Welcome to Uncut Golf Rankings!
We are, as far as we aware, the only website which freely publishes rankings for both men’s and women’s golf in one place. Our aim is simple, to include as many tournaments in these rankings as possible. If the tournament results are online, we will try to add them (if we haven’t already). The OWGR and Rolex Rankings are, quite rightly, bound by only being able to include tournaments from authorised organisations and tours. We believe there’s a lot more information out there that helps to create a fuller (uncut!) ranking system. For example, event qualifiers, minor tours, amateur events and regional tours. These events may not impact the rankings of the top 50 players in the world. However, many of the current top 50 players played in these events at some point in their career.
We think we are also the first website to freely publish strokes-gained style rankings for worldwide women’s golf. The LPGA publish strokes-gained stats but only for their own events. Our rankings comprise all the women’s events in the Rolex Rankings as well as any other data we can find.
Our rankings work on a simple principle – that players moving across tours, can create links between all elite level professional and amateur golf. We have automated this process to ensure that only tournaments with enough links are used to comprise our rankings. It is a work in progress and the progress of the work is never ending. The only way to link millions of rounds of golf is through a player’s name. This undoubtedly leads to problems with multiple players sharing the same name. In a similar vein, small differences in names need to be accounted for (I see you S.S.P./S S P/SSP./Shiv Shankar Prasad/SSP Chowrasia/Chawrasia!). We have multiple tools to spot these problems but we will never get to 100% accuracy. If you spot any mismatches, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Both of our rankings also include amateur events. The official WAGR do an excellent job of ranking amateur golfers separately from the professional game but we thought it would be interesting to see whether there are enough links between elite level golf events to include them. We’re happy to report that a high proportion of these events are included in our rankings. Getting the full tournament results so we can create more links between tournaments has proven the main obstacle though. If you would like to know if your organisations amateur events are included in the rankings, please do get in touch. Even better, please send any golf leaderboards and we will upload them to our rankings. Our ambition is to continue to expand the breadth of the rankings. We are wary of mismatching too many shared names because, as we include more leaderboards, the bigger the mismatch will become. However, we don’t think we are at that stage yet. So please, send us any results you have!
We are at the very early stages designing and improving our rankings. We currently mimic the the methodology used by the OWGR and Rolex Rankings but apply it to a strokes-based ranking system rather than a points based system. Therefore, these rankings will not be the best possible indicator of a player’s ability. For that, we highly recommend Datagolf. The purpose of a ranking system, oddly enough, is not necessarily to show who is currently the best player in the world. Rather, it is partly to reward good play (by climbing the rankings) in order to get exemptions into future events. Admittedly, a predictive rankings system and a reactive rankings system will create highly correlated output. We currently class our rankings as a reactive system. That is previous performances are recorded and presented in a simple manner. In a predicitve system, the calculation becomes a lot more complicated. We may publish those rankings in the future but, well, you know, baby steps!
With the number of mixed events in elite golf, we are probably going to try and create a combined men’s and women’s rankings first. We have many other experimental ideas but if there’s anything you would like us to investigate, by all means get in touch.
