Looking for that perfect publication that will help you know how well a player does in certain courses, certain conditions and in certain months?
We have that tool for you, welcome to the GolfStats Guide to the 2008 PGA Tour, our first annual publication. It’s designed to give all the information a fantasy golf player could dream of or any avid follower of the PGA Tour could want to know in order to more fully appreciate players and tournaments. The information in this electronic book can not be found anywhere else and is based on an extensive data base of results and statistics from Tour events.
The two main sections of this book break things down tournament by tournament and player by player. Each tournament page (example from the FBR Open) gives a detailed look at the top 15 to 20 players (more for major championships) in that event based on their past records, with a year-by-year breakdown of their recent finishes and their overall stats including scoring average and money won in that tournament. It also gives you an overview, tells about the course, gives short recaps of the last three years and reasons for victory, keys to who will win in 2008, and picks by myself and David Barrett.
But the heart and soul of this electronic book is the way you can link to the Internet on Golfstats. One of the big problems I encountered in 1998 when I put together Pro Golf was that we were limited to a finite number of pages and a lot of really great information couldn’t be included. In a way there are no restrictions to an electronic book, though to make it easier to read you have to keep it to a certain size. But in the links, of which there are more than 7,500, we let you explore the stats that you want to find out about and can help you better understand where players do well and not so well. So the key is not just the book itself but the way it lets you communicate with Golfstats.com in finding out everything that you need to know.
On top of the tournament section we also have a player section which breaks down the performance of 105 selected players (example of Phil Mickelson) into more categories than you can imagine. The electronic book gives their results in each and every tournament from 2000 through 2007 and highlights their best events. It gives their PGA Tour box scores (driving distance, fairways hit, etc.) for the last three years, but again through Golfstats.com you can look at all of their box scores going back to 1997. And in order to show when and where each player shines and where he struggles, there is a chart in the electronic book breaking down performance by month and breaking out how they do in various categories: major championships; hard, medium, and easy courses; desert courses; TPC courses; courses with Bermuda greens; and more. This information is truly unique and gives unprecedented insight into the players and their tendencies
We give you more than just numbers. We’ve also enlisted some top golf writers to guide you. Leonard Shapiro previews the 2008 majors, Bob Harig profiles the Q-School graduates, David Barrett looks at the Nationwide Tour grads, Gary Trask predicts five players who will surprise and five who will slide, and British betting columnist Jeremy Chapman gives his tips on how to pick players.
Now you’re ready to go to it—and start impressing your friends with your knowledge, winning major championship pools, cleaning up in fantasy golf, and gaining a greater understanding of the players that will enhance your golf viewing experiences
The cost of this publication is $12.95. It's 173 pages in length and is a PDF file that can be download off of PayPal. They accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express and PayPal. As you all know this is a secure site (secured by VeriSign) and data you enter into your browser when making a purchase is encrypted and secure, Golfobserver.Com has nothing to do with the transaction. Once payment is taken care of you will receive an email with a link to upload the file to your computer. Just follow the instructions, they are easy, but just remember once the file uploads to save it to your disk and it will work on either Acrobat, Acrobat reader or on a Macintosh via Preview. The file can be uploaded to a second machine, but we hope that you respect our digital content and not give it out to others.
So just hit the buy now button to start your purchase.
Again, I know that you will love the book, send us a line on what you think of it to me at Golfersal@aol.com.Enjoy.
Golfers of all skill levels are constantly looking for an edge. Whether it's employing that new gadget they saw on an infomercial, spending half their pay checks on the driver they saw Tiger Woods using or spending more time at the range with their trusted instructor than with their loved ones, "golf nuts" put no barriers on what they'll do to shave even a single stroke off their handicap.
But even after going to these great lengths to improve their game, do these golfers ever really take into consideration one of the most vital pieces of equipment to their game -- the golf ball?
Do they really have any idea what brand of ball is best for their swing, or do they simply take the hundreds of ads they see of TV for golf balls as the gospel truth? Just because the Titleist Pro VI is the ball of choice for Vijay Singh, does that mean it's the proper fit for the 21-handicap who plays once a week? If you take the time to get fitted for your clubs, shouldn't you fit those new sticks to the ball that works best for your game?
These are the questions that the people at GBT Technologies decided to not just ask, but provide the answers for, by launching GolfBallSelector.com in July. And the company spared no expense and left no stone unturned in doing so.
"The basic idea came from the fact that we don't think there's one single golf ball on the market that is the best golf ball," explains Gary Esayian, a partner with GBT Technologies, which stands for Golf Ball Test. "But there is a golf ball out there that is best for how you play the game and how you swing the club. It's that simple."
What wasn't quite so simple was the elaborate testing process GBT Technologies went through in order to conveniently provide golfers a list of the best balls for their specific games. As in-depth as the research was, however, the end result is that visitors to GolfBallSelector.com are provided this list in a matter of minutes after answering a series of questions about their game.
"It was very complex, but it was also very cool to be a part of," Esayian says of the process that took about nine months. "We're real excited about the results. The reaction we've got so far from the people who have tried it has been excellent."
GolfBallSelector.com , a joint venture between the high-end club fitting company Max Out Golf and the equipment website Equip2Golf.com, features the Mayes Performance Index (MPI), which is a patent pending performance index and rating system that provides relative comparisons between golf balls. Multiple lines from every major golf ball brand were tested for distance, spin, feel, compression, hardness, durability and price. Using swing robots and actual golfers, each ball was tested using a driver, six iron and wedge. Distance, spin and accuracy data was captured using Max Out Golf's patented IGMS system to measure actual launch conditions. The human testing was conducted not with one "optimum" or "average" swing, but by golfers of varying skill levels.
All of this info was then handed over to a company called Expert Choice, which produces decision support software that has has helped Fortune 500 companies from all over the world as well as the U.S. Government since 1983.
"It was important to have a third party come in that had no bias to any of the golf ball manufactures," says Esayian. "This is all about finding the best golf ball for the individual golfer. It's not about selling a particular brand of golf balls."
GolfBallSelector.com fitting process is available for a nominal fee. The standard version is $19.95 and provides a one-time single fitting session done on-line that uses the custom developed on-line analytical processing tools and techniques to help determine which balls have the right mix of distance, spin, and feel based on a golfer's own individual swing characteristics. A premium version, which carries an introductory price of $29.95, gives the user access to these tools, plus additional resources in the GolfBallSelector.com Learning Center for up to a year - allowing a golfer the opportunity to update their profile on a regular basis and review new balls as they become available.
Currently there are 30 different kinds of golf balls in the system, but roughly 12 more will be added in the coming months.
"The response we have got is that people are really surprised that they don't have to be going out and spending so much on the most expensive brand of golf ball because there's another two or three brands out there that are not only easier on the wallet, but better for their overall game," adds Esayian . "And this is something that can be beneficial to golfers of all handicaps. We've already had some Tour caliber players give it a try along with guys who are 36 handicaps."
"Not all balls are created equal," says Mitch Voges, who along with Esayian, is the co-founder of Max Out Golf . "Choosing the ball that makes the most of how you strike the ball can make a surprisingly big difference in your game. Our goal is to provide the real world data that golfers need to make a truly informed golf ball purchase."
This is not a paid advertisement, this is a small project that we believe very strongly in and have been behind since it's idea came about at the start of the year. Once you try this I think that you will think it's pretty neat also.
- Sal Johnson - Publisher, GOLFOBSERVER
