Hero World Challenge: Player ticket prices at Albany Golf Club can tell us a lot about the prospects for 2023

Last year, at the beginning of December when the whole world wondered when Tiger Woods would officially return to golf, 20 of the world’s best golfers gathered in the Bahamas for the Hero World Challenge. Jordan Spieth was last out of 20, partly because of a penalty he could have avoided.

Spieth and his partner Henrik Stenson tee off from an incorrect tee box on one of the holes at the Albany golf course during the tournament and are penalized for doing so. Shortly after his round, Spieth explains what happened and is caught insinuating that Hero is basically a hit and chuckles. Here’s what he said about the 20-player, uncut tournament.

“I really didn’t think we were going to be penalized because it was a charity event, but then I realized that had to do with world rankings and all that,” Spieth said. I think the annoying part for us right now is that every other group will — they’ll definitely tell them, but not for us. That obviously doesn’t matter to us, it’s a blessing, I think, for those people.”

Spieth received 2.4 Official World Golf Ranking points for finishing five shots in 19th place (which, coincidentally, is held by Stenson).

But is Heroes, despite having OWGR points available, really just a year-end charity event as Spieth alludes to, or can it tell us more about the players who play well at the end of the calendar year. before rolling into the next? In other words, this 20-player pitch is simply a weighing station for OWGR scores before the world’s best take the clubs away for Christmas, or is it a harbinger of what’s to come in 12 next month?

There are a number of different ways to analyze this, but the simplest way is to see what the top three and bottom three on the Hero’s final leaderboard have done in the years immediately following the performance. their. I went back to the 2016 Heroes World Challenge and beat the top three and the bottom three every year except for 2020 because the tournament was canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak (in the event of a draw in third or 18th place, I average the number of players together).

The data here is interesting and seems to represent the field structure more than anything else. There doesn’t seem to be a big difference in the following year’s performance for those who finished in the top three at the World of Heroes Challenge versus those who finished in the top three.

For example, Viktor Hovland, Scottie Scheffler, Sam Burns and Patrick Reed made up the top three last year, and that group goes on to win six times in 2022 (with four of those coming from Scheffler). However, Rory McIlroy, Henrik Stenson and Jordan Spieth finished in the bottom three of the table and they have won together five times in 2022 (with McIlroy contributing three of those wins). The results were not surprising: All 20 players at the Hero World Challenge were really good.

If you start looking at each year, a theme will begin to emerge. While there’s no guarantee that the top three at Hero will have a better next year than the bottom three, it’s clear that the top three almost always have wildly successful follow-up years while the top three almost always have a huge success. The bottom person isn’t always like that.

A good example of this was at the Hero World Challenge 2016, where Hideki Matsuyama won, Henrik Stenson came in second and Rickie Fowler, Dustin Johnson and Matt Kuchar tied for third. Even averaging subsequent years for those in third place, that team won five times and hit a total of 5.36 (!) per round in 2017. Tiger’s bottom three Woods, Russell Knox and Emiliano Grillo? Not much.

The lesson here seems to be that Heroes almost always have a great playing field filled with players ups and downs on the leaderboard, who will reap much of the success next year. However, if you happen to end up in third place, you are almost certain — and this is not surprising given the time of year and the caliber of players involved — will be part of a group there is amazing next year. That’s something to keep in mind when this ranking comes out in the Bahamas this weekend