Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

[zulu400]

Hi Guys,
I apologize for my absence from the competition. I actually tried my hand at a different site. The one that I used was cbs.sportsline.com. I had a good experience with that and it takes a lot of work away from the organiser so that all can concentrate on making the picks and you can have fun in real time.
I'll just highlight some points about the fantasy tournament over there.
1. We have to create a league, that can have 8 players. 2 divisions, 4 players per division.
2. There is a draft night, where you get to draft your picks for the season, you get to chose 10 picks, turn by turn, all automated, you just have to select the order of your picks. You can trade players or pick from common pool.
3. You can have 6 out of 10 players playing any given week and you have to designate 2 drivers, 2 putters, and 2 short gamers. Points get updated real time, and there is a lot of excitement by the minute.
There are season end playoffs, 2 top teams from division play 2 top teams of other division and then the finals. Playoffs stretch over 2-3 tournaments so there is enough opportunity....

The reason I'm writing this is that I really enjoyed participating on the tournaments here because of the people and the comments that we exchange and the camaraderie, so I was thinking that maybe we can utilize it on an already existing platform/website as we can really see the situations change real time, by the minute. Nothing against the way that we do it here, but its just my opinion, and moreover we all should like the rules that each website imposes, but I think we can give it a shot.

Note: I don't remember when the season started last year, I think it was in Feb/March, that is why I don't see it on the website yet. But if you are interested, please do let me know "zulu400@yahoo.com".....
Sincerely,
Raj.

[PKBasu]

I don't think we should let the contest die. Our forum golf contest was an important factor that enhanced my own interest in the game of golf. Now that we have one world-class top-50 player, and several others capable of playing on the PGA tour, there is all the more reason for us to sustain an interest in golf. Keeping the golf contest going is one way to sustain that interest. Besides, it's fun (even if some of us -- including I -- cannot always get our entries in occasionally)!

[jaydeep]

I m second to PKB's thought ... We should keep running our own golf contest without thinking number of participation.

Other members r showing interest to run this contest like guest and zulu.

Jaydeep.

[Kumar]

Jaydeep, unfortunately I have to disagree with you.

We have not had a golf contest for two straight weeks and even the regular participants have gone silent. And to have contest week after week without regular participation is not fun. except for usual malcontents like me and bhushan (sorry bhushan ji  ), this thread has been relatively quiet.

I have a suggestion. Letz take a informal poll of the golf contest members.. Each of the forum members interested in participating should put forth their choices and if we have a quorum, then we can resume the golf contest with popular option.

I for one vote for Ajay's suggestion above (with a caveat that Tiger cannot be selected for more than 10 tournaments).

[BSharma]

I agree with PKB that participating in the golf contest increased my level of interest in golf and, in particular, in Indian golfers.  The golf contest should continue, but we should have a decent number of active participants every week.  What is a decent number?  At least six or seven, in my opinion.  We should scrap the annual contest because by the end of the year only two or three contestants remain in contention for this award and the interest of other people wanes.

I am still opposed to restricting selection of Tiger Woods to ten times.  We do not know how he will perform in 2007 and there is always a possibility that Adam Scott or Luke Donald may have a Vijay Singh type of year when the Fijian won nine times in 2004.  Are we going to modify the rules and restrict selection of a super-hot golfer later in the year?  I write it because there was a similar discussion when Vijay became the hottest property in 2004.  The more variables we add to the selection of golfers for the golf contest, the more complex it becomes resulting in a chance that fewer new people will join it. 

Let the contestants select five golfers every week from the usual four categories (top 5; 6-20; 21-100, and >100 - for most tournaments) that they think will earn the maximum amount of money, and let contestants have a  monthly pool of golfers (in order or preference) from where their golfers will be chosen, if they fail to list their five golfers because of time restriction.

My one word advice for the golf contest?  KISS.

Paraphrasing Clinton’s winning mantra – keep it simple, stupid.

[Kumar]

why do you think that our contest members cannot handle complexity?  . We have been running essentially the same contest for last two years and adding a little wrinkle here and there will not make it difficult for our esteemed contest members.
Anyway if we are not going to restrict Tiger or top ranked player, letz count the number of strokes as suggested earlier in this forum by guest .. Whoever with the least amount of strokes wins.  For player missing the cut, add +1 to the last golfer's stroke score..

