The 2020 virtual Masters: A dozen potential surprises
By Bill Felber
Today, we look at a dozen of the entrants in the virtual Masters. They are strong players, falling just outside the top-ten favorites.
Their records may not put them near the top of a list of favorites in our virtual all-time Masters tournament. But a dozen qualifiers possess resumes strong enough to label them as plausible threats to be in contention when the virtual championship concludes on Sunday.
Among them, these dozen possess 20 Green Jackets…and that includes a pair who won three each. Based on the average standard deviation of their 10-year peak performance at Augusta, they performed between 0.75 and 1.22 standard deviations better than their contemporaries. That’s bordering on exceptional.
It also means they’re between three-tenths and nine-tenths of a standard deviation better than the field of all-time champions against whom they’ll be competing in this week’s virtual tournament.
On paper, they don’t project to crack the top 10 in our virtual championship. But this is a golf tournament, and that means anything can happen.
These dozen plausible contenders span the history of Masters Championship play. The first of them to win did so in 1938, claiming only the fifth Masters ever played. The most recent won his Green Jacket in 2000.
They not only blanket Masters history, they also cover the world. Although half were born and bred in the United States, four rank among the game’s greatest champions ever produced by Europe.
Here’s a more detailed look at the pre-tournament credentials of these dozen plausible contenders for the virtual Masters championship. For each, the introductory material includes the year(s) of their title(s), the 10-year period of their peak performance at the tournament – that’s the span on which their rating is based – and the standard deviation of their average performance during that peak. They are presented in the mathematical order of likelihood of contention.