Curious what DG will calculate the wave advantage to be this week, as it looks pretty severe as of now. Do you all just estimate based on forecast or have a more scientific approach?
I was just thinking about this. Let’s play a game. Guess what DG’s weather adjustment will be in DK points. My guess: 1.9 DK points.
Looking like the worst of the winds will be AM Friday by a wide margin. Could potentially see 40+ mph gusts with the wind dying down in the afternoon. If this does indeed happen, we could see a significant advantage. That south wind is going to be brutal for these players. Holes like #8 260 yard par 3 and hole #18 500+ par 4 are going to play directly into the wind. My only concern is that they could potentially delay play because of the wind gusts causing the balls to roll off the green.
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Update: DG has a wave advantage of 0.7 strokes total for Thurs/Fri. From my experience I believe they are a little on the conservative side when predicting this.
In general this advantage is pretty significant? I don’t have much context except some of the model predictions look noticeably different from this morning
I have talked to some sharps i know that are predicting the wave advantage to be in the neighborhood of 2-3 strokes all said and done, which is why I was curious as to how DG came up with their advantage
Very well could be. Really just depends how difficult it is Friday morning. It’s a rare situation though where one wave gets the best of both days.
I think using 2-3 strokes as a projection (i.e. an expectation) would be too high. There is still 1.5 days until the start of the tournament! The forecast could change. There haven’t been that many wave splits in excess of 3 strokes in the last 10 years on tour, so to expect a wave split of that magnitude doesn’t make sense, unless you have a weather model that predicts with 99% accuracy.
Our process is simple. We’ve fit a regression of the forecasted wind for a given round on a player’s subsequent performance in that round. Note that this is different than estimating that relationship using the observed wind. The relationship in the former case will be weaker because sometimes forecasts are wrong, and so the players projected to play in the wind sometimes don’t end up playing in it. But, it is the relationship we want to estimate because that’s the forecasting problem we are presented with each week. So the result of that regression is we have an estimate of how to adjust for each mph of wind, allowing for 1mph to be worth more strokes at different wind speeds (e.g. 6mph to 5mph makes less of a difference than 20mph to 19mph).
So for this week, we have our forecasts which tell us the wave differences each day, and it works out to 0.7 strokes total. This is our expected wave split, but in our simulations we allow for variance in this split as well: some simulations might be a 2 stroke split, while others it might be 0. Historically, I think the standard deviation in the difference between the actual wave split and our projection is in the neighbourhood of 1 stroke. So this means our projection will be off by 1 stroke or more 68% of the time (using the 68-95-99 rule). Which seems like a lot, but weather is not that predictable! The more important part is capturing the uncertainty correctly in the simulations. This is especially noticeable in the live model when projecting the cutline.
The 2-3 stroke projection would probably make sense if the gusts hit at exactly the time they are supposed to, but if they shift even a few hours that could totally flip things. And the more uncertain something is, the closer your projection should be to zero.
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Thanks for the insight Matt! I misspoke earlier, I should have said some people are predicting a wave advantage UP TO 2-3 strokes…which I’m sure in your simulation, there are such advantages at the extreme end as well. In all likelihood it will probably fall somewhere in the middle, which is why your .7 makes sense.
Also they suspend play now when the wind is high. Can’t have players shooting high scores, the sponsors don’t like that
Is there somewhere on the site where we can see the individual bias for each of the first 2 rounds by player? And, if so, is it also possible to see it for rounds 3 and 4 before the start of those rounds? Thanks
Yeah you can see it in the weather widgets (‘highlight player’ on top right) on the field page or fantasy projections page.