Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

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Kumar
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Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

Post by Kumar »

Guys, I feel that this year contest has been meandering for a while and participation has been abysmal lately. We need to bring this year's contest to close.. Do we want to play till Tour championship or just play tour championship to decide the winner..

We have been running this contest for 3 years now and buzz index is at its lowest.It is very important that  we ring in some new changes to next year's contest ( it is very similar to my suggestions )

Problems I feel that exist with the golf contest 'AS-IS'

1) some contestants  are busy and do not have patience to research and enter picks every week. We need to give them a opportunity to set their picking order at the beginning of each year. These way, they can enter their picks and forget about their picks for weeks at a stretch.

2) Tiger Woods - He is a contest killer. If a guy wins 50% of the tournaments he plays in (lately it has been 100%).. It makes no sense not to pick him.. Meaning every player picks him...Either remove him altogether from the contest or penalize heavily for picking Tiger.

My suggestion .. A contest in the format of formula one contest we had last year. Assign each contest member a maximum of 'X' points and each players will be assigned a value. Sum of players values should not cross 'X' points. To make this contest lively for members who want to manipulate their picks every week, We can let the contest members pick from their selection.

For example, Format could be as follows. Points i have slated here are just for sample and we could tweak these later. Maximum value allowed for contest members is '150' points . Each weeks it would be 75 points. Meaning they can select list of players whose cumulative values should not increase beyond 150 points for the entire year . And then every week from this list, contest member can choose 5 players whose cumulative value is not greater than 75 points. If a member does not enter picks for a week, then contest moderator will pick the 5 players whose aggregate will add up to 75 points.

Dhurv successfully ran a formula one contest along this lines and he could have some valuable input to offer.

I am now ready for  :tomato:to the above suggestions.  I feel sincerely that this contest needs some change to not only bring in new participants but to bring back old contestants (Dhurv, Gautam, VReddy, Suresh)...
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jaydeep
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Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

Post by jaydeep »

I am second to Kumar’s thought that we r loosing fizzes of the contest and need some actions to rectify it … So new more contestants (like guest … :notworthy: ) joins with our old ones.

As usual Kumar started our thought process on new format of the contest … So please put forward ur thoughts, which can help us to find right scenario for our contest for next year.

I m also agree to play just Tour championship this year, becoz people r not having time due to work for putting results and players list.

Jaydeep.

Edited -
PS. Congratulation guest for ur dominating victory.
Last edited by jaydeep on Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BSharma
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Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

Post by BSharma »

Congratulations guest.  :D

The golf contest is like any other venture; it must be tweaked and refined to suit the contestants so that more people participate in it and have fun.  I am happy that people are putting their minds together to make the golf contest better, and I agree that we must make changes for the 2007 season and beyond.  However, one must look at the golf contest objectively to determine what is wrong with it; why enough people are not participating every week, and what will spur interest in the contestants.

Why do people lose interest in the golf contest?  If some members are busy and cannot participate for several weeks, will automatic picks at the start of the season turn them into enthusiastic participants?  I am not sure why people lose interest in the golf contest, but if I was an “old-timer” and saw myself in the bottom quarter of the annual ranking by end of July because I could not participate regularly then I probably would not be too enthusiastic to play in the last three months of the contest.  Is the golf contest too long to sustain interest for most contestants?  Will choosing a new method (# of strokes versus dollars won) of selecting the winner of the weekly golf contest solve the problem?

I get a feeling that most of us want to change the rules to make the contest better, but to bring back the “old timers” and add new contestants will require more than penalizing contestants for choosing Tiger Woods or instituting automatic picks.  The latter only adds the number of contestants, but does not add to the “buzz index”.

Would scraping the annual contest and replacing it with ten monthly contests help?  It might if the loss of interest is due to seeing one’s name in the bottom quarter of the annual contest by the middle of the season. 

