Ken Climo - Not So Good

So you think Ken Climo had a good year in 2002? Sure, he won the USDGC, the World Championship, has a sky-high rating, and never finished out of the top 10 in an A-Tier.

And sure, only 24 people (by my count) actually beat him in an A-Tier in 2002. Not everybody can be the "man who beat the man". But what about "the man who beat the man who beat the man"?

The way I figure it (see below), 720 of the 797 people who played in A-Tiers in 2002 are better than Ken Climo.

Here's an example, our message board favorite Clue:
- Justin McLuen beat Mike Young at Kansas City Wide Open
- Mike Young beat Ken Climo at Bowling Green

But that's an easy one, as Clue had a good showing at the KCWO.

How about the infamous discgolfdude, certainly not better than Ken Climo. Or is he:
- Mark A. Bruce beat Brad Hammock at Memorial
- Brad Hammock beat Ken Climo at Augusta

Now *that* is amazing.

What about Juliana? As far as I remember, she only played 1 A-tier. Let's see:
- Juliana Korver beat Bill Nature Boy Crump at Dogwood
- Bill Nature Boy Crump beat Mike Young at Zboaz
- Mike Young beat Ken Climo at Bowling Green

And, sure, knicker-wearing message board poster Ryan Renz finished 40th at Augusta while Ken Climo finished 3rd, but that doesn't mean Ryan Renz isn't better than Ken Climo:
- Ryan Renz beat Mark Southard at Augusta
- Mark Southard beat David Bourgeois at Great Lakes
- David Bourgeois beat Brad Hammock at Memorial
- Brad Hammock beat Ken Climo at Augusta

Finally, how about infrequent message boarder Jon Van Deurzen. 60th place in the Mad City Open in his only A-Tier appearance, yet even he is better than Ken Climo:
- Jon Van Deurzen beat Eric Paulson at Mad City Open
- Eric Paulson beat Todd Ebens at Rumbletown Classic
- Todd Ebens beat Bill Nature Boy Crump at Memorial
- Bill Nature Boy Crump beat Mike Young at Zboaz
- Mike Young beat Ken Climo at Bowling Green

Well, there you have it. Ken Climo is not so good after all.

Remember that STYX song " Too much time on my hands"?

Why is it so hard to believe the DGD thing. I am great, I just dont show it/msgboard/images/clipart/proud.gif

Rodney, you need help./msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

This is like the Kevin Bacon six steps thing. Steve Hauf "meister" Beat Nolan Grider, Nolan Grider Beat Barry Schultz at VPO, so: Steve Hauf"meister" is better than Barry Schultz! Right? /clipart/proud.gif "meister"

"Mark A. Bruce beat Brad Hammock at Memorial"

Everyone beat Hammock at the Memorial...
<FONT SIZE="-2">except Clue</FONT>

[dannyreeves]

Someone has WAY too much time on his hands.

If only putting practice were as much fun as programming.

[discgolf6481]

How about the reverse?

If Ken Climo beat just about everybody at every tournamant, and all of those losers go off to other tournaments and they beat most of their competitors, and on and on...

I would think once Rodney calculates this, that the Champ would have beat every disc golfer that entered any and all tournament last year!

I vote that he once again is the best disc golfer - currently, as well as the past.

PS - Rodney start with the A tier, and work your way down. Is their anybody that didn't loose to Kenny?

Chef-A lot of us vote with you that KC is the best disc golfer currently as well as the past. How about the best disc golfer there will ever be? Anyone going to win more than 11 Pro Worlds? Ken "King" Climo-He's got the skins on the wall.

[rhett]

I have a more difficult challenge for Rodney: are there enough levels anywhere for you to show how I am better than Ken Climo???

I played pro at Old Zoo Fling and U.S. Masters.

I hope you like a challenge! /msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

Darrell Nodland's only loss (on record) was in a playoff to Mike Randolph, in a B-Tier.

And Mike Randolph's only loss was to Jim Oates.

Alas, Jim Oates got beat by Ken Climo.

That's the closest I can come off the top of my head. You're essentially looking for someone who won every tournament they played in.

My little wristwatch calculator won't handle all the data required to go beyond A-Tiers. Those 37 events alone were over 55,000 individual results (x beat y).

Rhett Stroh beat Tim Selinske at US Masters.
Tim Selinske beat Steven Civitak at SoCal.
Steven Civitak beat Emmett Cosgrove at Tahoe
Emmett Cosgrove beat Chris Brophy at SkyCatz
Chris Brophy beat Ken Climo at Masters Cup

Rhett Stroh is better than Ken Climo.

You did it Rhett....now you're famous!!! /clipart/crazy.gif
<FONT SIZE="-2">(As if you aren't already!)</FONT>

I'm curious about the programming behind this...

let loose the nerdspeak Rodney!

