flighted tour events are the only realistic opportunity that 98% of we non-stud middle ranker average players will ever have to win a tour event.
i've been playing the tour since the fall of '98 and all seven of my tour victories have been in flighted events. four B flight pro click wins late on the old access tour in the fall of 2000, and three 2k3 champ C flight click wins in dec '02 and jan & feb '03. i was promoted to the bottom of champ B flight shortly thereafter, where i somehow [censored] on for many seasons and where i had no chance to win, but i liked the idea that i was a B flight player even if i was only a hanger-on.
many players seem to think that they only have to show up in a flighted event and shoot a little better than their scoring average and then they will be in contention. that conception is a pipe dream because history shows that whatever flight is in question, that you have to shoot way over your head for any given week in a full field flighted event to contend. it only happens a few times a year for most of us, but i among others, can testify that it's possible.
the tour changed its philosophy of flight player distribution after the first season of 2k3. instead of flights with equal numbers of players, the population was distributed in flights in a rough approximation of the normal statistical distribution. what this accomplished is that no matter how many players were in any given flight (and 40% of all pro click players were in E and F flights alone), the difference in scoring average between the best player of each flight and the worst player was pretty much the same in all but the most extreme ability flights.
on the old tour with 667 players at pro click the flights were apportioned thusly: A 5%[33 players], B 5% [33], C 10% [66], D 10% [66], E 20% [133], F 20% [135], G 10% [66], H 10% [67], I 5% [33], J 5% [31].
what this meant in practical terms was that the players in each flight were packed together in equal statistical scoring measure whatever the number of players in each particular flight: that it would be as easy or difficult to win any flight event from top to bottom because the range of scoring averages in each flight were approximately the same: at pro click in '06, about 1.8 strokes.
if you improved your scoring average by 1.9 strokes you could theoretically move from the top of F flight to the bottom of D flight. and that could actually be accomplished by steady incremental good play over a season.
however, to actually win a particular flighted event, any player who has actually done it will testify that they played far beyond their average weekly scoring result. often in the past the winning score for a middle flight would be close to a very high flight winning score. no flight victories are achieved by just showing up: you have to go very low.
that being said, as of now, the ranked tour population is not large enough to support credible flight competition except at pro click, and then just barely.
the historical consensus was that a flight event had to have about 40 entries to be a real competition. we didn't get those numbers even on the old site at champ very often in any flight, but the pro click guys in the four big middle flights usually had at least 60 entries every week.
so what we need is some patience as the player population gradually builds. lw
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