Disc golf – Gravy Anecdote

European Disc Golf Championships Day 2

Another cracking day, judging by the scores. The leaders were having a good old ding-dong battle. Pasi faded at the end of the second round, but Juho stormed on through:

Players clearly learned a new approach on hole 1 today. In round 1, there were around 60 pars and over 100 over pars. Today? More people got par than any other score:

Now – what we all want to know is what are our Golden and Brown rounds? The golden round is when you take the best score of each hole and total that. The brown round is the opposite: what’s the worst score?

Here’s a static image, but the interactive version is below:

Finally well done to Team GB’s junior, Ned Morris, who had a great second round. Look at that steady-as-a-rock run of pars from holes 9-16:

Ned – don’t worry about bogeying holes 16 and 18. Derek’s done the same in both rounds:

European Disc Golf Championships

It’s disc golf analytics time! My friends are in Finland at the European Disc Golf Championships. Here’s some analytics for you to explore.

Each screenshot has a link to the interactive version.

First of all – you can compare players against each other. Here’s team GB’s progress through round 1. Chris O’Brian did extremely well, while Derek, Dan, James and Si all ended up within 1 shot of each other:

How about the holes? Well, hole 1 was brutal. 4 birdies and >100 bogeys or worse. Ouch. Hole 4 was the opposite: 40% of all players birdied it today.

And how did the Open division do in terms of Birdies/Bogeys? Well done Pasi Koivu for getting 11 birdies! Amazing.

Player progress comparison:Select a list of players to see their progress

Croydon Cyclone 2011

This weekend saw the Croydon Cyclone disc golf tournament. It was the biggest UK tour event for a long time, and the Croydon club created a tough course. Here’s the analysis of each hole’s results. As you can see, it was a tough event. Click on the holes in the upper chart to see score distributions in the lower section.

What do I take away from this?

This was a tough course. Check out how many holes had more bogeys than birdies. For the Open, it’s about half of the holes. For the other divisions, just about all holes were bogeyed more than birdied. In fact, the Int Ams only managed 28 birdies in the hole tournament.

What to make of the new and amended holes?

Hole 7, with an OB “lake” right in front of the tee seemed too easy for the top Open players. I think this dashboard proves that. The Open Division managed, on this hole: 36 birdies, 30 pars and only 10 bogies. The Advanced Ams were evenly split (14,42,20), so it played well for them. The Int Ams struggled (1,28,28).

Hole 9 saw proportionally more Open player bogey than Adv Ams, proving that we have too many open players who overestimate their driving and approaching accuracy!

I will leave you to explore the rest of the holes. Feedback welcome…

Visualising golf tournament results

Warning! This post discusses disc golf. If you’ve not heard of it, just imagine I’m referring to “normal” golf.

The US Disc Golf Championships, the world’s toughest, and richest event is happening this week. The leaderboard’s on the PDGA.com, and on the USDGC sites are ok, but don’t reveal very much.

Here’s my leaderboards, made using their data. The first shows the ranks of the players, showing you how many birdies and bogies they got. You can click on a player, or multiple players, to see how they did in each round (this viz will be updated as round scores are available; you may only see Round 1 scores for a day or so):

The second viz shows how we can use the data to analyse things other than players. Because we know how everybody scored on every hole, we can adapt the viz to analyse each hole, and see which played the hardest or easiest:

Both of these dashboards can be seen in full screen. Click here for the player dashboard, and here for the hole-by-hole dashboard.

Triple bogeys in golf: your fault or the course designer’s?

I played in the Croydon Cyclone last weekend, a part of the British Disc Golf Association national tour. One hole’s layout was controversial. It’s short, a distance that almost any player can reach from the tee. The designers spiced things up by surrounding the basket and most of the fairway with Out-of-Bounds areas that incurred a one-shot penalty, and required a rethrow, from the tee. What had in previous years been a really easy hole became a cruel score card nightmare. I took the stats of all the scores from the score cards and did the viz below.

You can read my full commentary on the BDGA forum by clicking here.

Golf score analysis: Scandinavian Open

I like disc golf. It’s the same kind of thing as ball golf, but played with discs (“frisbees”). Instead of holes in the ground, discs are thrown to metal targets. Just like ball golf, there’s a plethora of stats generated. This weekend saw the Scandinavian Open take place in Sweden. This is one of the biggest events in the calendar, and draws the top players from around Europe and the USA. The guys put the scores up promptly, so I thought I’d take their data, and visualise the results.

I created two dashboards using their results:

The Player dashboard

The Hole by hole dashboard