Let us say the last player to make the cut ended with +8 at the end of tournament. I had four players making cut with -6, , E, +1, +1. In this scenario, my last golfer who missed the cut will be assigned a score of +8 + 1 = +9. And my stroke total would be +5.

Who ever has the best score wins.

[BSharma]

The question is not about handling complexity of the contest rules, but for new members to join in without someone having to explain to them too many rules.

IMHO, interest of contestants goes up and down each week as their picks perform well or poorly.  Our contest favors quality over quantity, and if I have five golfers who make the cut and one is hovering around 25th place on the weekend and the other four are staggering in the bottom third, I have less interest than when my one of my five picks makes the cut, but is vying for the title on Sunday.  The victor’s earning will get me a higher rank in the contest than what all five of my poorly performing picks will bring for me. 

Now if you change the rules of the contest where the sum rank of all five picks will determine the winner of the contest (winner is the one with the smallest total rank) then the rank placement of each pick comes into play a lot more than the current rules of the contest, and if Tiger Woods is made ineligible, it will not make that much difference.

Kumar's example of adding the number of strokes and determining the winner of the contest is another good example, and choosing Tiger every time will not make that much difference.

[ajay]

I think there are enough ideas on the table.

I am still opposed to restricting selection of Tiger Woods to ten times.

I agree.

We should scrap the annual contest

I totally agree. Lets play monthly contests. Draft 10 players for the month before you enter the contest for the first time.

Let the contestants select five golfers every week from the usual four categories (top 5; 6-20; 21-100, and >100 - for most tournaments)

I agree, with the constraint that you select majority of your picks from your drafted players. We can name these categories as Red (top 5 players ), Yellow(6-20), green(21-100) and blue(>100). The categories will be defined based on ranking prior to first tournament of the contest.

Select your team of 5 players with at least 4 players from your draft every week. Allow maximum of only one player outside draft (to allow selecting non-regulars like Arjun Atwal, Jyoti, Jeev or any other player when they play) can't fill 5 spots with your drafted players and one non-drafted player - bad luck (So take extra care when drafting players to make sure that you'll have players to pick in individual tournament)
Obviously, we should have some constraints on non-drafted player.
For example: Earning of Red non-draft will be 1/4th. Earning of yellow non draft will be half. Earning of green and blue non-draft player will be counted in full.

My one word advice for the golf contest?  KISS.

Paraphrasing Clinton’s winning mantra – keep it simple, stupid.

Agree very strongly! Perhaps, more important thing right now is that the person who will run the contest, should be comfortable with the rules and regulation. The simpler the rules are , easier to run the contest.  

I would request guest, if you are still ready to volunteer, to start the contest consisting of 4 tournaments.  next week (I'm missing it a lot) Just finalize the rules that you are comfortable with, put it in bold and let's start playing.
(And I'll request guest strongly to register and get an identity.  :)
After all you can't remain a guest when you are ready to host a contest )

[ajay]

As I wrote earlier, I am willing to run the contest for some time if that's a hurdle

Please go ahead and ink the rules so that we can start next week.

[BSharma]

Ajay wrote:

"I agree, with the constraint that you select majority of your picks from your drafted players."

The drafted list should only be for those who do not have the time to send in their list of five golfers for a particular week.  As guest wrote, contestants should be rewarded for picking an unknown golfer and a contestant can do it better if he or she studies the latest performances of the unknown golfers and chooses one or more of them based on that knowledge.  Selecting golfers from a draft will simply allow contestants to pick the "known" golfers.

[jaydeep]

Ok guest, then u r the boss of our golf contest ... So go ahead and ink down the rules.

Jaydeep.

[Dhruv]

Why don't you just do something similar to the formula 1 contest and have golfers assigned points based on say earnings in 2006.  Just normalize them to a standard and then guys like Ernie Els who didn't play a lot due to injury can get biased up.  Just a thought.  So if I have a maximum of 100 points to assign and TW is 90 then well I can only pick two players but someone else can pick 4 or 5 players and so has a good chance of winning.

[PKBasu]

I completely agree with Bhushan's suggestion to KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!). Ideally, that means staying with our existing rules -- with just a slight tweak perhaps. Let's not tarry much further: almost the entire month of January has passed without our contest being activated. Let's get it back on the road...