After reading your posts, my opinion is that you are undervaluing the concept of dispersion and variance. My dispersion is so wide with a tee club that the only course of action is to aim for safety.
Yes. It's wide for nearly everyone. The only truly accurate players (in general)… are the shorter ones, because the ball doesn't travel far enough to get too far offline. And they're often less "accurate" as measured by degrees offline than better players. As measured by fairways hit, well, that's why the LPGA Tour has players who are "more accurate" than on the PGA Tour.
We are talking about SCORING. Not the experience or the fun or thrill. I hope architects never care about my or anyone else’s score.
Yes. I can tell someone to play Tobacco Road in the most boring, strategically sound way… but if they want to go for the green on 11 with a 5I in their hands for the one-in-50 chance of pulling it off… cool. Good for them, and I hope they beat the odds, because they'll remember that shot for a long time. Or however long it takes them to get out of the bunker 30 feet deep and short, whichever comes first.
When Jeff posted the criteria several pages ago, it didn't take into account holes that had water hazards, par 5s, or even par 3s where you may set up one side of the tee box or the other.
Let's dispense with the "one side of the tee box or the other." Yes, people will say they "feel" more comfortable over the shot, but there's no evidence to suggest that players actually score differently by changing the angle they have to a green by about a minute's worth on a clock.
I did some preliminary work on this once. Not enough to be statistically significant (I got to like 50 shots, while I'd want to have about 150+ personally), but there was basically no scoring difference. The angle isn't often big enough anyway. Yeah, people feel a bit better, but… it didn't result in anything. So until you have actual data here, you're just saying stuff that people "feel" like should be true without really knowing if it is or not.
Ira brought up the 11th at Augusta. There's water there. Would you care to take a stab at the results there? Go back to page 11 for the graphic. What are your guesses?
And there certainly wasn't any controls that factored in weather, fairway slopes, preferred shot shapes, particular weakness or strengths of ones game, etc.
Because those things come out in the wash. If a golfer fades the ball, and he "tends to miss right more than he misses left" as was said (IIRC)… then he's already giving shots away, because he should be looking to center his distribution pattern, and THAT would be his aiming point. If he consistently aims to fade it 5 yards and fades it between 3 and 25… then he's just being kinda dumb, no?
And the emphasis on scoring has been all one sided, about making a good score with par or better, and forgetting about mitigating risk in trying to avoid worse than bogey.
No no no. It's far closer to the opposite of what you've said than that. Proper strategy lowers scores not by having the 15-handicapper make more birdies and pars, but by making fewer bogeys and doubles. How? By saying "no, don't challenge that bunker. Aim about 30 yards away from it, or more, because there's no real trouble over there."
The water or OB is the other head scratcher because there is nothing else on a course that makes me chase angles harder than playing to a best spot to avoid penalty strokes.
Not sure what you mean here. Hitting away from OB isn't "chasing angles." You're just hitting away from a penalty — you're not hitting it so you have a good "angle" to the green or your layup on a par five or whatever.
Are there cases where an angle can be worth an expected stroke value that is sufficiently?
Yep, pretty much. That's how this strategy stuff works.
And as I've said, we can talk about generalities, but we advise players on things that fit them. Some have smaller dispersions with their drivers. Or some are really good with wedges. Some pull their wedges more often than they realize, so they need to actually shift their aim so that their distribution is centered over where it should be, etc.
Here's the thing that some have mentioned, too… but not enough: 95% of golfers (or more) aren't considering any of this stuff when they play golf. So to those of you trying to discard shots and data because it doesn't match whatever new criteria you set up (and by the way, Arccos does know wind direction/strength, temperature, etc. in the area at the time shots were hit)… have to realize that most of the data isn't being played by people "chasing angles" anyway. That doesn't make it any less valid; the opposite. If the left side of the fairway on a certain hole was actually the "better angle," then millions of golfers would unwillingly and unwittingly be scoring better from there. Who cares where they TRIED to hit it - the fact is they ended up hitting from what is supposed to be the "better angle." And yet no data supports that they actually score better from there.
When we consult with a player we often consult more with the caddies, because they're the ones who can help their players gain a shot or two over time, by knowing this stuff. The players often just want to understand the over-view, to understand that we know what we're talking about, and then most of them just put it on the caddie to tell them where to aim. So, we work with a LOT of caddies to actually understand and know this stuff. The caddies are the ones writing everything down, and choosing where a player aims, etc. It's on him to know the system, most often, and the player to hit the shot. It's also on them to know how to adjust strategies when you're no longer playing for the "lowest average score." i.e. late Friday when you're two outside the cut line, late Sunday when you have a chance for a top-ten finish (and the potential T6 outweighs potentially falling from 12th to 18th…), etc.
Here's where I land on this…
- I (and Lou, and Scott, and Mark) have shared data showing that angles don't often matter.
- The other side has shared anecdotes and tried to discount what the data shows, but doesn't have any of their own data.
I believe the latter is true largely because… there's not really data out there supporting "angles matter as often as y'all think." I've looked. I haven't seen it. And I didn't go into it with an assumption. Hell, the data about how far away from the flag golfers should aim from as little as 70 yards surprised the heck out of me back in 2013/2014.
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That's much too long, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to read it. I'll leave y'all to this thread, for the most part, as I'm headed south to play a little golf.