[rhett]

Woo-Hoo!

[jeffash]

Now let's have the list of all the people that have beaten Rhett!

/clipart/proud.gif


<FONT SIZE="-2">man, i've been waiting for that one</FONT>

[rickb]

Sorry Jeff but due to limitations in the amount of possible bandwidth in the Northern Hemisphere it would be impossible to name all the people that are better than Rhett.
It might happen if all computers were linked simutaneously but this would cause a rift in the time space continuim thereby erasing history as we know it and bringing the ultimate demise of the universe.
Lot of tangibles involved that would cause major thread drift. Let's just say using Rodney's formula that anyone that has ever picked up a disc. /msgboard/images/clipart/proud.gif

[pnkgtr]

WOW, and I beat Rhett at the SoCal AM Champs. I AM better than KC!

[rhett]

Introducing the successor to the YETI Project. Download your screensaver now and contribute to the solution.

Man, y'all are harsh. /msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

Jeff, I guess you'll just have to keep beating yourself! On the powerball,I mean!/clipart/happy.gif And to all, I have never beat Rhett! Better than K.C. one minute, Worse than Rhett the next! Oh the humanities!"meister"

[specialk]

Rhett, I think you meant SETI. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

That other thing is the search for intelligence in Jay Reading.

[rhett]

SETI/YETI. yeah, I meant SETI.

You sure we're not "Yooking for E-T Intelligence"?

greg_s, there so many levels of detail, not sure which would be the best. Let me go medium-level.

WARNING: Non-nerds go back now, unless you want to impress chicks and stuff.

First, the inspiration: baseball (http://baseball-reference.com/oracle/). Which of course was inspired by kevin bacon (http://oracleofbacon.org/). Recently these were re-brought to my attention by the j-walk blog (http://j-walk.com/blog/), which always seems to have cool stuff, in a nerdy kind of way.

So I started digging around, mostly with Google, and found out that I'm not very smart. But I was able to tell that this sort of thing has to do with "graphing" or "mapping", a whole area of mathematics I know nothing about, and the algorithm I was looking for might be Djikstra's shortest path algorithm.

I couldn't find anything pre-programmed, but I was able to find an 'awk' implementation, and a VB implementation. Using those, I implemented in VBA behind Excel 2002. I tried the awk first, but couldn't get it to work correctly. So then I tried the VB one, which was similar, and after a couple tweaks, got the results I was looking for.

As for the data, I started with the results of all the A-Tiers. I looped through them and broke them down into "matches", so I had one record for each "x vs y" combo where x and y are two different people in the tournament. This amounted to the aforementioned 55,000 records. I was originally using margin-of-win, so I also had to reverse each match, thus giving me 110,000 records. (By margin-of-win, I mean "x beat y by 3", and the reverse of "y lost to x by 3".)

Anyway, each person becomes a "node" on the graph, and each match becomes a, a, a, I forget the name, anyway, it's the legs that join the nodes.

Once you have that data loaded into the proper structures, you just pick a start-node, in this case Ken Climo, and the algorithm finds and stores the shortest path to every other node (that you can get to). The algorithm isn't very complicated at all, and there are some animations on the web that sorta kinda help you understand what's going on.

(I originally had each "leg" weighted by the margin-of-win, but decided to simplify and just count a win as a win.)

That's pretty much it. Since my dataset was in Excel and my programming was behind Excel, I just spat out the results to a spreadsheet.

The gathering of the data was throughout last season. The implementation of the algorithm took me a couple-three hours for a couple evenings.

On my computer (I think it's around a 1.3Ghz with 500ish meg of RAM), it takes about 10 seconds to load the data from the sheet into the arrays, 2 seconds to run the algorithm, and 5 seconds to spit the results back out. And that's for the shortest path to *each* player given a single start node.

If anybody is really that curious, I'd be happy to clean up the code a bit (and hopefully not break anything) and send it. As I said, it's Excel 2002, but I'm guessing 2000 or even earlier would work.

I gathered the data from posted results, so I'm sure there are some errors in it. But it gives fun results if not 100% accurate results.

I'll answer more questions if there are any. Via e-mail if that would be more appropriate.

rodney

Special K, you crack me up.

Here is one for you....I beat a guy in a local super small tourney in Chico, CA....who has beat another guy who has beat another guy who beat Mr. Lissman....and I am sure he has beat someone who beat Climo, if he hasn't done it himself....so as far as I can tell having a horrible short game and maxing out at 350 with no wind makes me the world champ....so when is the SN Pro line of discs going to be produced...maybe they could be made out of recycled garbage!

One more thing, I will make sure to have Dave make a SN Pro BA as my first proline disc....that would be a Banshee top with Aviar BB bottom....so what do you say Dave?

What is this *for a couple evenings*? You so did that at work. Nobody would actually do that in their free time, even if they were a bigger nerd than you.

