How the golf model works

Every player carries a true strokes-gained rating, decay-weighted toward recent rounds so current form matters more than a stale season. The player ratings page shows the rating and the rounds behind it for every slate-active player — a rating with no evidence behind it isn't shown as if it had some.

A single Monte Carlo simulation of the full field prices win, top-5, top-10, top-20, and make-cut at once — never five separate models that could quietly disagree with each other. That coherence (win ≤ top-5 ≤ top-10 ≤ top-20) is enforced by the publisher before anything goes live: a payload that violates it is refused, not patched.

Every market on the board is labeled by the walk-forward gate it actually passed. Gated markets (win, top-5, top-10, top-20 today) cleared their skill gate on the latest binding run and carry a real skill claim. Ungated markets (make-cut today) are published as model output with no skill claim anywhere — site, socials, everywhere. These tiers are recomputed from the committed gate registry on every publish; a publish is refused outright if a hand-edited tier would disagree with that recomputation.

Every published claim traces back to one binding walk-forward run. The backtest page shows every gate's value, threshold, margin, and pass/fail — including where it currently fails. The win gate "passes under fair measurement," which is a narrower claim than saying the model improved, and we say it that way on purpose.

Calibration is the clearest example of showing the unflattering number: the pooled calibration figure currently passes, but the per-season median fails, and we display both side by side rather than leading with the one that looks better. Calibration language is blocked everywhere on the site for golf until that changes.

This section ships ahead of the model's first published slate — the pages, claim-tier logic, and honesty rules are live now, and every board fills in automatically once the first event publishes. Odds and expected value are typed in the contract already but stay dormant until a dedicated EV launch gate passes its own pre-registered review.