Cut prediction: Fort Worth Invitational

Through the first round of the Fort Worth Invitational, there are 76 players at par or better (T61). Here is how we are projecting tomorrow’s cutline, assuming course conditions are similar to Thursday’s: Even par: 78 percent 1 over par: 17 percent 1 under par: 5 percent It was a tale of two nines for Xander Schauffele on Thursday, shooting 4-under par on his front nine followed by 6-over par on the inward half. His probability of playing the weekend climbed all the way to 95 percent at the turn. Now, it stands at just 40 percent as Schauffele is currently two strokes outside the most likely cutline number for Friday. Here is how his cut probability evolved throughout Thursday’s play: It’s interesting how much a golfer’s performance on the first hole of the tournament can influence their finish probabilities. For example, Jim Furyk started Thursday with a 67 percent chance of making the cut. After making birdie on his first hole of the day (the 10th, which played to about par) his cut probability jumped to 76 percent! That is a big difference: 67 percent was the 40th highest pre-tournament cut probability, while 76 percent was the 18th highest. What explains this nine percent increase? The short answer is simply that the margins between the best golfers in the world are very small: just a single stroke per round separates the 20th ranked player from the 100th ranked in this field (in terms of expected scores), according to our model. When Furyk gains a stroke on his first hole of the tournament, he is effectively leapfrogging all the players with ability levels that are less than half a stroke better than his (because we are predicting a 2-round cut). This turns out to be about 20 players. This specific example is illustrative of the narrow margins in professional golf, and the difficulty in predicting (with certainty) where players will finish on the leaderboard any given week. Finally, here are some other notable cut probabilities heading into Friday: Rickie Fowler (3 under par, 97 percent), Jon Rahm (2 under par, 95 percent), Jordan Spieth (1 under par, 91 percent), and Patrick Cantlay (3 over par, 38 percent). NOTE: These reports are based off the live predictive model run by @DataGolf. The model provides live “Make Cutâ€�, “Top 20â€�, “Top 5â€�, and “Winâ€� probabilities every 5 minutes from the opening tee shot to the final putt of every PGA TOUR event. Briefly, the model takes account of the current form of each golfer as well as the difficulty of their remaining holes, and probabilities are calculated from 10K simulations. To follow live finish probabilities throughout the remainder of the Fort Worth Invitational, or to see how each golfer’s probabilities have evolved from the start of the event to the current time, click here for the model’s home page.

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