Here are some of the main statistical takeaways after Thursday’s first round at the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions. Patrick Reed is at 8-under par and holds a two-stroke lead over Tony Finau and Xander Schauffele. Reed and Finau are about equally likely to win according to our predictive model (17 percent). Here are the remaining top 10 win probabilities: The biggest mover in the wrong direction on Thursday was Dustin Johnson, who was our model’s pre-tournament favorite with an estimated 11 percent win probability. Johnson shot a 2-over-par 74 and saw his win probability plummet to just 1 percent; he has a lot of work to do over the next three days to claim his first victory of the young 2018-19 season. Despite their smaller field sizes, World Golf Championships events are typically among the most difficult to win on the PGA TOUR. We estimate that a top-five player in the world (i.e. a player who is two strokes better per round than the average PGA TOUR professional) has a roughly 7 percent chance of beating this WGC-HSBC Champions field. Conversely, a top-five player is estimated to have a 17 percent chance of beating the field at the other PGA TOUR event this week, the Sanderson Farms Championship. Here are all the field strength numbers so far in the 2018-19 season: NOTE: These reports are based off the live predictive model run by @DataGolf. The model provides live “Make Cut,� “Top 20,� “Top 5,� and “Win� probabilities every five 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 10,000 simulations. To follow live finish probabilities throughout the remainder of the WGC-HSBC Champions, 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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