FARMINGDALE, N.Y. -- If a male golfer wants to know where he stands in Olympic qualifying, he asks the Dracula emoji.
A Twitter account with the name Nosferatu, handle @VC606 and bio, “Undead and OWGR guru” publishes an updated Olympic golf ranking following significant tournaments during the PGA Tour season. That’s in addition to weekly regular ranking projections, impressively before the complex-math Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) is updated.
Neither the OWGR nor the International Golf Federation publishes true Olympic qualifying rankings, which are derived from the same formula as the OWGR. The OWGR uses a two-year, rolling window of tournaments. The Olympic qualifying rankings use tournaments from June 2018 to June 2020, a significant difference.
The IGF does post a version of Olympic qualifying rankings on its website, but they are taken from the current OWGR, which includes tournaments from 2017 and early 2018 that were not part of Olympic qualifying. They are not as accurate as Nosferatu’s Olympic qualifying rankings, which are a projection of the OWGR on June 22, 2020, the cutoff date to select the 60-man Olympic field.
“We haven’t considered this situation until now, but on reflection we prefer our current method,” an IGF official said.
For example, Brooks Koepka would be in the Olympic field if chosen by today’s OWGR, thanks to his 2018 U.S. Open and PGA Championship victories. But the current projected June 22, 2020 OWGR has him outside the top four Americans and thus an Olympic alternate.
“Looking at the current ranking, obviously Koepka is up there, and the points that he earned in those two majors he won last year, still account for about 36 percent of all his points [in the current OWGR],” Nosferatu said by phone. “But by the time the deadline comes for the Olympics, those two majors, I calculated, will only account for around two percent. So it’ll be almost irrelevant at that time [June 22, 2020] the fact that he won those two majors, unless he wins some new ones, of course...”
If it sounds like it might take a mathematician to decipher the differences and the correct ranking, you would be right.
Nosferatu said his first name is Vince and that he’s lived in the Dublin area for 30 years, working in academia and research with a science and technology background.
“Whatever I do, it involves a lot of math,” he said.
Why Nosferatu and @VC606 and not his real name?
“Because I still have my day job,” Vince said. “It’s not something that I want to be seen, necessarily, all the time that I’m spending on it [on projecting rankings]. So for the time being I will keep it this way.”
Vince was not an avid golfer growing up. Not until he became transfixed watching the 1996 Masters, famous for Nick Faldo making up a six-stroke deficit to beat a choking Greg Norman by five shots.
“Then, obviously, the next year it was Tiger,” Vince said. He was hooked.
His golf rankings obsession began on a BBC message board about a decade ago, after Tiger Woods’ philandering came to light.
Those on the forum wondered when Woods would fall out of the No. 1 ranking during a competition break and, upon returning, un-Tiger-like results. Vince was intrigued, and, having joined the forum around Halloween, made his handle Prince Dracula.
When he signed up for Twitter in 2011, that handle was taken.
He chose @VC606 for his initials and the number attached to BBC’s online sports forums that shut down in 2011. And dropped Dracula for Nosferatu, the title of a 1922 silent horror film, keeping the vampire link.
Not wanting to reveal his secrets, Vince will only say that he set up software to calculate the top 10 in the world and would post the projections on the BBC message board.
“After a few weeks I started to get confidence,” he said. “I put more time into it. I moved to top 20 after a couple of months, then top 50, which is critical, and it just grew from there.”
Now, Vince posts an updated OWGR every week on Twitter, before the rankings refresh on OWGR.com. Vince’s are limited to the top names and those who made significant jumps with top-five finishes at tournaments around the world, but his software calculates the ranking for hundreds of golfers.
He also projects Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup qualifying standings and where golfers have to finish to, for instance, take over or retain the No. 1 ranking.
“I’m not an expert in golf as such as a game, but I’m a passionate fan and an observer, with a bit of math background,” he said.