[morgan]

Ken Climo is probably reading this and having a chuckle.

I second Clue's motion. Only a SUPER GEEK would do that work at home./msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif Oh wait a minute...

[xterramatt]

so, has Matt King beaten Ken? I remember him whining about moving up to open a while back....

Maybe this'd quiet him down.

Matt, you are such a woman. I have never complained about moving up. I sometimes complain about rising entry fees and other minor stuff. Perhaps you would like to discuss this in a dark alley somewhere. I know I would.

My apologies to women for lumping you in with Peckham.

Matt King you crack me up.

[discglfr]

I have been Jon VanDuerzen's best friend and golfing buddy for the past 8 or so years and let me be the first to tell you, he IS better than Climo.

Heck, Jonny V has even slept in Keegan's (Climo's son) 4 foot long bed eventhough JV stands a towering 6'6". Wow, I don't have time to check the board too often but to see a thread that says JV is better than Climo is certainly worth coming back for!

[xterramatt]

maybe that's what it was about... I forgot the :P

Chill...

Nice people skills Peckham.

[chains11864]

only in cyber-space do you people dare to challenge...behind numbers and computer screens...so easy to call KC out, but you should only do that in person...i am not better than KC...probally will not ever be, but will try hard to compete with him if given the chance...comparison is only valid on the course...not from your computer

have fun with it...but look out for "Karma"

Chains

Brandon Chains Bailey beat Chris Lee at Seneca Soiree
Chris Lee beat Larry Leonard at Dogwood
Larry Leonard beat Ken Climo at Bowling Green

Brandon Bailey is better than Ken Climo!

and BB is playing the am crosstown this weekend - so WHEN i beat him i'll be better than kenny, too? (sorry for callin you out, but i want something to support my delusions)

f.luke

[rhett]

I sure hope that was a lame troll by Brandon. I'd hate to think he was serious!

[oakhollowdgc]

Kenny! You are better than me at disc golf!

[rickb]

I can kick his [*****] at some Golden Tee though. Or pool, or darts, or foosball. Hell any game that's played in a bar where no actual physical talent is required. /msgboard/images/clipart/proud.gif

[chains11864]

RHETT...all in fun..just trying to sound like a warning from above. Like a "1984" voice, warning of impending doom....if this keeps up. Was not too funny, and still got my "bagger" reaction for it..../msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

[rhett]

Good to hear that, Brandon. Unfortunately some people just read a little and are serious about that kind of stuff! /clipart/wink.gif

Rodney: The obvious question is if "only 24 people (by my count) actually beat him in an A-Tier in 2002". Of the 24 players that beat Climo, what were their head-to-head with Climo records and were any of them undefeated! <FONT COLOR="ff0000"><SUB>And no, its not for me, as I have never beat Climo heat-to-head cuz believe me, I would remember that.</SUB></FONT> If anyone is undefeated by Kenny then we need to call that guy OUT!

[rhett]

I'm undefeated by Kenny! /msgboard/images/clipart/proud.gif

LMAO at Rick Black. We should start taking pre-regs for the Golden Tee tourney before the Renny Points Bonanza this year. Players meeting: midnight Entry fee: four shots of Cuervo 1800 and 6 beers (to be consumed by player) Location:EBs
Prize: Stumbling around Renny the following day - Everybody wins!

[rickb]

Except for the others that were playing in our group. Fred could care less, Chris had no idea and it seemed like Scotty was getting a chuckle out of it.
I'm always game for some Golden Tee before a tournament. At least I get an idea of what it would be like to shoot 15 down.

no1 is better then climo

[MTL21676]

just b/c someone doesnt win every tournament doens mean they are not as good as the winner....ratings tell the story and the ratings show that Climo is the man....

only person can beat King climo is king ken Climo.
no one else will ever do what he does and it's FRICKEN WIN!your da tihs ken/msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

You can beat Climo in a tournament,if your lucky. But let's see someone beat him for a week straight. Only two in twelve years. And he came back to beat them each the following year. It's easy to talk trash on here, but if you had to pick a player to win and you would be killed if that player lost, who would you pick then. Climo right. Unless you have no brain in your head.

climo/msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

[marcace]

Ask joshita about betting against THE CHAMP/msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif HA HA HA .....I'm laughing all the way to the bank. Thanks again Kenny!!!

Hey, can't seem to find Climo at the Hall of Fame. Is he playing at the tournament? Its so close to his home state.

[nix]

Kenny is the man. NEVER bet against him, but even worse, never let him find out you bet against him!

Lesson learned marcy!

Climo is hurt that is why you dont see his name or score.He is here watching thou.

Well, have a rapid recovery and get back in the rat race /msgboard/images/clipart/happy.gif

hey everyone...i have an idea. GET OFF YOUR KNEES

yeah, no [*****]