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The Ryder Cup: Are Balanced Four-Ball Pairings Optimal?
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William J Hurley
Published/Copyright:
October 13, 2007
In the 2004 Ryder Cup Matches, US Captain Hal Sutton decided to pair his two best players, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, in the opening four-ball match. The popular press characterized this pairing with the adjectives ``bold" and ``risky" since it is generally thought that balanced teams are preferable to unbalanced. In this paper I compare a Balanced strategy (matching stronger players with weaker players so that the resulting pairs are balanced) against an Unbalanced strategy (matching stronger players with stronger players and weaker players with weaker players) and find the Balanced strategy to be superior, but only slightly so.
Published Online: 2007-10-13
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Using Box-Scores to Determine a Position's Contribution to Winning Basketball Games
- Home Advantage in the NBA as a Game-Long Process
- Does Effectiveness of Skill in Complex I Predict Win in Men's Olympic Volleyball Games?
- Position Play in Carom Billiards as a Markov Process
- Grouping of Decathlon Disciplines
- The Ryder Cup: Are Balanced Four-Ball Pairings Optimal?
