard to Links adjustments. I was wondering if they were and if they weren’t should they be? The blog was titled who plays well at the Open but shouldn’t the factors associated with it now apply to the Scottish Open as well.
Just my thoughts and … good luck to everyone during the open and hope the model nails it.
I read this differently from you. Matt Can you clarify. Distance being overvalued is less important and the other elements are all slightly more important.
At the same time all skill levels are down from what they would be due to the randomness of links?
This was the post that you asked me to confirm one way or the other. I see now that you were confused by my use of “overvalued”, which now that I think about it, I have been misusing with respect to course fit. I’m using it to mean that an attribute is valued more than normal at the given course.
I couldn’t see a way to easily reply to your post, so I didn’t. The second part of it about skill levels all being down contradicts the first part of it (in thinking about it now, I assume you are referring to Opens being high variance?). The forum is meant to be a place for conversation among site users, it’s not just a personal line of communication with me or Will. I did get frustrated by being asked to confirm something that you hadn’t made a great effort to clarify (in my opinion), hence my tone. Appreciate your longer reply above.
As for the nationality-specific adjustments, if a player has a good Links history they can overcome their nationality’s starting point. Your nationality provides the prior on what we think your Links performance will be, and then we update that prior based on the individual’s actual Links performance.
The other part of the question related to whether the Scottish Open and the Open modelled in the same way with regard to Links adjustments. I was wondering if they were and if they weren’t should they be?
Yes they are modelled the same, or at least similarly (we put more weight on Open performances specifically next week). These adjustments go under “country” on our skill decomposition page, and they are applied every week not just for Links courses.