Friday, July 15, 2011

Analysis of previous winners of British Open after round 3

OK round 2 is in the books and the cut has been made.  Some big names missed out including one of the pre-tournament favourite Luke Donald.  One of the criteria I used to eliminate players who would win pre-tournament was that they should not have won the week before and that held true for Donald (although Steve Stricker did make the cut).

So my last analysis will be be after the round 3.  Again an analysis of the round three scores of the winners from the last 30 years produced some interesting results.  The most important factor appears to be whether the player is leading or trailing as shown by the graph below. Out of the 30 winners, 15 had the lead or a share of the lead after round 3.  But another 12 were within 3 shots of the lead.  The far outlier was in 1999 when Paul Lawrie came back from 10 shots behind!  But 20 players were in the range of a 2 shot lead or within 2 shots of the leader.  Appears to be more favourable to be not too far ahead or to be within close range of the leader.

No comments:

Post a Comment