Links Corner Forum

How do you re-unite the PGA and LIV players? You create a league based loosely on the TGL, you create realistic AI life like animations of all the participants (only anis of players I've created will be used), you create 16 4-man teams, you create a 22 match schedule, you give each team a home course and you let Links 2003 be the judge and jury. This is my next replay concept that will be starting soon and that I plan on documenting here on LC. Yes, I'm 49, but dammit you just can't take the little kid out of me. At least not yet!!!

Introducing "The Rivals Golf League"

The PGA Division

Drive - Pilgrim Trails Golf Club
Justin Thomas
Patrick Cantlay
Billy Horschel
Lucas Glover

Common - Bull Run HD
Rory McIlroy
Hideki Matsuyama
Keegan Bradley
Adam Scott

Links - Adams Tree Golf Club
Tiger Woods
Max Homa
Tom Kim
Kevin Kisner

LAGC - Crooked Creek HD
Collin Morikawa
Sahith Theegala
Tommy Fleetwood
Justin Rose

NYGC - Tall Pines Estate
Xander Schauffele
Rickie Fowler
Matt Fitzpatrick
Cameron Young

Bay Golf Club - Bartlett Springs
Ludvig Aberg
Wyndham Clark
Min Woo Lee
Shane Lowry

Scramblers - Cara Brae
Scottie Scheffler
Tony Finau
Sam Burns
Will Zalatoris

Rough Riders - Shadowlands Golf Club HD
Akshay Bhatia
Jason Day
Viktor Hovland
Chris Kirk

The LIV Division

Crushers - Duine Mara
Bryson DeChambeau
Paul Casey
Charles Howell III
Bubba Watson

Majesticks - Bakers Flat
Lee Westwood
Ian Poulter
Henrik Stenson
Phil Mickelson

Fireballs - Kill Devils Hill HD
Jon Rahm
Sergio Garcia
Tyrrell Hatton
Cam Smith

Torque - Dark Woods Golf Club
Joaquin Niemann
Mito Pereira
Sebastian Munoz
Kevin Na

Aces - Pacific Breaks
Dustin Johnson
Patrick Reed
Brooks Koepka
Jason Kokrak

Stinger - Burns Old Links HD
Graeme McDowell
Robert Macintyre
Louis Oosthuizen
Charl Schwartzel

Korean Golf Club - Las Joyas HD
Byeong Hun An
Sungjae Im
K.H. Lee
Si Woo Kim

Pin Seekers - The Glen
Cam Davis
Jake Knapp
Nick Dunlap
Sepp Straka

The Rules

Each team plays a match per week for 22 weeks. Each team will play the teams in their own division twice (14 matches) and each team in the opposing division once (8 matches). At the end of the 22 week season, the top 2 teams in each division will compete in the playoffs using the same format used during regular season play. The 2 seed will play the 1 seed in the semi-finals with the winners meeting in the championship.

Home Course Selection
16 courses have been selected from the Links 2003 course library. The courses had to be fictional and they had to be very good. I then used a random number generator and allowed it to number the teams 1 through 16. I did the same for the courses and lined up the numbers. Team 4 got course 4 and so on.

Scoring
Each match is worth 10 points. Those points can be won or lost over 4 team events per the below scoring.

Scramble (1-3, 2-4) (2 Points)
Each teams 1 player and 3 player will compete in a 2 man match play scramble. The team that wins the most holes in that match will earn 1 point.
Each teams 2 player and 4 player will compete in a 2 man match play scramble. The team that wins the most holes in that match will earn 1 point.

Alternate Shot (1-4, 2-3) (2 Points)
Each teams 1 player and 4 player will compete in a 2 man alternate shot match. The team that wins the most holes in that match will earn 1 point.
Each teams 2 player and 3 player will compete in a 2 man alternate shot match. The team that wins the most holes in that match will earn 1 point.

Team Stroke Play (2 Points)
Each teams 1 player and 2 player will compete in team stroke play match. The team with the combined lowest shot total will earn a point for their team. A tie will result in each team earning .5 point.

Each teams 3 player and 4 player will compete in team stroke play match. The team with the combined lowest shot total will earn a point for their team. A tie will result in each team earning .5 point.

Match Play (4 Points)
Each team will play a 1 vs 1, 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 and 4 vs 4 match play. The player that wins the most holes will earn a point for his team.

Standings
After each match/event, team and player results will be entered into a spreadsheet where the standings will be kept along with the schedule and any other pertinent stats.

Player Movement, Player Regression and Development, Relegations and the Draft

Relegation Rules
- Players ages 20-59 are eligible for the league (player's starting age is 2024-birth year).
- The oldest player on each team is the team captain.
- Team captains have 4 exemption years that reset if their team makes the playoffs. After 4 years of not making the playoffs, a new team captain will be named. The new team captain will be named based off age first with player rating as the tiebreaker.
- All players must retire after their age 59 season.
- The 4 players on the championship team will receive a 3 year relegation exemption.
- The 12 players on the other 3 playoff teams will receive a 1 year relegation exemption.
- The worst player based on contribution to teams points during a season that isn't the captain will be relegated from the league and put back into the free agent pool. This will be a maximum of 12 players and a minimum of 10 players. If exemptions prevent players on non-playoff teams from being relegated then multiple players can be relegated from a team starting with the worst team and working up from there until at least 10 players are relegated.

