Golf Predictor to Wind Down

It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing the cessation of Golf Predictor as a public enterprise at the conclusion of the 2020 GP season (calendar year). In more than twelve years of assiduously producing statistics for European and US PGA Tour events for the public, I have processed:

1. 209,846 tournament result records (from 1556 tournaments) since 2003.
2. 151,658 tournament field stats (aka prediction) records (from 1094 tournaments) since 2008.
   
3. 6,360 golfers.

Unfortunately the time has come to call it a day. It had to happen sometime and the difficult decision to end this labour of love has been arrived at due to the following reasons:

 

1. Like myself, the technology behind Golf Predictor is ageing! While, it was the latest and greatest back in 2007 when I started the project, the technology is now somewhat out of date. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor inclination to rewrite the entire site using the latest technology (see following points).
2. My main hope for Golf Predictor was to make a living from it and to be able to devote my time full-time to it. Unfortunately, that never came to pass and I had to develop and run the site in my spare time, while maintaining a day job to pay the bills. This is not feasible in the long term, now that my personal circumstances have changed.
3. While I developed a complex website with many great stats and features, I have always struggled to get enough users to make it viable as anything more than a hobby. This is true (and personally very disappointing!) even in the past year when I made the site free for all users. Unfortunately, this makes both the current site and an entire site rewrite unviable.
   
4. I can honestly say that I enjoyed every single minute of what must be thousands of hours spent on developing and enhancing Golf Predictor over the years. However, the ongoing weekly tasks have become a grind in recent times as more and more data has been imported into the site. On a typical week with two tournaments, I now have to source, process and import up to fifteen data feeds all on my own time.
   
5. There is an almost year round weekly commitment to running Golf Predictor, which can be difficult. I haven't missed a single week of producing stats in over twelve years, which amounts to all 1092 events on both major tours from the 2008 Masters on. This task was carried out even when ill, on holidays, during family funerals and even my own wedding and honeymoon! During the Coronavirus lock down earlier this year, I enjoyed the absence of the weekly grind and this probably influenced my decision to call it quits now.
6. Despite my best efforts and producing what I think is a good quality golf feed with over 40,000 posts, I have failed to build up a significant enough social media presence to possibly make the entire enterprise viable.
   
7. Since the first major I covered was the 2008 Masters, it's only fitting that the last major I covered was the 2020 Masters!
8. The end of the GP Season (calendar year) is the most logical time to stop.
   

 

I'd like to thank sincerely all the users of the site down through the years, in particular all the subscribers in the first eleven years and the generous donors in the last year of operation. All unused portions of donations will be returned in due course and I have disabled the log in and registration pages on the site.

 

I hope those few of you that registered or subscribed/donated found Golf Predictor useful over the years - I certainly did. Using the site to pick golfers (normally in the 40/1 to 80/1 range), I managed to make money long-term from the bookies, something that is not easy to do. I was delighted to finish on a high note with a 60/1 Antoine Rozner win the other week in Dubai. However, at the small stakes I bet at, this betting wouldn't fund my retirement either!

Now, if anyone is interested in purchasing a catchy domain name, an ageing website or a quality database of all the results* on the European and US PGA Tours since 2003, please let me know via the Contact GP page!

 

So long, and thanks for all the fish. 😀

*I also have a large amount of world ranking, strokes gained, bookmaker odds and DraftKings data!