A few thoughts on how Royal Birkdale will play this week…

In the two Opens played at Birkdale for which we have data (2008 and 2017), short players overperformed by 0.53 strokes/round (2017) and 0.2 strokes/round (2008). The data from those two events produced this course fit plot:

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Normally, for majors being played at venues we don’t see very often, I make a couple adjustments to the course fit that comes directly out of the data. But there were no tweaks made for this year’s Open.

After seeing a couple tweets this morning raving about the firm conditions at Royal Birkdale, I’m pretty convinced (although not fully—see below) that power off the tee will be largely neutralized this week.

Less emphasis on driving distance, combined with pretty average values for the other four attributes, means that the skill distribution gets compressed—which is what we typically see at Opens. On our skill separation plots, where a value of 1 is expected, Open venues have averaged 0.83 since 2004, with Birkdale values of 0.6 in 2008 and 0.72 in 2017.

At a lot of Open venues, patchy rough and pot bunkers can make driving accuracy a less important skill. Similar-quality tee shots can find themselves skirting by bunkers or trickling into them, which leads to a half or full shot difference in outcome. This hurts accurate players (I think) because the reward for a good tee shot is not as sure as it at your typical PGA Tour venue (not a criticism of links golf, just an observation!).

From the few bits of content I’ve consumed on Royal Birkdale, it seems like the penalty for especially wayward misses will be severe this week. One way to rationalize the average accuracy value in the course fit plot above is that a large penalty for big misses at Birkdale offsets the usual linksy randomness that helps inaccurate players.

I don’t have great recall of the turf conditions at Opens over the years, but Geoff Shackleford compared the current firmness at Royal Birkdale to two relatively recent Opens: 2006 at Hoylake (where Tiger famously won while hitting just one driver all week) and 2022 at St. Andrews. Interestingly, bombers were strongly favoured at both tournaments. This was a bit puzzling to me initially, but in both weeks inaccurate players performed way above their baselines, likely because the burnt-out conditions made the rough penalty non-existent. (St. Andrews also always favours long and inaccurate players.)

I don’t think this bomber favourability will necessarily translate to Royal Birkdale (no matter how dry it gets, dunes will still be nasty), but it’s something to think about. It’s also worth pointing out the skill coefficient from Hoylake in 2006: 0.32, the 2nd-lowest value among PGA Tour events and majors since 2004. A reminder that when a links course gets really firm, weird stuff happens.