Okay, so I was digging into this thing about the 2023 Masters, you know, the golf tournament? I got really curious about how many pars were made during those four days. It’s kind of a random thing to wonder about, but I figured it could be an interesting little project to figure it out.
So, first, I needed to find out how many players were even in the tournament. Turns out, there were 89 players for the first two rounds, and then it got cut down to 50 for the weekend. That’s a lot of golf!
Next, I had to think about how many chances each player has to make par. Now, this is where my memory of golf courses comes in handy, each hole on a golf course has a “par” which is the number of strokes it should take to get the ball into the hole. Most courses are par 72, and there are 18 holes, so I just multiplied 72 by 18. I figured the Masters probably has a pretty standard layout.
Here’s the math I did:
- Rounds 1 & 2: 89 players 72 pars = 6,408 possible pars
- Rounds 3 & 4: 50 players 72 pars = 3,600 possible pars
Adding those together, I got a grand total of 10,008 possible pars for the whole tournament. But wait, that’s just the maximum possible. Not every player is going to hit par on every hole, right? I mean these players are good but not perfect.
So, then I went hunting for some stats from the actual tournament. I found this website that had all kinds of information, including the average score for each round. Turns out, the average was something like 73.52. That means, on average, players were scoring slightly over par. That means my initial number 10,008 was too high.
I also learned that the Masters has these four par-5 holes that are apparently pretty tough. Those holes are the ones where players are most likely to make some mistakes. That means the actual number of pars is way lower. But I need to know the total number of scores made by all players to get the exact number of pars.
My conclusion?
It’s tough to say the exact number of pars made without knowing every single player’s scorecard. I got some other numbers. It said there are 5,004 possible pars, so the number I got was wrong. But I still think it was a fun little exercise to think about. It just goes to show how much goes into a big tournament like the Masters, even down to the number of pars. At the end of the day, I still learned something, so that’s a win, right?
