Tacking, laying-up and course management

[Rob Marshall]

Erik runs a glue factory as a side hustle when the lesson book is light. Apparently there aren’t any horses quite dead enough.

He’s not known for being tactful either…. “That's so bad… and I don't think you know why.”

[Michael Felton]

Michael,

If your scoring average is two shots better than the field average you only have a better chance of winning IF your scoring distribution is equal or larger than that of the fields.

Lets say that the field average is 50% for a given week and to win a golf tournament you must play above the 80% range for the week. If you're average is 65% +/- 15% you'll will only ever kiss the win threshold on the furthest of outliers, just one week out of the year. But someone who is average at 50% and has a distribution of +/- 40% will clear that 80% threshold more often, giving themselves a lot more chances to win the golf tournament.

They will of course miss a very high number of cuts in the process, but if the goal is to win, they are the better bet.


Tiger is one of the best putters who has ever played....

Let's look at an example shall we? Tiger's scoring average is better than everyone else's. Tiger won more events than everyone else. Tiger made more cuts than everyone else. Do you think he was taking a riskier strategy to up his win percentage at the cost of missed cuts? Or is it more likely that the things that made him good at making cuts also made him good at winning and also made him good at scoring average? If a player's scoring average is two shots better than the average, they're very good indeed. They'll win at a much higher lick than someone with an average scoring average.


Here is the thing - a golf tournament isn't one chance to increase your likelihood of making birdies. It's 72 chances. If you take a 50/50 chance 72 times, you're going to blow out about 36 times on average. No one is coming back from making 36 bogeys. The good side of the variance improves your chances of making birdie, but it doesn't guarantee it. So, to win, your strategy needs to be more conservative than that. If you need 10 coin flips to go your way to make it a win, then you're looking at 1 in 1,024 chance of it happening. No one has ever played 1,000 tournaments, so that's really not a good way to win.


The poker analogy is a good one by the way. If you wind up all in with a 90% chance of winning, I think we'd agree that's a good state of affairs to be in. Do that 20 times through a tournament though and you're looking at 0.9^20, which is about a 12% chance. You can be the best poker player in the world and still lose just because the cards are against you. You can't control the cards. All you can control is what you do with them. Likewise on the golf course, you can't control where in your shot pattern you're going to hit it. Sometimes you'll hit runner runner and win a pot that by the probabilities you should really have lost, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

In poker its often asked, when someone wins a decent-sized event is it due to luck or skill? And the simple answer is both.

I haven't said anything about the ratio and I've certainly never implied let alone said it took more luck than skill to win the Masters. And yes, I have seen his putting stats. He still wasn't going to make 90% of his 8-footers for a prolonged period of time or something. I've said that he was "lucky" (lots of the "good randomness" that week) in drastically out-performing what he could have expected after laying up on 16 par fives.

Of course it often takes a little luck to win. Zach just needed a lot more than usual. So, one can't really draw any conclusions about how good his strategy was. Zach's strategy may have actually lowered his chances of winning, which the "luck" (good randomness) made up.

Erik runs a glue factory as a side hustle when the lesson book is light. Apparently there aren’t any horses quite dead enough.

I'm not replying to myself here Tim! 

Rob, troll better.

[Garland Bayley]

...
For example, how did Zach perform after winning the Masters in 2007, as one would think he has come to understand how great his strategy is… right? Well, he finished T20 in 2008, missed the cut in 2009, 42nd in 2010, MCed in 2011… and then in his next ten Masters, finished in the top ten once, finished outside the top 30 five other times… not counting his four other times.

...

Sometimes I wonder if you ever play this game. Trying to correlate data from events a year apart makes little sense. Furthermore, trying to prove the point as if you know Zack used the same strategy in all those years is nonsense. You don't know whether he stuck to the same strategy even the next year.

It is far more likely that he was using the same strategy around the time of the 2007 Masters, than he was using it in the 2008 Masters, and following events. Probably more importantly, his game was in peak form in 2007, which contributed to all his results around that Masters win.

