The Golf Director Problem: Forming Teams for Club Golf Competitions Konstantin Pavlikov, Donald Hearn and Stan Uryasev Abstract Club golf competitions are regular events arranged by golf directors (or professionals) for club members. Player skill levels are measured by their USGA or R&A handicaps and it is the job of the director to use the handicaps to organize teams that are, in some sense, fair. The handicap system is limited in that it does not take the variance of players’ scores into account. In this paper we propose two optimization models that employ the handicap distributions from a prior study [1]. The first model directly computes team probabilities to win a single hole, and the sec- ond derives team probabilities to win from those of the players. The computational complexity of both models grows exponentially with the number of players. Using scenario optimization, with approximations, the second model is shown to give very good results for up to 40 players in reasonable computer time. Also, the solution of a real problem shows that common assumptions about the structure of fair teams are not necessarily correct. 1 Introduction The Golf Director Problem. This paper considers the assignment of players to teams in ordinary golf club competitions, which are events arranged for members at many public and private golf clubs. Typically these competitions involve 12 or more players, all of whom have established handicaps—the lower the handicap, the better the player. The task of assigning the players to teams is that of the club golf director (or professional), who attempts to create teams that are as fair as possible, using the players’ handicaps. By convention, teams are of size 4, but sometimes teams K. Pavlikov · D. Hearn(B ) · S. Uryasev Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, 303 Weil Hall, P.O. Box 116595 Gainesville, FL 32611-6595, USA e-mail: hearn@ufl.edu K. Pavlikov e-mail: kpavlikov@ufl.edu S. Uryasev e-mail: uryasev@ufl.edu © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 P.M. Pardalos and V. Zamaraev (eds.), Social Networks and the Economics of Sports, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08440-4_10 157