FAQ
Who is behind SmartGolfInfo (SGI)
Mike Miller (@SmartGolfInfo) is the creator of SmartGolfInfo’s golf database and site. Since 1997, he’s been a golf bettor and a gambling industry consultant, executive & director.
Service Coverage
In return for your subscription, you receive timely access to our proprietary golf Tournament Sheets, containing player form histories, course notes and stats.
Our minimum level of weekly output is sheets for all individual stroke play golf tournaments, for which there is a fantasy sports or betting market, on the following 17 Tours: Americas- PGA Tour
- Champions Tour (Seniors)
- LPGA Tour (Ladies)
- Korn Ferry Tour
- European Tour
- Legends Tour (Seniors)
- Ladies European Tour (Ladies)
- Challenge Tour
- Asian Golf Tour
- Japan Mens Tour (JGTO)
- Korean Mens Tour
- KLPGA (Korean Ladies)
- JLPGA (Japan Ladies)
- Sunshine Tour
- PGA Tour of Australasia
- WPGA (Ladies)
- LIV Golf
Included in the above are all Majors, plus ‘unofficial’ events such as the Hero World Challenge, the main Amateur tournaments and periodical tournaments such as the Olympic Games.
In addition to the above we will, whenever time permits, produce sheets for tournaments of lesser interest on which there is betting. These may include:
- Americas: Epson & PGA Americas Tours;
- Europe: Alps, PGT & NGL Tours;
- Asia: PGTI, ATGT, CGA & Asian Development Tours.
Tournament Sheet Content
Each sheet contains: the tournament field and every player’s:
- Name;
- Age;
- Ranking points, SGI ranks plus Official World Golf Rankings;
- Nationality;
- Historical form and trendline;
- Course and recent form and annual Tour stats; and
- Bookmaker odds.
For ease of use across devices, laptop is the optimum viewing medium, we limit the number of columns per sheet.
The site is optimised for use on smaller-screen devices such as tablets and smartphones, but laptop is highly recommended.
Early fields are sorted by SGI World Ranking points until they can be sorted by bookmaker odds. In addition, users can sort them in various ways and ‘star’ players to bring them to the top of the listing.
Sheet Timing
We start work for each week’s tournaments during the preceding week. Earlier if practicable.
Once we have a reasonable early list of players, we publish a sheet.
We continue regular sheet updates as qualifiers are determined, and players withdraw and are replaced, until fields are settled; typically the Tuesday of tournament week
Sheets remain unchanged and live until after each tournament is resulted. Past tournaments are searchable.
Timezone
Our servers are set to UTC
Player Data
Every player in a sheet is clickable and doing so generates a range of player data. This includes: name, age if known, nationality, three years of recent form, any recorded annual Tour statistics and a 12-week, 12-month and 24-month form summary (starts, wins, placings, made cuts, etc…).
Colour-Shading of Form Data
For ease of use on sheets and in keeping with our legacy, we highlight Wins in yellow and Placings (2nd-10th) in green.
Subscriptions
Our subscriptions are for: 4-week or 52-week terms. UTC.
Subscription payments will auto-renew and we will keep you fully informed in this regard.
Subscription Cancellation
You can cancel your subscription at any time but there are no refunds.
Subscription Changes
You may change your subscription to a longer or shorter term at any time. Such change will take effect from the expiry date of your current subscription.
Contact
Contact us by completing the email form.
Follow @SmartGolfInfo on X where we’ll post whenever we upload a new Tournament Sheet or have a service update for you.
Scope of Form Coverage
Results from 38 professional Tours (25 Mens and 13 Ladies) are updated weekly in our database, along with the upper echelon of placings in all significant Amateur and Qualifying School events. Only tournaments scheduled for at least 54 holes are included.
The 38 Tours are:
- American: PGA, LPGA (Ladies), Korn Ferry, Champions, Americas, Epson(Ladies), APT & Mexican;
- European: European, LET (Ladies), Challenge, Legends, Alps, LETAS (Ladies), NGL & PGT;
- Japanese: JGTO, ATVT, JLPGA (Ladies) & Step-Up (Ladies);
- Chinese: CGA & CLPGA (Ladies);
- Korean: KPGA, KLPGA (Ladies) & Dream (Ladies) 54-hole events only;
- Other Asian: Asian, ADT, ATGT, Thai LPGA (Ladies), TLPGA (Taiwan Ladies), & PGTI (India);
- Australasian: PGA Tour of Australasia & WPGA (Ladies);
- South African: Sunshine Mens & Ladies & IGT Big Easy;
- Middle Eastern: MENA & LIV;
- Qualifying Schools: PGA, Korn Ferry, European, LPGA (Ladies), Australasian, Asian, LET (Ladies), Sunshine, Alps, Americas, ATGT & Champions Tours;
- Amateur Tournaments: USGA Mens, Womens and Junior Amateurs, R&A Mens and Womens Amateurs, Eisenhower and Esperito Santo Trophies, Olympics, Asia-Pacific Amateurs (Men & Women), Brabazon Trophy, Western Amateur, NCAA (Men & Women), Asian Games (Men & Women), European Amateur Championships (Men & Women) .
Our sole focus is stroke play tournaments, so we do not prepare sheets for teams’ or matchplay events, though we do record individual final placings where applicable.