03/11/07 PODS Championship T14
03/18/07 Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by MasterCard T42   
03/25/07 World Golf Championships-CA Championship T9
04/08/07 Masters Tournament 1
04/15/07 Verizon Heritage 6
05/06/07 Wachovia Championship 84
05/13/07 THE PLAYERS Championship T16
05/20/07 AT&T Classic 1

[Philippe Binette]

Playing YOUR game and making the game simple are the two main issues in course management.


- Zach in 2007, played his strengths: wedge play. Conditions were tough and he took the big mistakes out of play on 13 and 15. He hits a draw... not the best ball flight from a hook lie on 13


- Tiger took trouble out of play at hoylake


- as for van de velde, the mistake is on the 2nd shot.. OB left, OB long, water short, 215 yards... and from where he was, you can barely see what you are hitting at..
Hitting the ball 80 yards back in play, he would not miss a 17 yard wide fairway... no way... then a pitching wedge... and kiss the trophy...
Also made a mistake on the 3rd shot... take an unplayable, drop on the crosswalk 40 yards behind... wedge on, 2 putts... 6 and open champion

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Sometimes I wonder if you ever play this game.

You wonder about a lot of things other people accept as common knowledge and fact, though, GB.

Furthermore, trying to prove the point as if you know Zack used the same strategy in all those years is nonsense. You don't know whether he stuck to the same strategy even the next year.

Keep up Garland. It's a supporting point, it's not foundational at all.

He was playing well, obviously, around the time of his win. Even if that means just in those four days, he was playing well. Unless you're Tiger Woods you can't win without playing well AND often a little luck (Tiger can play "average" by his standards, get little to no good luck, and still possibly win).

Still doesn't mean that his strategy was the best or that he didn't have to rely on a heck of a lot of "good randomness" going his way.

[David Ober]

I play with younger higher handicaps than myself. The other day one of them told me that I don't hit the ball all that much better, I just know all the tricks. The ball doesn't move and we have wonderful modern clubs. It only makes sense that the crafty golfer wins.


I thought the same thing about the old men I grew up competing against. I called them crusty while today I call myself crafty.

I like that: "Crafty instead of Crusty." LOL

[Ben Hollerbach]

Here is the thing - a golf tournament isn't one chance to increase your likelihood of making birdies. It's 72 chances. If you take a 50/50 chance 72 times, you're going to blow out about 36 times on average. No one is coming back from making 36 bogeys. The good side of the variance improves your chances of making birdie, but it doesn't guarantee it. So, to win, your strategy needs to be more conservative than that. If you need 10 coin flips to go your way to make it a win, then you're looking at 1 in 1,024 chance of it happening. No one has ever played 1,000 tournaments, so that's really not a good way to win.

Michael,

You can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re not looking at one individual player, but rather a field of ~144 players. Out of which, one player will win.

Let's dive into the coin flip a bit more. Imagine a field of 144 players participating in a 72 flip coin flip tournament. Half the field accepts a score of 36 correct calls and plays to the average (mean group) and half the field chooses to call their coin flip on all 72 flips (called group). If the winner of the tournament is the player with the most correctly called flips, how likely is the winner to come out of the mean group and how likely is the winner to come out of the called group?

After 100 simulations of this tournament, the called group always produced the winner. Not only that, but the highest the mean group ever finished in a tournament was 19th place! The called group and mean group would share the same average of 36, but since the call group has a greater potential to score both well higher and well lower than the mean group, the call group will always produce the winner.

Now the first simulation assumes everyone's average is the same, which we know it’s not. Using SG:All data from 2021, we see there is a +/- 2.1 stroke advantage range per round across the PGA Tour. Applying a field average advantage to all 144 players in the simulation, The mean group threshold would rise by 8.4 correct calls over 72 flips and the called group would experience a greater range of scores, will that impact who wins?

No, over another 100 tournament simulation, the mean group still did not win a single tournament! Even with the potential of the best called group player having a negative scoring advantage, at no point of time was the best called group player for a given tournament worse than the best mean group player at any tournament.

