THERE'S A TEASER that comes up in many probability text books about the number of people you need in a room to have a 50-50 chance of at least two of them sharing the same birthday. Probability text books are a distant memory for most of the staff at Tour Headquarters so we did what we always do when meeting the unknown — we went googling for the answer.
Sure enough, the numerators, denominators and factorials were all explained by Dr Ken on mathforum.org who proved in words of no more than six syllables that only 23 people were required to reach the 50-50 mark.
Neither Dr Ken nor any of his colleagues had ever been asked about the probability of a Golf Masters contestant with 435 teams out of a total of entry of 12,838 winning a weekly prize over the course of a season but it happened for Peter Lynch in week nine and we reckon that was about par for the course.
Now "par for the course" may not be a phrase bandied about by many maths professors but it was the best we could come up without going for a week of grinds at the Institute.
Lynch was our overall leader three weeks ago with EL 59 which he co-manages with Emma Lynch. The week-nine prize was won in conjunction with Ann Lynch and their team AL 3 had €6,045 to spare over Séamus Kennedy's SLTK 2. Kennedy, you could say, is our first manager to be Lynched this season but he may not be the last.
Both teams included Jeev Milkha Singh (€100,000 for victory at the Austrian Open) but unlike 18 others, neither doubled up with our other week-nine winner, Justin Leonard, at the St Jude Championship.
Both had good back-up for Singh with Simon Wakefield (€80,000 for second in Austria), Padraig Harrington and Alex Cejka (€52,500 each for tied fourth in Memphis) but Lynch secured his fourball at Druids Heath and Nike Tiger Woods polo shirt by including Davis Love (€13,045 for tied 24th in Memphis) rather than Kennedy's Edoardo Molinari (€7,000 for tied 38th in Austria). For those double-checking our maths, both also had one player who missed the cut and one who didn't play at all.
The new overall leader is Michael Kenna whose Clonmel 16 rose six places to knock Brendan Hill's 876542 down to second. Kenna also led in week seven with M Kenna 7 but Clonmel 16, another of his 207 entries, continues our run of a different overall leader every week.
The biggest contributor to their week-nine score was Robert Allenby who was beaten in a play-off for the St Jude Championship and earned €75,000. Kenna can be well pleased with the Aussie's efforts having used Clonmel 16's seventh transfer to bring him in for the idle Bradley Dredge.
Darren Clarke contributed €18,500 for tied-19th in Austria while Robert Karlsson, Oliver Wilson, Cliff Kresge, David Lynn and Marcus Fraser managed a paltry €1,000 between them.
Our only counting tournament this week is the US Open.
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