If your team is losing a big golf tournament, the best math strategy is to pair your best players directly against their best players.
April 2, 2026
Original Paper
Ryder Cup Singles Ordering
SSRN · 6401838
The Takeaway
While it feels safer to pair stars against weak opponents to secure points, matching skill-for-skill (Strong-vs-Strong) maximizes the variance of the outcome. This high-variance strategy is the only way a trailing team can create the 'tail event' needed for a comeback.
From the abstract
In the Ryder Cup golf competition, team captains must decide the ordering of their 12 players for the final day's singles matches; lineups are submitted without seeing the opponent's order. This ordering determines which players face which opponents and can significantly affect the probability of achieving the target score needed to win or retain the cup. With 12 players per side there are approximately 479 million possible orderings, and the goal is to maximize the probability of earning at lea