Welcome to the Golf Digest Tournament Predictor. Each week we'll pit a machine's tournament forecast against our expert's picks. This week: the Open Championship.
Last Week Recap: Neither the professor or our expert had Bryson DeChambeau as the John Deere Classic winner. Professor Lou Riccio had two top-5 picks in Wesley Bryan (T-3) and Zach Johnson (T-5), but just one other player in the top 20 (Charles Howell III). The Golf Digest expert logged four top-12 selections in Steve Stricker (T-5), Daniel Berger (T-5), Brian Harman (T-10), and Chad Campbell (T-12), with CH3 rounding out five top-20 picks.
This Week: The claret jug returns to Royal Birkdale for the first time since 2008. Compared to other venues in the Open rota, Birkdale's fairways are of the flatter variety, subtracting the bad-break bounces often seen at links golf and providing easier second shots than one would find at Carnoustie or Muirfield. Not to say the course is a cake walk: with surrounding du..

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SOUTHPORT, England — Journalists tend to like Jordan Spieth. Unlike some other members of golf’s upper echelons – they know who they are – the impressively mature 24-year old enters press conferences with the clear intent of actually answering the questions. OK, so he doesn’t always answer the question asked. But he can be forgiven that because the answers he gives to the questions he thinks he has been asked are invariably interesting and thought-provoking. Are we clear?
Anyway, Spieth was up to his usual tricks on the eve of this 146th Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, what is also the young Texan’s fifth visit to the oldest event in the game. Asked by the gentleman from The Guardian for an explanation as to why the last seven majors have been claimed by first-time winners, Spieth came up with a typically tangental — and on this occasion, flawed — response.
“I think there's a lot more guys who haven't won majors than guys who have that are playing, so the chances are ..

Here's the question: What would the World Ranking look like if we had to carry our bags? No caddies.

SOUTHPORT, England — Royal Birkdale's flat, but narrow fairways have long taken drivers out of the hands of the world's best golfers. When Johnny Miller won here in 1976 he used 1-iron off 12 of the 14 non-par 3s. And earlier this week, Rory McIlroy — arguably the best driver in today's game — said he doesn't plan to hit his best club until the 13th hole of each round.
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But it looks like Phil Mickelson will take that conservative strategy to the next level. The five-time major champ doesn't think he'll hit any drivers all week. And he certainly won't be able to if he sticks to this plan.
https://twitter.com/WillGrayGC/status/887289072921657345
Considering the course and which player we're talking about, Tuesday's equipment buzz at Royal Birkdale isn't all that surprising. We've seen Phil Mickelson completely take the driver out of his bag for majors before (Remember that..

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A year ago, when I made my crazy prediction for the winner of the 145th Open Championship, I emphasized that the recent trend among those honored as “the champion golfer of the year” was experience. Or what we in the working trade like to call “age.”
Fitting, seeing as we are after all talking about the man who prevails in golf’s oldest major being the sort of chap who’s seen the mercurial panoply of golf’s rich tableau. Which is what Open Championship fans know as “Friday.”
It was against that weathered backdrop that I chose a resolute veteran, an accomplished winner who had known the depths of defeat and self-doubt and risen to golf’s heights with the fortitude only poets and kings know. Or what today most Americans see as “a Gatorade commercial.”
So it was with that sense of Churchillian “Keep Calm and Carry On” that I bravely suggested an Englishman would win the Open Championship, the proud, earnest, resilient Justin Rose.
Rose, of course, did not win.
But he did finish T-22. And ..

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