Golf's Second Slam

People generally know about winning the grand slam in golf - victories in the 4 major tournaments (US Open, Masters, British Open, PGA). There have been 5 players who have done it in history - Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player have done it. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods won each of those majors at least 3 times so they are each 3 times grand slam winners. Any discussion about the greatest golfer of all time comes down to those 2 golfers.

In addition to winning the majors, there is a thing called the "second slam" where you get second place in all four majors. There have been 8 players who have done this. Craig Wood, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson, Louis Oosthuizen, and Dustin Johnson are 7 of those. What about Tiger and Jack? Tiger hasn't gotten second place in all the majors. Jack, in addition to winning the grand slam three times over, has won the second slam 4 times over.

In my mind, that closes the argument. Tiger has won a lot of tournaments and a lot of majors, but Jack was seemingly always in the hunt for a championship in the majors.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tasker: Get Voice Command

The way I decided to set up Tasker is to use some reusable tasks that can be called from other places. The first one I'll talk about is the Get Voice Command. This task listens for some stock commands like "yes", "no", "cancel", or "repeat". It is a quicker listener than the "Get Voice Input" command which I'll talk about in another post. This is meant some some quick one or two word commands. It uses regular expressions to match commands (meaning, you can say "yep" or "yeah" or "yes sir" and it will return "yes"). Being generic like this means that I don't have to duplicate all these regular expressions everywhere. I can just call this task and if it returns "yes", then I know the user (me) said something like "yes" or "yeah" or whatever. There's an input parameter to the task of the message to speak before listening for the answer. The task will re...
Read more

Blackjack Streak House Advantage

One of the side bets you can play at several casinos in Black Hawk is called "streak". This is a bet where you get paid if you win that many hands in a row (2, 3, 4, or 5). How much is the casino advantage on this game? Well, it all depends on the payout. There are several factors in play, but as a general rule you can assume that the odds of winning one hand in blackjack streak is 47.51% (or .4751) - thanks to Wizard of Odds for that. So the odds of winning "x" hands in a row are .4751^x, which is .22572 for 2 hands, .1072396 for 3 hands, .0509495 for 4 hands, and .0242061 for 5 hands. If you take that number, multiply by the amount you get if you win a streak of that size, and then subtract from 1, you will get the casino advantage. A typical streak pay scale is 3, 8, 18, and 38. So, for a streak of 2, the casino advantage is 1-(.22572*4)=0.09712 (9.71%). For a streak of 3, it's 3.48%. For 4, it's 3.196%. For 5, it's 5.596%. So the best bets are strea...
Read more

Picking 87 NCAA Basketball Games

My friend Tim and I picked 87 NCAA basketball games against the spread on Saturday. We alternated picks - first I would pick one, then he would pick one. Once a pick was made, the other person was automatically the "house" for that pick (meaning, you automatically had to take the other side). The way the picks were made, you wanted to make the ones you were most confident about early (before the other person had a chance to pick it). We made the picks in 3 waves - morning games, afternoon games, and night games. There were 24 morning games, 35 afternoon games, and 28 night games based on our breakdowns. In the morning games, Tim was 4-7-1 and I was 8-4. Our "top half" (picks 1 through 6 for this set) were both 2-4, however. That means I was 6-0 in the games lower down the list (ones I was basically guessing). In the afternoon games, Tim was 8-10 and I was 6-11. Our "top half" (1-9) picks were both 2-7. Again, we did better on the ones where we were guessin...
Read more