[Sean_A]

Sean - You are not being fair. I said that I saw serious flaws in the Gloucestershire ranking. Some of it is bizzare and I think its bizzare because its been done by not many opinions, some of it is like saying Hartlepool is better than Crystal Palace if you can understand that analogy. I am not saying MINE should be the only one to count. If we take 20 opinions we will get a better accuracy of what is best, thats not so much different in what the top100 site have tried to do. What you need is good opinion of course and there needs to be a secure way to cancel that doughnut opinion.
As Jim stated whilst 75 places in a top100 may be safe the other 25 places need much research, as I said in an earlier post if you need to find top 100s for the Englands, Scotlands, Wales, Irelands you need very detailed research so that needs to start from the foundations of best in the counties, get that accurate to at least top 20 and you have the basis, get that wrong and doughnut appears!

Adrian

It doesn't follow that more opinions equals a better opinion.  

I also don't necessarily agree that to find the best we must work up from small areas to larger areas.  Indeed, nearly all of the best candidates for top 100 have already been identified.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel.  The issue, and it will always remain an issue, is how courses stack up against each other. That will forever be a matter of opinion even if most can agree on which 75 courses of the 100 will be included.  Indeed, no matter how much folks rail on about this list or that, most of them are far more similar than not.  I can't personally see why you and Scott think the Top100 list is terrible - if it is bad, all the lists must be bad.  


Mark

I agree with you.  The Confidential Guide is at least as good as any ranking, except perhaps for the Non Official GCA.com rankings.  I like this very much and would use it for my go to list for play outside GB&I.

Ciao

[Jud_T]

The more opinions the more accurate the result.

or is it the more opinions the more homogenized the result?  Personally, I prefer single malt to a blend...

Jud - But what if the malt I serve you, you dont like.

Then at least I know exactly what it tastes like and not to order it again.  Better than drinking a mediocre blend my whole life because "that's what everyone in town drinks" and never knowing about that really special tipple that's only made in 1 antique cask by the cranky old woman down the road.

[Jim McCann]

Ross

Eight of the twenty one courses in the Borders - ten of which are ranked on the Top100 site - are 9-hole layouts.

Unfortunately, I've never seen any of these courses being lauded in a golf publication as worthy of inclusion in a
regional Top 10 chart, never mind a national Top 100.

If there are one or two that you think worth a visit, let me know and I'll certainly play them sometime this coming
summer.

There's no bar on 9-hole courses appearing on the Top100 site.

I've enjoyed recent rounds at Traigh, Carradale, Cruit Island and Castlerock (Bann), all of which feature on our site
and indeed the latter two are ranked in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland charts.

[Adrian_Stiff]

Mark - I still think a collection of opinions is better than one opinion, you need to factor out the bad opinion though or ratings will be skewed. Ratings are subjective which as you clearly state and in some respects you cant argue with an opinion, but constantly on here and your guilty of it too, you see a course 'crazy' out of position. Its not easy to produce an objective ranking, perhaps impossible, but you factor out bad opinion if Charlie Farley rates some 5400 yarder as the best in the county when its not even staged a county championship, there could be objective measures that stopped that silly opinion.

I do think that if you did a more peoples rating then you would see a greater sprinkling of modern courses but then I think rating golf courses is generally screwed too much in favour of the older ones anyway. In my world I booked 463 society groups in 2011 so I am pretty front line in knowing the courses people want to play and their likes.

If people dont want courses ranked from 1-100 or 1-500 fine, but clearly some people do want to see that and the top100 tries to do that.

[Adrian_Stiff]

Sean - The problem in not having a collection of opinions is you get the doughnut. The Gloucestershire rankings are crap.

[Mark Pearce]

Adrian,

The point is that a good and sensible argument could be made that The Belfry is the best course in England and another (in the opinion of most on this site preferable) that RSG is.  I agree that you could choose to dismiss obviously wrong opinions (no-one sensible for instance, is going to argue that Ramside Hall is the best course in England (though a number, whose opinions I would immediately discount for ever, might think it was the best in Northumberland and Durham)) but where do you draw the line?  For me, Kington is in all respects a better golf course than The Belfry.  You probably disagree.  Neither opinion is bonkers, though.  Averaged rankings of subjective preferences lead, I think, to mediocrity rewarded.

[Adrian_Stiff]

Mark - I dont agree with you that Kington is better than Belfry. I have not seen Kington, but from the pics it looks the sort of course I would want to play and I would probably play that ahead of The Belfry since I have already played it. My choice to disqualfy Kington is a choice you and Sean (and most on here) are not going to like. I think there can be objective rules that stop a course being good (lets say reduce its points), one would be length, another reason is that the best courses stage or have stage championships and so I think weight should be given to courses that stage championships, now if you look at the Golf World or Monthly or whatevers top100 the courses are generally longer courses (though over 6200 yards in most cases) and have staged some form of championship golf, there are levels of championship golf, Open, Qualyfying, Amateur Championship right down to county championships and lower. Now by my method a man voting a course that had never staged a county championship (unless it has recently) over a course that has staged 4 Ryder Cups, that opinion would not be counted. The Belfry might not be the greatest course but it certainly deserves a place in the top 100 of GB & I whilst Kington does not.

[Jud_T]

So if they held the Ryder Cup each year on a series of soccer pitches with cups at one end that course should automatically be top 100?

[Frank Pont]

In essence its not nuclear physics to make good rankings, its just a heck of a lot of work collecting the data from many respondents.