What is present is an overall reduction in scoring advantage and a higher finish by the mean group. In the first simulation, the average gap between the top mean group player (36) and the top called group player was 10 correct flips. In the second simulation that gap was reduced to 7.6 flips. For the mean group, there was always one player who was near or at the max advantage of 8.4 flips while for the called group, the players with the best advantage may not have also had the most correct calls. In the first simulation the best finish by the mean group was 19th place. In the second simulation the best finish by the mean group was 2nd, which occurred in the 100th tournament simulated. Close, but no cigar.

Regardless if it's a player coming into the week hot, a player who finds something during a practice round on Tuesday, or a player who starts off Thursday 3 under through 4; A hot player will play into that feeling as much as possible and ride that hot streak as far as it will take them. Some player’s confident play will cost them and they will miss the cut, but assuredly one will be able to ride their hot hand to victory.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

No, Ben.

The "mean" group will finish on average about 19th 37th (a bit higher because many of the "guessers" will finish "even" too), but you can't say that 19th is their "highest finish." Because of the randomness of the "guessers" group, or whatever you called the ones who take their chances with luck, the "mean" group could occasionally all tie for first as there's a non-zero chance all 36 72 players in the "guessers" group had some bad "luck" (randomness).

Edit: I had the field size as 72 in the first version of this post. You still missed the point of Michael's post above.

[Ben Hollerbach]

That's so bad… and I don't think you know why.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

That's so bad… and I don't think you know why.

You're right… I don't know why you're so bad at this. 

[Michael Felton]

Here is the thing - a golf tournament isn't one chance to increase your likelihood of making birdies. It's 72 chances. If you take a 50/50 chance 72 times, you're going to blow out about 36 times on average. No one is coming back from making 36 bogeys. The good side of the variance improves your chances of making birdie, but it doesn't guarantee it. So, to win, your strategy needs to be more conservative than that. If you need 10 coin flips to go your way to make it a win, then you're looking at 1 in 1,024 chance of it happening. No one has ever played 1,000 tournaments, so that's really not a good way to win.

Michael,

You can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re not looking at one individual player, but rather a field of ~144 players. Out of which, one player will win.

Let's dive into the coin flip a bit more. Imagine a field of 144 players participating in a 72 flip coin flip tournament. Half the field accepts a score of 36 correct calls and plays to the average (mean group) and half the field chooses to call their coin flip on all 72 flips (called group). If the winner of the tournament is the player with the most correctly called flips, how likely is the winner to come out of the mean group and how likely is the winner to come out of the called group?

After 100 simulations of this tournament, the called group always produced the winner. Not only that, but the highest the mean group ever finished in a tournament was 19th place! The called group and mean group would share the same average of 36, but since the call group has a greater potential to score both well higher and well lower than the mean group, the call group will always produce the winner.

Now the first simulation assumes everyone's average is the same, which we know it’s not. Using SG:All data from 2021, we see there is a +/- 2.1 stroke advantage range per round across the PGA Tour. Applying a field average advantage to all 144 players in the simulation, The mean group threshold would rise by 8.4 correct calls over 72 flips and the called group would experience a greater range of scores, will that impact who wins?

No, over another 100 tournament simulation, the mean group still did not win a single tournament! Even with the potential of the best called group player having a negative scoring advantage, at no point of time was the best called group player for a given tournament worse than the best mean group player at any tournament.

What is present is an overall reduction in scoring advantage and a higher finish by the mean group. In the first simulation, the average gap between the top mean group player (36) and the top called group player was 10 correct flips. In the second simulation that gap was reduced to 7.6 flips. For the mean group, there was always one player who was near or at the max advantage of 8.4 flips while for the called group, the players with the best advantage may not have also had the most correct calls. In the first simulation the best finish by the mean group was 19th place. In the second simulation the best finish by the mean group was 2nd, which occurred in the 100th tournament simulated. Close, but no cigar.