Automatic picks are helpful for members who are busy and cannot find the time to pick players every week, but what use it is if I chose players in January and did not show up in the golf contest thread until September.  Did I add anything to the “buzz index”?  I think making people select “automatic picks” every month if they are going to be busy for a few weeks makes more sense than the “automatic picks” be applicable for the entire season or for six months. 

The current rules for picking a winner of the golf contest favor choosing the winner of the PGA tournament (e.g., guest winning the contest this week by being the lone contestant selecting Davis Love).  I am not opposed to having a different format for selecting the contest winner, if that is what people want to do.

Let’s tweak the rules to improve participation, but let us do it after determining what the underlying problems are and what will solve the problems.
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Post by Kumar »

Bhushan I agree that we can get the inputs from old-timers as to why they are not participating.

We could even have golf contestants go against one another instead of the entire field (idea borrowed from yahoo's fantasy football), where we could play each week against one contest member.  And winner would be contestant with maximum number of wins (may be even a play off system). In this scenario, common picks could really kill the interest ..

I agree that contestant's lack of interest could be because they are floundering in the bottom quarter.. And there is just no way to avoid this (unless we stop accumulating yearly earnings). Unless we decide to give sops to bottom feeders (like bottom three contestants for current week,  get one additional top 5 pick for the next week). Unless the contest is evenly matched with less than a million separating the person at top and bottom, nothing could fix that issue. 

Automation of picks ensure that there are fixed number of contestants every week and no one drops out.  Lot of weeks we see PKB missing the deadline to enter his picks and these would automatically fix it. If he had not dropped out that many weeks,he would definitely have a chance to win the top spot.  And when there are more contestants, there would definitely be some interest (though they may not actively post in the contest thread). 
Whatever changes we make, we need to ensure that 2007 season carries a methodology for automation of picks. Whether it is for a period of 1 month , 3 months, 6 months or an year. Unless this happens we are going to definitely lose more participants.

And secondly we have to consider how much weightage we give to 'Tiger' pick. If we are going to stick to earnings as means of deciding our winner, it would require a brave soul to not pick Tiger. And I definitely feel that it will make contest better (though it may not add to buzz index).
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Post by Dhruv »

Make it more like a hockey/football pool situation.  So you have picks and X number of trades and that is all.  Easiest way IMO is to have total prize money won in the last year as criteria.  So say you can pick as many golfers as you like as long as the prize money they've earned is last year is less than X.  Makes people picking Tiger have fewer picks.  Also as $'s won is what we are going with makes the competition fairer. 

To change players midyear allow say 2-3 changes in the midyear and do it based on  % prize money earned or something similar.  Don't know if it makes sense.  Also maybe we can have prizes such as a signed cap or something.
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Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

Post by BSharma »

I am trying to get my view point here in-between seeing patients.

One reason why I do not like to see the golf contest being run similar to football/hockey contest is that golfers get on a high for two or three weeks and then slack off.  The trick is to find when they will play well or not play well (Tiger is an exception).  The person who does his or her homework well may get rewarded for picking the "hot" golfer (e.g., Davis Love this week).  I want contestants to get rewarded for picking the "hot" golfer and avoiding the ones who will bomb that week.  Choosing five golfers for the entire year and then making some sort of trade in mid-year does not reward the home work done by contestants and then it boils down only to luck rather than other factors. 

Having ONLY monthly contests (whetever format we choose) will eliminate the problem of languishing in the cellar for missing several weekly contests.  Choosing the best three out of four weekly contests for the "monthly" winner will avoid the penalty of missing one weekly contest in a month.  It is hard to use "automatic picks" since we do not have a list of golfers until Friday evening (US time) before the tournament. 

I believe that finding the reasons why people do not actively play week after week and then trying to address them will help make this contest a better one.

