“He’s on a hot streak.”
“Rory just can’t miss right now.”
“You want Webb Simpson on your fantasy team this week, he’s been playing great the last few months.”
The hot streak. Long defended by athletes, denounced by statisticians. It pops up in discussions about three-point shooting, batting titles, and blackjack, but I want to talk about golf.
I don’t really care about putting hot streaks, and it would have taken me a decade to comb though the data to chart individual rounds, but there was one thing I could check out: tournament finishes.
I wanted to see how a player’s finish in one tournament (“event A”) could be used to predict their finish in the next tournament (“event B”).
My hypothesis going in was, with some reservations, that there must be something to the hot-hand theory. We’ve all seen the kind of streaks Tiger and Rory have gone on where they seemingly can’t miss a putt, and we’ve all had our own streaks where nothing seems to go straight. I figured most pros would go through the same thing.
But the results told a largely different story.
Continue reading “How Does Today’s Finish Predict Tomorrow’s?”
There’s just one month left of 2014, and means that while those in the southern climes are entering the prime of their golf season, those of us in the North are facing a harsh reality. In the northern latitudes, there’s no denying that golf season is just about at its end (despite the fact that many of us in Central Ohio played in shorts on the last day of November). As the Starks would say on Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” 
Always at the forefront of cutting edge golf technology is TaylorMade. They seem to be the one company that puts themselves out there time after time and seem to be first with the latest and greatest equipment. Sometimes strategies like this backfire, and your products are seen as a joke or as gimmicky; other times you hit home runs. One technology that the company has been pushing over the last several years is its speed slot technology which has been found on both woods and irons. On the irons, it is a polymer filled slot found on the clubs sole. The idea behind the slot is that it allows the face to flex more, producing higher ball speeds across a larger portion of the face. In other words, more forgiveness and more distance. With the release of the RSi Irons, the company is pushing the bounds even more with the addition of slots on the clubs face.
Tiger Woods is really mad at Dan Jenkins. He is angry because Jenkins wrote an fake interview with Tiger saying all sorts of unfriendly things about Tiger in Golf Digest. Tiger responded posting