Regardless if it's a player coming into the week hot, a player who finds something during a practice round on Tuesday, or a player who starts off Thursday 3 under through 4; A hot player will play into that feeling as much as possible and ride that hot streak as far as it will take them. Some player’s confident play will cost them and they will miss the cut, but assuredly one will be able to ride their hot hand to victory.

So what you're really saying here is if you have 144 players, 72 of them take even par as their result, 72 of them take a 50/50 chance of birdie or bogey on all 72 holes, what are the chances that even par wins? That's really not how this works.

First of all, it's not birdie or bogey vs par. It's something like this:

Aggressive: birdie 22%, par 58%, bogey 20%
Optimal: birdie 19%, par 70%, bogey 11%

Now run each of those for 72 players each and 72 holes each and then tell me who wins most of the time.

Just for fun, throw in one Tiger Woods - give him birdie 28%, par 64%, bogey 7%

I cobbled something together in excel and ran 50 simulations. I got the aggressive group winning 6 times. The optimal group winning 28 times and Tiger winning 16 times. That's a 32% win rate for him, which feels about right for when he was at his best.

The optimal group is a little lower scoring average than the aggressive group because, well, they're optimal. Scoring averages are 71.64 for the aggressive group, 70.56 for the optimal group and 68.22 for Tiger.

[Ben Hollerbach]

Michael,

On every page of this thread, Tiger Woods is mentioned as most likely the only player in the history of the game who’s average was good enough to win at a measurable rate.

You yourself even stated it in Reply #46:

In any case, I think peak Tiger could show up and play at his average and still win. He wasn't guaranteed to win (he was pretty much guaranteed to win when he did outperform himself - think 2000 US Open and Open), but he could win. Just about anyone else needs things to fall their way to win in a given week.

Continuing to bring up Tiger as an example of average strategy and attempting to extrapolate his once in forever level of performance to the rest of the PGA Tour demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the basis for this discussion.

That same misunderstanding appears to have been applied to the coin flip example. The example YOU established in Reply #76. I just simply ran the test. If you don’t like the results, that's on you.

Since you no longer like the coin flip test, let’s dive deeper using ACTUAL scoring data:

Through Colonial last year, 21 events and 105,065 combined holes played, the unadjusted scoring average on the PGA tour was 71.15. Par for the combined calendar of courses over that period was 71.52. The average scoring range on the tour at that time was from 69.24 to 73.62.

The breakdown of individual scoring over those 105,065 holes was as follows:

• -2 (0.62%)
• -1 (21.53%)
• E (62.82%)
• +1 (13.83%)
• +2*(1.19%) *Double Bogey or Greater

Using these probabilities we can create a weighted simulation to test what would happen if a group of randomly generated players played against the low scoring average. This time, rather than using a 50% field average, the percentage was increased to 75%, leaving only 36 of 144 players trying to ride out a hot streak to the win. As the best scoring average was 2.28 strokes under par, the threshold to ensure a win would be set at -9.12. So the test group would have to have a player shoot -10 or better to ensure a win.

After 1,000 simulated tournaments, The test group won 999 tournaments and the average benchmark won 1 tournament.

That’s it, just 1.

A 0.1% win rate.

It even surprised me that it was that low!

Comparing the simulated wins to the actual wins from the source data, the range of winning scores and win average match up to each other. It is clear that the simulation created an accurate portrayal of real world events.

	Simulated Wins (1000)	Actual Wins (25)
Lowest Winning Score	-25	-25
Average Winning Score	-16.26	-16.05
Median Winning Score	-16	-17
Highest Winning Score	-9	-6*
Wins Below Threshold	1	1

*2021 PGA Championship

If you care to take a look at the simulation results, or to run your own simulation, you can do so here:
GCA: PGA Tour Winning Simulator (Weighted Scoring)

Since you insist on bringing up Tiger Woods, let's look at what an average 2000 Tiger Woods would do in this scenario. With an unadjusted scoring average of 68.17 for the year, Tiger’s average four day score would be -13.4. Running another 1,000 tournament simulation, Average Tiger Woods would win 13.8% of the time. Out of his 9 wins in 2000, only one of them was anywhere near or below this threshold, the US Open.  Looking into the other 8 wins that year, his average play would have only won 3 of them.  Even Tiger needed to chase his tail to win at the rates he did.

