Sunday, January 11, 2009

Ranking the 2008 LPGA Top 30 Predictors

In yesterday's post, I surveyed how my preseason top 30 picks for the 2008 LPGA season panned out and generated an overall 2008 ranking that's an average of the 5 top systems in place for identifying the best players on the LPGA. In this one, I'm modifying the scoring system for Seoul Sister.com's Pakpicker competition to determine how I did relative to Hound Dog, Mulligan Stu, Bill Jempty, and Ron Sirak.

Here's how it works. First, we get points for each of our picks who finished in the top 30 (including ties), on the following scale: 30 for 1st, 29 for 2nd, 28 for 3rd, and so on, down to 1 for 30th. Next, we get bonus points for the accuracy of our picks: 20 points for nailing a pick and a point off for every spot we're off (up to 19, to avoid turning the bonus into a penalty). The maximum number of points you can get for a single player, then, is 50 (picking as our top player the actual #1).

(Drum roll, please.)

Here's how I rank the 2008 LPGA top 30 predictors:

1st Mulligan Stu (646)
2nd Hound Dog (604)
3rd The Constructivist (569)
4th Bill Jempty (529)
5th Ron Sirak (518)

Congratulations to Mulligan Stu! So what accounted for his dominating victory? The most important factor was that he was the only one of us to pick Ya Ni Tseng to make the top 30 (bringing his total of correct top 30 picks to 21; what sunk Jempty and Sirak was that they missed an additional 3 top 30 players). The rest of his lead can be accounted for mainly by the fact that he picked Inbee Park and Maria Hjorth higher and Jee Young Lee and Morgan Pressel lower than Hound Dog and I.

So there you have it. Once again, the mainstream golf media loses to mere golf bloggers. Better luck this year, Ron!

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