Gaganjeet Bhullar earned 0.90395 OWGR points for winning the Jeev Milkha Singh Invitational and improved by only one spot from 305th to 304th in the world
The Official World Golf Rankings have for the past thirty years become the single most determinant of entry into the world’s professional tournaments and of course the majors. The Ranking system is overseen by a committee which is led by members of the major pro tours and the world’s governing bodies like PGA, European, Asian and South African Tours, the R&A, Augusta National Golf Club ( which owns The Masters) . Most professional golfers define their careers by the World Rankings.
Gaganjeet Bhullar won the Jeev Milkha Singh Invitational on the @pgtofindia tour. He ‘jumped’ from #305 to #304 in #OWGR. Bless him…
— Nosferatu (@VC606) October 17, 2022
Recently, in August 2022, the Official World Golf Rankings officially made significant contributions incorporating modern statistical techniques, which more accurately evaluates tournaments relative to each other.
The change was the result of an independent analysis of the ranking system commissioned in 2018. The new system underwent a 12-month trial period from August 2021 to August 2022 before becoming official. Changes to the system have been made over a dozen times since the rankings were introduced in the late 1980s.
The two biggest changes to the system related to how many players in the field earned ranking points, and the total ranking points available at a given tournament.
In the old system, only those who finished in the top 20 earned points. In the new system, everyone who makes the cut will pick up points, or fractions of points as the case may be.
The more impactful change is in how the total number of points available at a recognised tournament is calculated. Instead of a fixed number of points being assigned to a tournament, the calculation will now be based on the strength of the field, which takes into account the world rankings of all the players in the event.
Essentially tournaments with stronger fields will offer players more points; those with weaker fields will offer fewer points. The points are calculated based on a world rating chart (overall quality of players) and a home rating chart (quality of players from the home tour).
A maximum of 80 points will be awarded to the winner of these tournaments. The only exceptions are the four Major Championships, which continue to offer 100 first- place points, and the PGA Tour’s Players Championship, which offers 80 first place points regardless of the strength of field.
The downside to the change, is that it sets up a self-reinforcing cycle whereby tours with the strongest fields give their players more points, which in turn makes their fields even stronger, which gives their players even more points to earn and, well, you get the picture.
“It’s easy to imagine that the highly skilled players will all cluster in one place, leading to a self-perpetuating upward spiral, perhaps leading to fewer global opportunities in the short term and further depletion of global tours in the long term,” Shane Ryan writes in Golf Digest.
Now that rankings have been in place for a little over two months, though, we can analyse what kind of outcomes it is producing.
On the PGTI tour, Gaganjeet Bhullar earned 0.90395 points for winning the Jeev Milkha Singh Invitational this past week. That’s more than the 0.63658 points Yuvraj Singh Sandhu earned for winning the week before because the field at the Invitational was stronger, mostly because of Bhullar was the highest ranked player last week at 305 compared to Rashid Khan at 385 the week before.
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In photo – Karandeep Kochhar poses with his Gujarat Open Golf Championship Trophy
However, back in February, Karandeep Kochar earned 5 points for winning the Gujarat Open Golf Championship, even though the highest ranking player in the field was Udayan Mane at 461. So PGTI’s points has gone down between 1/5th to 1/9th from what they used to be before the change. This completely marginalises PGTI players in making any significant progress up the rankings while playing in India. There is going to be no chance in the future for a Indian player qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics based solely on his multiple victories in India, the way Udayan Mane did in 2021.
That’s a big loss for players on the PGTI. The way to counteract this effect would be
to offer bigger purses that might attract higher ranked players more often, which would raise the overall points allocated for PGTI events. Also, if players on the tour perform better i.e. shoot lower scores, they will automatically be rated higher for the next tournament, which would mean more points to be earned the next time they tee it up.
In other words, the ranking systems now rewards individual players for playing better than the rest of the field. Looked at it from this perspective, the new ranking gives tours an incentive to improve its overall quality of play.
Whether this will be enough to offset the loss in points remains to be seen. Even if it eventually does, it is likely to take a while even in the best possible case.
Similarly, the points offered on the Asian Tour, are also very low. By winning a Rs 1.5 crore event on the PGTI tour, Bhullar earned more points than Siddikur Rahman did for finishing third in the US$1 million Mercuries Taiwan Masters on the Asian Tour 3 weeks ago. And Chan Shih-Chang earned 2.2859 points for winning in Taiwan, while Bhullar earned 14 points for winning the Indonesia Open in August the week before the new system was officially implemented. So the points allocated to the Asian Tour have fallen to 1/6th the level they were earlier – a huge blow for the ranking ambitions of Asian Tour players.
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It should be no surprise that the big winner appears to be the PGA Tour, which will have the strongest fields most weeks of the year [the LIV Tour isn’t eligible for world ranking points yet]. Tom Kim earned 42 points for winning the PGA Tour’s Shriners Children’s Open earlier this month. In comparison, Jon Rahm earned 14 points for winning the Spanish Open the same week on the European Tour.
A year ago Sungjae Im picked up 56 points for winning the Children’s Open while Rafa Cabrera Bello picked up 24 points for winning in Spain. While the Children’s Open points this year are down to 75% of the 2021 level the Spain winner’s points are down to 59% of the 2021 level, a greater percentage fall in point allocation.
Time will tell what effect this will have but certainly it appears that top European Players will be forced to move to the US PGA Tour if they want to be eligible for the majors and various bonuses paid by sponsors based on world rankings. The PGA Tour which makes the rules, will get stronger while the attraction of a career in Europe or Asia will fall dramatically.
And there is no doubt that the PGTI has now been completely marginalised in the World Ranking System.