When Tiger won the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he ended a drought of 923 days without a win on the PGA tour. Looking at his previous stats here and here, Tiger had won 71 of 237 tournaments played (30.0%) before his winless streak began at the end of 2009. Before his recent win, Tiger lost 27 consecutive tournaments (well, he didn't win, but his tournament earnings were still over $2 million during this time - I'd be happy with that). Let's assume that the probability he wins a tournament is 0.30 and that each tournament performance is independent (probably not the case, but he has won at so many different courses that it should be relatively true). Since the probability that he wins is 30%, the probability that he loses is 70%.* The probability that he would lose 27 consecutive tournaments before winning the 28th is:
Prob of losing 27 * Prob of winning one = (0.70)27 * (0.30) = 1.97 x 10-5which is equal to 1 out of 50,000. In other words, it is highly unlikely that this streak would happen if Tiger's game did not significantly suffer after the "incident".
Let's now look at his Major winless streak (now at 11 straight after not winning the Masters). As a professional, Tiger won 14 of 46 Majors played (30.4%) before his losing streak began. Notice that this is very similar to his regular tournament win percentage. The probability that Tiger would go 11 Majors without winning is:
(0.696)11 = 0.018This is still a small probability, but not completely unreasonable. I looked back at his stats, and Tiger previously had a Major winless streak of 10 (2002-2004). So I wouldn't write Tiger off just yet, especially if the "old" Tiger is back.
UPDATE:
* This needs to be pointed out because I originally switched the 0.3 and 0.7. Oh, the mistakes I can make when I don't have a class of undergrads correcting me. Thanks to Matt for pointing this out.
No comments:
Post a Comment