First of all, it's not birdie or bogey vs par. It's something like this:

Aggressive: birdie 22%, par 58%, bogey 20%
Optimal: birdie 19%, par 70%, bogey 11%

Now run each of those for 72 players each and 72 holes each and then tell me who wins most of the time.

Where did your numbers come from?

The Aggressive group’s probabilities are very close to PGA Tour averages that I posted above. The PGA Tour averages should have been used as a control group for your test, not as an experimental group. Especially when you consider the average PGA Tour player has nearly the same birdie probability with a significantly less bogey probability. Clearly you assume a greater risk has to be taken on to earn birdies than is actually true.

How can you justify the change in Aggressive (average) strategy to “Optimal” strategy? Only a 3% reduction in birdie probability to a 12% increase in par probability, and a 9% decrease in bogey probability! So a minimal difference in birdie potential, but a much lower risk of making a bogey! How are you correlating that? Do you actually have data to support those probabilities?

[Michael Felton]

First of all, it's not birdie or bogey vs par. It's something like this:

Aggressive: birdie 22%, par 58%, bogey 20%
Optimal: birdie 19%, par 70%, bogey 11%

Now run each of those for 72 players each and 72 holes each and then tell me who wins most of the time.

Where did your numbers come from?

The Aggressive group’s probabilities are very close to PGA Tour averages that I posted above. The PGA Tour averages should have been used as a control group for your test, not as an experimental group. Especially when you consider the average PGA Tour player has nearly the same birdie probability with a significantly less bogey probability. Clearly you assume a greater risk has to be taken on to earn birdies than is actually true.

How can you justify the change in Aggressive (average) strategy to “Optimal” strategy? Only a 3% reduction in birdie probability to a 12% increase in par probability, and a 9% decrease in bogey probability! So a minimal difference in birdie potential, but a much lower risk of making a bogey! How are you correlating that? Do you actually have data to support those probabilities?

I made them up, but they're educated guesses. The whole point of the optimal strategy is it's really hard to markedly up your birdie percentage. All you can really do is reduce your bogey percentage. That's by far the biggest differentiator. The whole point of what I'm saying is if you are more aggressive you might increase your birdie rate by a tiny bit, but you'll make a bunch more bogeys. You seem to think it's 50/50, but it's not. Birdies are hard. Even for tour pros.


So you're still testing the wrong thing. It's not riding out a hot streak against a bunch of people averaging par. It's both groups optimal and aggressive riding out a hot streak and seeing which comes out on top more often. Increasing your birdie chances at the cost of bogey chances is not a good idea. Especially as it isn't a straight trade. It's a loaded deal where going for birdies costs you more.


I threw Tiger in mostly out of interest and to show that my numbers were about right. You're also throwing in "average" Tiger. Tiger doesn't always play to his average. He averages out to that. Sometimes better and sometimes worse. That's why I was running my simulation for everyone, not cherry picking some average score (which isn't how any of this works). No one goes out and always shoots their average.


Could you perhaps state what it is that you are trying to prove here? I'm trying to show that playing optimally even if it costs you a little bit in birdies (questionable) is better than being aggressive because the added bogeys you'll make by being aggressive will more than outweigh the added birdies.


Scott Fawcett by the way in building out his system has actually run a bunch of simulations with different flag positions on different holes and by mapping tour player shot patterns over different targets to find the optimal solution. Each result of an approach shot has an average number of remaining strokes to get down. He maps out how often you'll make birdie and how often you'll make bogey. Then figured out what's the optimal target. Then narrowed that down to something that is usable and a player is able to figure out on the fly.