The method to use is to let individual golfers make a ranked list of courses ranging from the best to the worst course (they need to have played or walked the course). Better even is to use conjoint analysis, which forces you make many subsequent choices between two courses and also allows for other factors to be included (eg. would you rather play Valderama for 300 euros or De Pan for 100 euros, or would you rather play Swinley Forest for 120 pounds or New Zealand for 80 pounds). By going through such a choice process an algorith establishes the sequence of courses, but also the utilities each of the courses would have. Either of these two methods would establish a list of courses ranked from best ranked to worst ranked for one person. For some persons this list would be short, say 40 courses and for others the list would be huge, say 1000 courses.

Then you would need some demographical data from the person. Things like gender, age, income, golf handicap, GCA member, Pro, architect, Joe Blow, address, no of courses played. Using this data would for instance allow you to rank courses in GBI using as control group GCA members, handicap 10-15, average income. (as long as the group is large enough to be statistically significant). You could do the same for Joe BLow, handicap15-30, low income.

Key is to get as many people as possible to rank the courses they have played from best to worst, preferably through conjoint analysis with some utility like money to give the ranking a scale, then to segment the the overall pool by demographics.

This system should be relatively easy to set up for a website like Top 100, and would no doubt also increase the stickiness of the site. Approach a couple of hundred people around the world, get them to do the rankings. Then open the system up to all readers of your website. That way it would become a living ranking changing over time.

As far as I know the only site to have done something like this has been GolfWeekly in the Netherlands with a panel of 150 voters.

Rankings by experts on wine, like Robert Parker are comparable to Tom Doak and Confidential Guide. They work because we trust the judgement of the star, the expert. But it falls apart with sites like Top100, because we are not sure they have raters with the same standing/credibility (at least in the perception of the public) ....

[Mark Pearce]

Adrian,

Your position is pretty much what I expected and is clearly a very reasonable position.  It's just not one I agree with, which isn't because one of us is right and the other wrong, it's because subjective judgments like this are impossible to objectify.  "Which is the better golf course?" is a difficult question because the answer for each individual depends on a set of criteria which dioffer from person to person.

I wouldn't want to rely on a ranking where my ranking of a course had been dismissed as an outlier!

Frank,

Are you suggesting that the rankings be adjusted for the reader?  That is, the reader gives information about himself and his preferences and the site engine then correlates a ranking for him favouring like-minded individuals?

[Frank Pont]

Mark,

that is one of the creative ways you could slice and dice the data to make it interesting for the reader.

It could also predict which other courses a person would like given his rankings, sort of like Amazon.com

[Adrian_Stiff]

Frank - I am with you on this. I like the idea of a live site wherby a 'newbie' can sign up and cast his vote (provided his vote meets the criteria). If courses all had points, which you would end up having with a formula, a very simple column could be inputted wherby the points is divisible by the green fee to you a value factor, so in essence Wentworth might be 22nd with 867 points and Boat of Garten might be 112th with 561 points but factor in the green fee at £300 or £30 and the value rating of of Wentworth is say 2.86 whilst the Boat would be 18.58 (have not done the exacts).

Mark - It is difficult to say whats best as a golf course for one and whats best for another, there has to be a method to stop the bad opinion though or it gets skewed by some golf course that gets 500 people to 6ball it, the only way to do that is to have something objective. Have you ever heard of the 'flip flop' it was used for working out wage disputes in baseball.

[Ross Tuddenham]

Jim

Sorry, did not mean to sound like I was suggesting any should make a top 100 national ranking.  Rather I would advise playing some of the nine holer’s over some of the 18 hole courses in the Borders Top ten list. Kelso for example is not much fun unless you enjoy flat ground, flat greens and thick rough.

If you are in the area Melrose and Selkirk are worth a shot, although really I was more curious about the inclusion of nine hole courses in general, rather than really recommending any of the borders courses.  After all if you have the time east Lothian is only an hour and a half away.

[Jim McCann]

Ross

I've only played five of the ten Border courses featured on our site but I'd already planned on playing Torwoodlee this year so
there's no reason why I shouldn't squeeze in the two 9-hole tracks that you've suggested when I'm in that neck of the woods.

Thanks for the steer.

Similar recommendations for elsewhere in Caledonia gratefully received...

[Sean_A]

Adrian

The Belfry is a great example of big and modern not being terribly good or even well liked.  I have never met one person, not one, who has said he thinks The Brabazon is a very good course.  Should we therefore consider it an outlier course BECAUSE it has hosted Ryder Cups?

Ciao

[Mark Pearce]

Adrian,

The problem with an accepted wisdom that discounts certain opinions is that it is self-perpetuating.  My view that kington is better than The Belfry gets discounted but Joe Blow, who has just learned to play, has only ever played his local muni and then gets to play a corporate day at The Belfry gives it 6 stars or a Doak 10 or whatever top score you are allowing, and his opinion (which, I'd like to think is less objectively valuable than mine, given our respective experiences) is allowed and merely adds to the Belfry's already inflated position.

[Adrian_Stiff]

Mark - That scenario of Joe Blow would be mitigated in my methodolgy. The criteria could only be his knowledge of local courses, the rater would have to be initmate with at least 20 local courses, he would have to pass a test based on fairness and some objective criteria.
Sean - Our club qualified for the Help for Heroes final in 2010 there, they all and the other teams praised it highly. I have played it twice, once as early as 79, its very clinical and its not totally to my taste as I am quite a 'leftie' like you, 10 & 18 are the standouts but theres no real minger there now, 11 & 12 are much improved, the conditioning is very good and may up the anti for some, the history too. I would still call it good in the general scheme of near 3000 golf courses in the GB & Ire.

[Tags:]

Tags:

[Tags:]

Tags:

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()