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?