Player Movement and the Draft
- After each season a draft will be held to fill empty roster spots resulting from relegations.
- The free agent pool will be used for the draft.
- Players in the free agent pool will be drafted in order based on their overall player rating score.
- The draft order will be in reverse order of place in the standings the previous season.
- Teams with full rosters will not participate in the draft.
- There will always be a maximum of 64 players in the free agent pool and a minimum of 32 players.
- Players that retire will also be replaced using the draft.

Player Regression and Development
- Each player will receive a player rating in each Links 2003 rating category (Driver, Woods, Long Irons, Short Irons, Chipping, Putting) initially using a dice roll.
- All players will start with the same ratings initially. (50 = 10 Driver, 5 Woods, 5 Long Irons, 10 Short Irons, 5 chipping and 15 putting).
- Each player's initial rating is determined by randomly generating 25 numbers between -2 and 3 and the sum of those 25 numbers is put into a formula to generate the rating for that category. This is then done for each skill category for all players.
- Each year, a random number generator will create a number between -3 and 3 for each player for each category that will determine whether they improve or regress in each skill set. For example, a player with a 7.5 long iron rating gets a -3 for that rating from the random number generator, he will be moved to 7.2. If that same player gets a 3 from the random number generator he will be moved to 7.8. This allows for objective and reasonable player improvement and regression from year to year and in each skill. A player could improve on his driving in an off-season, but get worse at putting and so on.
- All free agent players will go through the same initial ratings process and development/regression process prior to the draft each season.

Now, 2 things I wanted to add to this. First, you can't possibly read my post with all the info and honestly tell me that doesn't sound like fun. If you do, you're an old fuddy dud and you deserve rocks in your stocking at Xmas.

Number 2. How cool would it be to stream this on YouTube to try to drive traffic to this site, my site and most of all, the game of Links? I have two 16 year olds (boy/girl twins) and they said I should do it. My daughter even said, and I quote, "Dad you would be a rock star at that."

To be honest, and this might be hard to believe, but I'm a pretty quiet/shy guy so I doubt I'll do it, but man it's tempting.

That's quite an involved procedure you've got there. I'm not sure I would have the time and patience to do that, but if you start doing YT videos I'll watch!

I dont really know for sure but I get the impression that your age regression may turn out to be a bit drastic (and also unrealistic)? Most golf pros dont peak before the age of 30 do they? Or at least dont start getting significantly worse on their 30th year? From what I remember (it has been a long time since I experimented with computer players so maybe Im off, but) one full point, like 70.8 to 69.8 is quite a big step in performance, isnt it? Wont you end up with the captains being the significantly worst players on their teams and the rookies dominating?

Definitely looks interesting! My questions are: 1. which courses are being used? 2. what TV network have you shopped this to? with LIV being on FS1 now you might be able to get a deal with the CW network. LOL!

Jim

Guitarzan,

The magic is in the spreadsheets and using AI to help. I have random number generators create all the dice rolls so I just enter a single number for each rating category for each golfer. I can do all the ratings for all 128 golfers in a couple hours. As for the spreadsheets, the formulas for all the age regression, stats, standings, etc. minimizes the work on that end. Is it work, yes. Does the enjoyment of testing a regression model and player development model with some competition outweigh the little work involved, hell yes.

Jim,

I listed the courses in another thread, but I'll list what courses are with what team as one of my first reports on the league. I don't know enough about the courses yet to know their significance. Each team will have 11 home matches and 11 away matches each year so I'm interested to see if there is a home course advantage that plays out. The good news is that I will keep home and away records in my spreadsheet so outside of randomness I will eventually learn that. The ratings in Links 2003 do their job well so that eliminates some of the randomness, but even real life has randomness. I mean we just had the 7 and 8 seeds play in the college football championship and not the 1 and 2 seeds so I want some randomness.

Adelade,

I've ran the player development and regression model through a ton of testing with my Tour LXIV seasons, but we shall see. I did have to change the way I created the initial rating though to remove the early disadvantage the younger players were getting with their ratings. I think now that the initial ratings are starting in a better place that the player regression/development from year to year, even with the age regression, will work much better. Keep in mind that the age regression is a one time hit at the age of 30, 40 and 50, but they continue to develop and regress with each rating each year so I think I will find that it's not aggressive enough. At the end of the day, I enjoy creating a model/concept and letting the math play out. That's really most of the fun for me. I'm just so thankful that Links has the ability to assign ratings that hold up pretty well over a large enough sample set.

To the point of Links AI player ratings playing out over a large sample set, I went and checked the numbers. I've played 34,560 rounds of golf using AI players during my PGA Tour replay (24 golfers, 32 rounds per year for 45 years) and the average score over those rounds is 69.5. The average score on the PGA Tour is around 71, but that's for all 170+ players. I only use the top 24 (it's not actually the top 24, but it's 24 of the top 50-75). I checked the PGA Tour and their top 50 average was around 70 so I'm within a half a shot over an extremely large sample set. I've very happy with that level of realism/accuracy.

Damn, if you go thru with this and stream it on YT, I’ll definitely watch…

Home courses are now posted in the original post next to the team name. This was 100% random and that's unfortunate because I was excited to see how Shadowlands GC HD and Pilgrim's Trail played, but they were randomly not assigned to a team. I think I will now use those two courses as permanent playoff courses. One for semi-finals each year and one for championship each year.

Just finished the master spreadsheet for the RGL. This is where all the work is at. Now that this is finished things will be a breeze going forward. In case anyone wants to play along, I've attached the sheet to this post. I plan to make all the players (.pin files) available as well once I get them created. That means anyone that wants to do this or any version of it, they will have all the tools to do so without all the work.