When you see the buried lie you know the right thing to do is hack it out with a wedge. You top the ball and it bobbles a few feet into the rough. Imagine things are going well and you’re on the 5th tee swinging your driver. Being realistic about your ability is vital. If you’ve got off to a bad start, trust things will get better. If you’re playing out of your skin, enjoy it but don’t be irked when things start to get a little pedestrian again. The bigger the data set, the more stable the measure. We can hack around a course complaining of our inconsistency hole to hole but it’s surprising how our final score tends to be in the same small range of numbers by the end. The mean score for 36 holes is better than the mean for 18. In fact, the more holes golfers play, the more likely they are to arrive at a mean score that reflects their ability. Whenever this player does well, they say, he can’t handle the pressure. The media announce that the player choked. A mathematical law doesn’t make for a great newspaper story, however. Both scores moved back towards the average (par for the course). Both players had a run of either good or bad luck that was unlikely to carry on. This is a common scenario and illustrates a law called Regression to the Mean. ![]() However, on the second day our high performer posts a poorer score. The media are full of the first golfer’s form (they might pick on possible reasons like his new clubs). The first golfer has been no better or worse than the other in the past – but at this tournament, he’s on fire. One shoots a good low score and the other shoots a bad high score. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning behavioural economist, discusses two golfers on the first day of a tournament. It seems behavioural economics can teach amateur golfers (like me) a thing or two.
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