At the end of the day though, if a target is optimal, then the scoring average by taking that as your target is lower than the aggressive option. It's typically lower by around 0.05 to 0.1 shots. Over the course of a round that's between 0.9 and 1.8 strokes on the average score. The only way that works is if you increase your bogey chances more than you increase your birdie chances. If it didn't, it wouldn't be optimal. The numbers I gave worked out to 0.06 shots improvement per hole with a corresponding scoring average difference of 18x that or 1.08. So those numbers are pretty close to correct. I could shift them all up or down a fraction if you like. The average is 22%, 63% and 15% for under par, even and over par on each hole, so that's what we want our two groups to average out to.


How about:


Aggressive 24%, 56%, 20% - average 71.3
Optimal 20%, 70%, 10% - average 70.2


So that still maintains the 1.1 scoring average difference, which is as I said about what you'd expect. I'll even keep Tiger out of it this time. The aggressive group won 12 of my 50 simulations and the optimal group won 38 and I gave three playoffs out of three to the aggressive group because it's just not a fair fight.

[Ben Hollerbach]

Michael,

From what I can tell, the “Optimal Strategy” you’ve mentioned time and time again in this thread is simply the strategy that allows a player to play optimally. But how does one execute this strategy and how is the strategy impacted by a field of players who all have the same goal?

You’ve fabricated a breakdown of what the scoring probabilities of your “Optimal Strategy” should look like, but it’s not rooted in actual performance. Could you put some supported context to your “Optimal Strategy”?

What is it we’re supposed to take from this? Is this like a John Maddenism in which “usually the team that scores the most points wins the game”?

How about:

Aggressive 24%, 56%, 20% - average 71.3
Optimal 20%, 70%, 10% - average 70.2

Please explain, if the the actual PGA Tour average probabilities are 21%, 63%, 14%, how your Aggressive and Optimal probabilities make any sense?

[Michael Felton]

Michael,

From what I can tell, the “Optimal Strategy” you’ve mentioned time and time again in this thread is simply the strategy that allows a player to play optimally. But how does one execute this strategy and how is the strategy impacted by a field of players who all have the same goal?

You’ve fabricated a breakdown of what the scoring probabilities of your “Optimal Strategy” should look like, but it’s not rooted in actual performance. Could you put some supported context to your “Optimal Strategy”?

What is it we’re supposed to take from this? Is this like a John Maddenism in which “usually the team that scores the most points wins the game”?

How about:

Aggressive 24%, 56%, 20% - average 71.3
Optimal 20%, 70%, 10% - average 70.2

Please explain, if the the actual PGA Tour average probabilities are 21%, 63%, 14%, how your Aggressive and Optimal probabilities make any sense?

I have 72 of each type of player in my field. I looped eagles and doubles in with birdies and bogeys since their frequency is low and it would probably improve my point even further if I separated them out, so it's 22, 63 and 15 (which adds to 100). Then "optimal" represents the optimal target to take on an approach shot. Aggressive is if your target is the flag. Scoring average aiming at the flag on the PGA Tour is about 0.05 to 0.1 strokes worse than the optimal target (per Scott's work). I'll get into that more below. I then picked my two strategies so as to meet two constraints - one they average out to PGA tour average and two they work out to a difference of 0.05 to 0.1 strokes per hole. So my two groups have birdie averages of 24% and 20%, which means an average of 22% which matches the tour average. Bogey averages of 10% and 20% average out to 15%, which is the tour average and then the par percentages have to tie (or it won't add to 100).


What we are supposed to take from this is if you're a player on the PGA tour and you want to improve your win percentage, it's much better to be in the optimal group than the aggressive group. The optimal group (given two groups that are otherwise identical) wins at roughly a 3:1 lick against the aggressive group. 50 events, 72 players in each group, you have a roughly 50% chance of winning one of those 50 events if you're in the optimal group and a roughly 17% chance if you're in the aggressive group.


With respect to the "more about this later", here is how that works. Per Mark Broadie's work, you can peg an expected number of shots to complete the hole from any point on the golf course. From a short-sided greenside bunker, that might be 2.55 strokes. From rough around the green it might be 2.45 strokes. From fairway 20 yards away it might be 2.15 strokes and from on the green, if you're 33 feet away it's right around 2.00 strokes and if you're 8 feet away it's 1.50 strokes. Then you take your shot pattern and overlay it around your "target". If you make that target the flag, then you overlay your shot pattern, calculate the number of shots it takes to complete the hole, on average, from every spot within that pattern and then you add them all up and divide by the total number of shots hit to the green in your pattern and you have the average number of strokes it will take you to complete the hole given your target is the flag.