For matchplay resulting purposes, if a player is knocked out in the round of 64, we record it as 64th, if knocked out in the quarter finals, we record an 8th, etc.
Majors
Many Tours have a long established tradition of Major tournaments. On the top Tours, given the added prestige and pressure, Majors have been tagged in the database so player form in those tournaments can be isolated and examined.
These Tours are: PGA, DP World, LPGA, Champions, KLPGA & JLPGA.
OWGR & SGI Rankings
OWGR means Official World Golf Rankings and these data are recorded for every player along with our own SGI Rankings.
Our OWGR source sites are:
owgr.com (Men) and;
rolexrankings.com (Ladies).
We have developed our own rankings - for Men, Ladies and Senior Men) - and they are displayed as SGI Rank.
Course Form
A maximum of 12 years’ form will be displayed.
Course form for this week’s tournament cannot be assumed to have been achieved at this week’s tournament. e.g. a player with past form in the PGA Tour’s Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow would carry that form into a sheet for a PGA Championship at Quail Hollow, etc.
If there has been more than one instance of a player playing a course in any calendar year, all form data are displayed in separate rows with the most recent listed first.
Pro-Am course form is treated differently. Where courses are used for Pro-Am tournaments, with their much easier course set-ups (e.g. Alfred Dunhill Links), we record form as ‘Pro-am’ course form to distinguish it from, say, an Open Championship. In other words, a sheet for an Open Championship at Carnoustie will not display Alfred Dunhill Links performances as ‘Course Form’, and vice versa.
Recent Form
All player form data (including qualifying school, amateur & lower-tier tournaments) are displayed in our sheets for users.
Therefore, the form you’re viewing occasionally may not relate to the Tour being played this week. Click or tap on any Recent Form data point to inspect where and when it was achieved.
-2W means two weeks ago, -8W means eight weeks ago, etc.
For tournaments of secondary interest, with weak field strength, we record placings only down to the cut line and for those of tertiary interest we record as few as the top 10 or 20 placings. This is to limit player database size and manageability while still ensuring that any performance of substance is captured for subscribers.
We do record and identify mixed gender tournament results, though not based on their treatment by the two world ranking organisations - where they typically are treated as two separate tournaments.
Our form focus is on individual stroke play performance so we do not record any form data from team contests such as: Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup, World Cup, Presidents Cup, etc, and we do not prepare sheets for such events.
For significant Amateur tournaments (e.g. USGA & R&A events) we sometimes record two separate sets of results: strokeplay & matchplay. The primary purpose in doing so is to split out stroke play performances for future reference.
Data Errors
We expend considerable effort to ensure that our data output is excellent. It mostly is.
Nonetheless, in a sport with thousands of professional participants every week, occasionally with identical names, there inevitably will be the occasional error. We welcome your feedback in this regard so we can improve database integrity for all.
Course Notes
Wherever quality data is available (it mostly isn’t!) we publish notes for a course. These can include:
- Course name & location;
- Architect(s) and year built or upgraded / changed;
- Par and yardage;
- Grass surfaces (fairway, rough & greens);
- Water hazard & bunker counts;
- Stimpmeter green speeds and green sizes;
- Course overview (parklands, links, woodlands, desert, etc);
- Course and terrain characteristics (narrow, exposed to wind, undulating, flat, mountainous, resort-style, etc) and;
- Key metrics / skills required for success there.
In any event, we publish at least minimal course information for every tournament
Player Naming Conventions
Unfortunately, there is no global standard. Our player naming conventions are as follows:
- Korean, Japanese Thai, Euro, Latino & English-speaking nations: given names followed by family name;
- Chinese, Malaysian, Singaporean & Taiwanese: family name followed by given name(s);
- Where a player name contains non-english characters (eg Spanish, Portugese, German, French, Scandinavian, etc) we display the anglicised version of those names;
- Where Asian players have adopted an anglicised name or nickname, we use it. eg Bai Zheng Kai is Bobby Bai, Choi Kyung-Ju is KJ Choi, Pan Cheng Tsung is CT Pan, etc and;
- Where two players carry the same name we differentiate by: adding a middle initial (eg Peter J Wilson & Peter T Wilson) or adding a birthdate to the name (eg Tae-Woo Kim (Jan1993), Tae-Woo Kim (Feb1993) or another differentiator (eg Olin Browne, Olin Browne Jr).
Overall, we’re using what we judge as the most user-friendly naming approach for our audience. Nonetheless, we’re open to suggestions on how the presentation of name data can be improved.
Tournament Naming Conventions
Our service sometimes sees limited online real estate in conflict with long tournament titles.
For example:
- Korn Ferry Tour Championship presented by United Leasing & Finance or;
- Saudi International powered by SoftBank Investment Advisers.
Our policy is tournament names will include naming sponsors except where they are overly long and to ignore secondary sponsors. For example, “Visa Argentina Open presented by Macro” will be presented as “Visa Argentina Open”.
Country Naming Conventions
We aim for simplicity, while trying to achieve a balance between ease-of-use and geo-political reality. For example:
- The United Kingdom (UK) is split out into its four constituent countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland;
- Nations with non-english characters carry a simplified name (eg Việt Nam is Vietnam);
- The Republic of China (ROC) is Taiwan, Swaziland is Eswateni.... And the list goes on!