Golf - Lottery System

The GGGolf Intelligent Lottery System V2

The GGGolf intelligent lottery system is designed to be fair to all members according to your club’s rules. The following is a concise explanation of how it works.

There are 2 different processes in the lottery. The first one is weighting by member category. The second process is the number of times people don’t get their desired tee times. This is called percentage of failure (to get desired tee time). During the draw, foursomes with more weight are placed first. For foursomes with equal weight, the lottery places first those foursomes who have been penalized most percentage wise since the beginning of the season.

This means that the more times, percentage-wise, a member is successful in getting their desired tee time, the less likely that member will be successful the next time they enter a ballot.

Example of weighting: if ordinary members are assigned a weight of 10 and non-ordinary of 5, this means that a foursome with 4 ordinary members would have a weight of 40 and a foursome with 2 ordinary and 2 non-ordinary would have a weight of 30. When weighting is used, foursomes with more weight always get their tee times assigned before foursomes that have less weight. For groups of foursomes the weight is averaged out to 1 foursome so that it is fair compared with single foursomes. This enables clubs to enforce playing privileges according to their bylaws with, for example, guests. Several private clubs only assign a weight of 1 to guests to ensure that foursomes with 2, 3 or 4 members always have preference over foursomes with guests.

The percentage of starting time requests not obtained for players in a foursome are combined together to form that foursome’s total percentage. The percentage is calculated by adding-up the number of times each player in the foursome did not obtain their tee times divided by the total number of lotteries the members of the foursome participated in. The higher the combined percentages, the greater the likelihood of that group getting their preferred tee time. The lower the combined percentages, the less likelihood of success in getting their preferred tee time.

Singles and twosomes have pretty well the same chance of success as those members who enter as a foursome as long as they are merged together prior to performing the lottery. The success rate of a single or twosome depends on what happens after their percentages are combined with the percentages of those they are grouped with. Singles and doubles that are not merged usually are drawn last but can be automatically assigned to groups that are not full.

A potential downside for singles/ twosomes occurs when a single or twosome has requested a certain time (09:30 – 10:30), and they are matched with members who have requested a different time (10:30 – 11:30).

On occasion a twosome may be matched with another twosome who has a lower combined percentage. This will have a negative effect. However, this will be balanced by those occasions when a twosome is matched with a twosome with a higher percentage. Over the season this should balance out.

During the assignment of foursomes to tee times, the system assigns foursomes according to the weighting (if used) and the percentages (failure rate). For example for foursomes of equal weight, if you have 5 foursomes that have requested 7:00am and 1 foursome that has requested 7:09am, if it’s the 7:09 turn percentage-wise that has the highest percentage (failure rate) then they get the 7:09 tee time and the others would get 7:00am, 7:18am, 7:27 etc..

By default, failures are calculated if the foursome does not get their tee time plus or minus 15 minutes. The plus/minus 15 minutes can be changed in the GGGolf options. For example, for a club that has tee times every 9 minutes, a better value could be 9 or 18 minutes, allowing 1 or 2 times before or after desired time to not count as being penalized.

While filling out ballots, members can indicate if the prefer playing sooner or later should their requested time no longer be available during the draw. If a member requests later but no places are available 1 or 2 hours later, the system may place the group up to 15 to 30 minutes earlier. The system can iterate before and after the desired time several times in order to find the best time for the group. The default iteration values can be changed in the Lottery Options.

Since 2013, a new feature was introduced in the GGGolf lottery system, which enables the end user performing the draw to indicate, with the press of a button, that the lottery has been finalized. This action stores the lottery results in the reservation ballots and can easily be printed on a reservation ballot report. Thus, even when players or foursomes are cancelled or moved after the draw, the initial draw is always available and is used to calculate the percentage of failures throughout the season.