2020 Deer Lakes PDGA League   February 17, 2020 at 4:36pm

Changes to the birdie pot for 2020

So, I was bored at work at some point last year and with the ability to look at all of the live scores, I dug into the possibility for each of the divisions to hit the birdie pot and found that there were some holes that just did not get birdied by some divisions. Therefore, I am changing the birdie pot to have seeded holes. This should even out the chances of the birdie pot getting hit across divisions instead of it just seeming to get hit by the open players.

I broke the holes into three groups. The easiest holes are were holes 2, 4, 8, 9, and 14 which were birdied by the Intermediate field 18% of the time. The next grouping of 5, 13, 15, and 18 were birdied by the Advanced field 30% of the time. The remaining holes 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, and 17 were birdied by the Open field 35% of the time.

So, for 2020 the birdie holes will be picked based on difficulty. The Intermediate holes will include two of the easiest holes, plus one of the middle difficulty holes, the Advances holes will add one additional middle difficulty hole, and the Open holes will add two of the most difficult holes. This means that Intermediate and Advanced will never have to worry about hole #3 coming up as a birdie hole, so y'all can stop complaining to me about that. :D

Based off of last year's stats, this should mean that Intermediate will have a 0.56% of hitting the birdie pot with Advanced having a 1.03% chance, and Open having a 0.98% chance. Hopefully this will give the Advanced and Intermediate divisions a little more of a chance to hit the birdie pots and more fairly distribute the payouts.