andyson:
And for BinB, I'm still waiting for someone to post a video of a WTF shot they blame on VEM. The closest we had was Twominusone's shot into BP 9 that mysteriously came up short. I think 98% of my "WTF was that" shots are on me. That said, I do think VEM is in play. But more subtle. For example:
VEM-free we get 10% of our shots at a max deviation and 50% at min deviation.
When VEM kicks in the distribution IMO changes.
Bad VEM we get 25% of our shots at max deviation and only 35% at min deviation.
That's an example of what I mean by subtle. The distribution (think Bell shaped curve) shifts towards the dark side. Sure they never change the precision of the clubs. The circle of precision doesn't change. But we hit the outer edge more frequently when VEM kicks in.
I hope that all makes sense.
Makes perfect sense, but I still don't think it is in play. Anything with variance involved is going to have ebs and flows, thats the nature of it. Of course there will be rounds when more edge shots happen, and rounds with fewer, I just contend that there is no driving force (VEM) behind the variance. If you did 100 trials of flipping a coin 100 times the restults of 'heads' might be something like 48, 45, 58, 50, 42, 60, 48, 55, etc, of course there will be patterns to the variance, but no driving force behind it.
I use the poker analogy at lot on here, but it's the same thing there, if you race 22 against AK offsuit they're both going to win roughly 50% of the time, but yet poker forums are flooded with "it's rigged!" nonsense when people are running on the wrong side of variance there as well. But like I've said a lot lately, the distribution pattern of shots is pretty damn tight with today's top clubs, making deviations mostly a thing of the past anyway...
Not to say you're wrong about it, but all the WGT employees on here besides pizza have stated VEM is not in play, and I choose to believe it, right or wrong...