Vince inputs results into his software -- what he calls “an engine” -- from the major worldwide tours every Sunday. If he’s on his game, it can take fewer than 10 minutes combined for the PGA and European tours. He could automate that part of the process but prefers the knowledge accumulation of doing it by hand. Tournaments are weighted by strength of field and recency, which means ranking points from a specific result fade before extinguishing altogether after two years.
“The ranking system is not complicated in terms of math, but it’s very complex, and the complexity makes it probably so scary to many,” he said. “But the basic math, for somebody who has some math background, it’s nothing to be scared about.”
Sasha Forster, secretary for the OWGR technical committee, said the organization is aware of Nosferatu.
“The Twitter OWGR guru,” Forster called him, repeating the Twitter bio. “OWGR, to our knowledge, has not had any communication directly with him. We receive contact from many fan statisticians around the world from our website and feedback.”
Forster added that everything needed for a fan to calculate the rankings is available on the site.
But as far as Vince knows, he is the only person doing the math -- and publishing those results publicly -- before the rankings are updated on OWGR.com every Sunday night. He noted the OWGR has its flaws, and he doesn’t know anybody with the organization, but he is a fan and likes the system.
“I’m probably something like an unofficial sort of PR guy for them,” he joked (the OWGR’s Twitter account, launched in April 2016, has 4,647 followers to Vince’s 8,399). “In the end I keep telling people, you can trust what I say, as I’m pretty confident my predictions are right, but you should still go out there Monday morning on OWGR.com and check if you really want to be safe.”
Vince’s Twitter followers include Justin Rose and Justin Thomas. Another notification was particularly memorable.
“A few years ago, I was somewhere in the mountains in Austria, skiing,” he said. “I woke up in the morning, and I was staying in a sort of chalet somewhere with bad wifi. It was the weekend, and I needed to do some checking on the rankings. The first thing I saw was an email telling me that Rory McIlroy was following me. I was obviously very happy!”
Open champion Francesco Molinari has tweeted at Vince, asking for his ranking projection. Twice.
“Obviously he’s very good at what he does,” Molinari said as he prepared for this week’s PGA Championship at Bethpage Black. “He’s the only one, as far as I know, that gives immediate feedback on the world rankings at the end of events. That’s pretty much all I know about him.”
Vince declined to say which golfers contact him the most but acknowledged his Twitter direct message box is pretty busy. Google “Nosferatu” and “golf,” and you’ll find media citing his work.
“He’s sort of earned his own reputation as the go-to guy, even if he is this sort of mysterious figure behind this Twitter account,” Golf Channel senior writer Rex Hoggard said.
What Vince will admit to is imperfection.
Last year, he projected Ian Poulter to make the Masters field if the Englishman reached the quarterfinals of the World Golf Championships-Match Play. But Vince had a miscalculation, forgetting to note another golfer’s withdrawal from an earlier tournament that impacted Poulter’s projection.
By the time Vince realized his mistake, Poulter had already been told that his reaching the quarterfinals was enough to get him to Augusta. But then 10 minutes before his quarterfinal match, Poulter was told about the correction and went on to get drubbed 8 and 6 by Kevin Kisner.
Vince was relieved when, the following week, Poulter won the Houston Open to grab the last available spot in the Masters.
“It made me feel really bad at first when it happened, but then he turned it around brilliantly by winning the following week, and that made me feel much better,” Vince said (Poulter appeared light-hearted in retrospect). “Mistakes will still happen sometime, but in fairness I think they are getting less and less.”
Vince said nobody has helped him with ranking projections in an official capacity, but he would be interested if an offer came to financially back a deep dive into what rankings would have looked like before the OWGR started in 1986.
“There is a lot of interest how you compare the performance of somebody like Tiger and somebody like Jack Nicklaus,” he said.
Vince has attended a few tournaments, including the Masters, the Ryder Cup and the Open Championship at St. Andrews. But he’s never approached a golfer in real life and unmasked his identity.
“Many of them I’ve had short conversations with on Twitter every now and then,” Vince said. “Some of them probably would be interested to see who I am. I haven’t been tempted to try and go to meet them yet, but who knows, it may happen someday.”
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