WAGR Files: Cracking the WAGR Power Rankings for Pro Events

Last summer, we published our findings on how to crack the code for the WAGR Power Rating for Am events.  By piecing together information from tournament results, we were able to determine the underlying formula for WAGR Power as a weighted sum of the WAGR rank of the players in the field.  Our WAGR Power wizard has proven time and time again to accurately estimate the Power Rating of events within tenths of a point.

But one piece of the puzzle remained unsolved: How does WAGR calculate the Power Rating for professional events that include amateurs? As it turns out, the answer is deceptively simple — WAGR calculates the Pro and Amateur contributions separately (based on OWGR and WAGR, respectively) and just adds them together. Unfortunately, this approach dramatically undervalues professional players, especially those recently turned pro. Here's why that matters.

The FAQs on the WAGR website state that they are based on the OWGR ranking of the players in the field.  But how is that converted into the Power Rating? A quick look at the Pro events over the last year shows the majors getting 2200-2600 points, some PGA Tour events getting slightly over 2000 and most other top Tour events hovering close to 2000.

We know that the Amateur Power ranking is set-up to cap at 1000 (meaning that if an event had the 1st-60th ranked Amateurs in the world, the weighting and contribution is structured to give you an answer of 1000).  For example, the fact that last year's U.S. Amateur and a Power rating of 996 demonstrates that it was slightly off from having all of the top ranked amateurs in the field (note: 18 of the top 20 were at Hazeltine).

So seeing events hovering around 2000, my initial hypothesis was that the Power contribution for a professional player at a given OWGR rating is 2x the points of the Amateur player with the same ranking in WAGR, and perhaps the multiplier was somehow higher for majors. But given WAGR events are capped at 1000, how would that explain Pro events over 2000? My original hypothesis didn't seem to hold.

I looked into it again, this time asking the question: how were Pro and Amateurs contributing to the Power ranking when they are in the same event? Might the combination of Pros and Amateurs be the key to explaining why some events could get over 2000 points?

Well, looking at the Valspar Championship, we see that sometimes the simplest answer is the right one: WAGR is simply calculating the Pro contribution (based on OWGR) and Amateur contribution (based on WAGR) separately, then adding them together to get the Power rating of an event.

First, modifying our WAGR calculator to double the points for Professionals, sorted by their OWGR entering the event, we see the professional side of the Power contribution is 1907.42:

And then adding the Amateur contribution from Luke Clanton and Kieron Van Wyk, we get an extra Power boost of 107.24 from these two players:

Per our calculator, the Valspar Power = Pro Power (1907.42) + Am Power (107.24) = 2014.66.  The actual published Power Rating was 2014.96.

We'll get to the multiplier in a minute, but at first pass, simply adding the Pro plus Am components seems a little too simplistic.  The significant difference between majors like the U.S. Open and Open Championship and the Masters is not based on the relative strengths of those fields, but is driven more by how many amateurs they have in their fields (16 and 12 for the U.S. Open and Open Championship, respectively, versus five for the Masters).

The next limitation is with how WAGR uses the OWGR ranking in the formula, something the OWGR has already recognized as a limitation and moved away from in their own strength of field calculation.  OWGR calculates a strokes gained metric and then converts the strokes gained for a given player into a strength of field contribution.  The strength of field for a given tournament is simply the summation of the players in the field.  The rationale for this SG approach is clear.  In OWGR, missing the cut is worth zero points regardless of which Tour you are on.  But it's obvious that a player who misses his first five cuts by one stroke on the Tour is more skilled than a golfer who misses his first five cuts on, for example, the Mexico Pro Golf Tour.  Although there might be a 6+ stroke difference in skill between these two golfers, they would both be ranked 4549th (tied for last) in OWGR, and their WAGR Power contribution to an event would be exactly the same (2.62 each).

Given OWGR has already created the ranking vs. skill conversion, one easy WAGR enhancement would be to use the OWGR strength of field contribution for Pro players rather than the OWGR rank itself. Plus, this would help offset a limitation in the OWGR methodology that suppresses rankings because of its minimum 40-event divisor.  A strokes gained measure and accurate strength of field contribution can occur well before a player plays in 40 events.