Another suggestion is to use the PGA Tour golf contest (choose 5 golfers with total value of $1 million; the price of golfers changes weekly depending on their performances) and posting our picks at Sports-India and have a monthly contest.  The winner is based on total earnings of the five golfers, similar to our contest.  Tiger Woods costs $300,000 and that leaves only $700,000 for the other 4 golfers at the PGA Tour contest.
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Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

Post by BSharma »

Check out the PGA Tour golf contest.

http://www.pgatour.com/fantasy/

I played in the salary cap cup contest two years back.  You will have to sign in (free) to view the salaries of each golfer every week and the software lets you pick up to five golfers until you reach a $1 million limit.
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Post by ajay »

First of all, let me appreciate the commendable effort put by Sandeep and Jaydeep to run the contest. I can understand how Sandeep feels trapped with his busy schedule of traveling. Fortunately, Jaydeep came to his rescue and gave some helping hand. Running the contest week after week is not that easy.

I see the contest from different point of view. I feel the contest should have a live scoreboard where each contestant have power to monitor his performance with respect to others. If possible, more web based automation is required to run this contest. Like selecting the players with a click of the mouse and locking of the selection at a specified deadline. I think hardest part of running the contest is to ready the excel file by inputting the user's selection. Mostly, there is a delay in creating the file and without the ready excel file no monitoring is possible. So if there is a automated way to input the selection, that will be very useful.  And once a team is selected and locked, anyone should be able to monitor the progress round by round and post the results. Right now, the person who creates the excel file can monitor the results anytime but nobody else. Since I stopped running the contest, I do miss the flexibility of monitoring the contest at any time. In fact, I even feel  lazy to see who did I select and where they are on the leaderboard. This lack of information dampens my enthusiasm too. Earlier, I could do this with a click of the mouse in the excel file. If same facility is available directly on the web, then whenever anyone is looking at the leaderboard, he can go and check out his position in the contest and post his observations in the contest thread. I'm sure this will generate more enthusiasm in the contest.

Well, what I wrote above is more of my wishful thinking as it may not be feasible to implement. But what may be feasible to do is to have more volunteers to run the contest. Each volunteer can peek and put his name against a tournament schedule and he becomes responsible for those tournaments. But unfortunately, that requires each volunteer to learn how to use the excel file, which may be a deterrent.
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Suggestions for Golf Contest 2007

Post by jaydeep »

But that means extra work on people who r conducting contest to check weekly performance of particular player to give weight age ... Or r we planning to give same price to golfer for monthly, quarterly or half yearly  basis???

Dhruv's suggestion of giving signed cap (by Daniel Chopra or Arjun Atwal in the beginning) to the winner sounds cool.

Jaydeep.
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Post by BSharma »

Ajay wrote:
And once a team is selected and locked, anyone should be able to monitor the progress round by round and post the results. Right now, the person who creates the excel file can monitor the results anytime but nobody else. Since I stopped running the contest, I do miss the flexibility of monitoring the contest at any time.
You can color-code the player's names on the PGA Tour website result page and keep tab of your players.  The website allows a person to use three different colors for each player.  Often I will use one color for my picks, another color for golfers selected by other golf contest contestants and a third color for Arjun Atwal and Daniel Chopra.  I can look at the scoreboard and at one glance see how my 5 picks are doing in relation to all the other contestants' picks.  I do this on my home computer and hence I see it at night time when I get home.
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Post by ajay »

I some time color code but normally I'm too lazy to check the names and color code them.  :oops:
By the way I've Daniel, Arjun, and other top players as my permanent selection, which are colored with a fourth color and I don't need to color code them every week.
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Post by Dhruv »

Yup. Same golfers for the full year except you have the choice to exchange players after say 10 tournaments.  You can then trade any player of yours who has earned $100 that year for another who has won $100 or less. You could exchange 2 players who had won $200 dollars for 1 player of $200 or 2 players who had won $150 and $50 etc .
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Post by SaniaFan »

So can someone share that excel so that other people can learn to use the excel off hand.
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