We see this WAGR vs. OWGR ranking issue create quite a bit of volatility in Pro events in the summer months, particularly right after graduating seniors are going pro. These players, especially those coming out of the PGA Tour U system leave college with relatively high WAGR rankings (and therefore high Power contributions as Amateurs) to likely very-low OWGR rankings and minimal contributions to events as Professionals. For example, let's look at 30 players who went pro immediately after NCAA's ended last summer, what their WAGR contribution was a couple weeks prior as Amateurs and what their Power Contribution would be today as Professionals.  The table is sorted by the degree of change in their Strokes Gained since last May, which obviously can (and should) explain part of the difference in Contribution.

You can see that the WAGR contribution from these players is, with just a few exceptions, consistently lower.  Hypothetically, if you were to play in an event against these 30 golfers when they were still amateurs, the Power Rating would be 938. Today if you played the same 30 guys in a Pro event, the WAGR Power rating would be 551.  You'd get 28% less points per finish position competing against the same players, who on average haven't changed much in the last 10 months.  The primary thing that has changed is how their Power contribution is calculated.

It's pretty easy to see that the 2x multiplier is overly crude and likely not nearly high enough. For instance, Mats Ege's Power Contribution as the 1298th ranked professional is effectively the same as the 599th ranked Amateur Oscar Lent.  Eges and Lent have something in common in that they both lost in the second round of The Amateur Championship (Eges in 2023, Lent in 2024).  The only difference is that it was Lent's top performance as an Amateur to date whereas Eges had 15 performances better than that in his last two years as an Amateur.  Still, competing against them in a tournament today would be deemed equivalent by WAGR standards.

You can see this gap very clearly when you look at the WAGR Power Contribution between Pros and Ams when controlling for Strokes Gained. In the chart below, I grouped the Top 500 Am players (from Data Golf) in bins of 10 players each, and showed the Average Power Contribution by Average Strokes Gained for each bin.  Then I did the same for Pro's in bins of 20 players each.  Similar to the table above, the DataGolf Strokes Gained metric was converted match the OWGR scale.

Given the WAGR Power Rating is used to rate the performance of the Amateurs in the field, ideally the shape of the blue Pro curve should line up with and be an extension of the orange Amateur curve.  But it's obvious that they are on two completely different curves.  And the gap is most pronounced in the -0.75 to -2.00 Strokes Gained range.  This is roughly golfers in the 400 to 1000 ranking in OWGR, which is going to include a lot of Korn-Ferry Tour, PGA Tour Americas and Challenge Tour players.  

The difference in curves should be a consideration for any amateur who may have an opportunity to qualify and/or play in a pro event.  PGA Tour events look like a fair and equitable extension of the amateur contribution curve.  Competing in KFT events and earning an equitable share of WAGR points is likely to be an uphill battle. That said, competing in professional events can still be a valuable and worthwhile experience, WAGR points aside.  But If your WAGR ranking is important to you, you'd be much better off competing against Am's in this SG range (40-200 in WAGR) than the equivalent skill level in professional events.

And although the orange curve doesn't go deep enough to the left to show it, there is likely an inflection point where very low Pro events are more beneficial than the corresponding Am events. That is because the minimum WAGR points from winning a Pro event can create a nice arbitrage relative to the strength of the field.  We can see one fascinating case study in Justin Bai, a sophomore at the University of the Pacific (formerly University of Washington).  Justin has made a killing playing in mixed events in the China LPGA Q-series, winning 4 of 8 events he's played in.  His average WAGR points in these pro events is 10.10, a level consistent with the 11th ranked amateur in the world.  However, Justin has not replicated the same success in college and amateur events, averaging 4.22 points per event (consistent with a 1600-ranked WAGR player). As you can see in the chart below, Bai is able to earn outsized points in these pro events when controlling for strength of field and strokes gained (per Data Golf).