Then you move your target around and repeat. You can start with the middle of the green. Sometimes that will be better, sometimes worse and sometimes the same. So you do it again and again and again for different targets. Until you find the one spot that results in the lowest expectation. That's your optimal strategy. The optimal strategy, given PGA tour pin locations is roughly 0.05 to 0.10 strokes better than the flag. In my simulation, the aggressive group always aims at the flag. The optimal group always aims at the optimal target. So the optimal group is in my simulation 0.06 strokes better.


Then I calculate for 144 players using randomness their combined 72 hole scores given the ratios noted above. Then I check which player has the lowest score. They're the winner of the simulated tournament. If they're in the optimal group that's a win to the optimal group and if they're in the aggressive group then that is a win for the aggressive group. Over the 50 simulations I ran (not quite sure how to set up a macro to run it lots of times), I got 38 for the optimal group and 12 for the aggressive group. That's despite the fact they are making fewer birdies, which again I think is questionable since most birdies come on the par fives and optimal and aggressive are very similar strategies I suspect on par fives.


In reality I don't think anyone actually aims at the flag all the time. And very few aim at it even much of the time. Like take 16 and 17 at TPC. The right pins on those two holes only idiots would aim straight at those and there aren't many of them on the PGA tour in the first place, so the margins are smaller, but every little bit of an edge helps and playing optimally will give you the best chance to win you can get. Then your actual skill level - basically how small your shot patterns are - will dictate how often you win and the luck of where your scores happen to fall in each given week will dictate which tournament you win.


It's interesting to throw Tiger in there because his shotmaking capabilities are (were) so good, that he was able to win at such an incredible rate despite all the randomness sometimes working for him and sometimes against him.


Side note - Shotlink data, which I think goes back to 2003, can show you every single shot hit by a particular player and where it ended up. For a single shot it's impossible to know where the player was aiming and where it ended up relative to their target. But for 1000s of shots, you can start to pick out the patterns. Scott F went back and looked at every approach shot Tiger hit and by laying all of those shots over a notional target, he was able to figure out where the center of Tiger's shot pattern was and presumably therefore what his target was. Those targets are very close to what his algorithm comes up with.


If you want to know what the optimal strategy is, it's in DECADE. I don't think it's my place to share it here since it's Scott's proprietary information.

[Rob Marshall]

"If you want to know what the optimal strategy is, it's in DECADE. I don't think it's my place to share it here since it's Scott's proprietary information."

I would like to see DECADE in a book. Brodie's book was interesting but not what I was looking for.

[Jeff Schley]

2003-2010 PGA Tour stats to bring to the table. You want to be top right obviously and Tiger is there.  Surprised where Furyk ended up.

Here is the description:Figure 7: Scatter chart of putts gained versus long game strokes gained using 2003-2010 data. Each data point represents the results for a single golfer; a few golfers are indicated to illustrate. The regression trendline shows a slight negative correlation between the two skill categories (the correlation is −14% with a standard error of 7%).

[Jeff Schley]

Another good one.
Table 1: Total strokes gained per round, broken down into three categories: long game (shots over 100 yards from the hole), short game (shots under 100 yards from the hole, excluding putts) and putting (shots on the green, not including the fringe). Ranks are out of the 299 PGA TOUR golfers with at least 120 rounds during 2003-2010.

[Jeff Schley]

Talk about dominant. Tiger was the best at almost everything for 100 plus shots.
Table 2: Long game strokes gained per round, broken down into five categories: long tee shots (tee shots starting over 250 yards from the hole), approach shots 100-150 yards from the hole, approach shots 150-200 yards from the hole, approach shots 200-250 yards from the hole and shots over 250 yards from the hole (excluding tee shots). For space reasons, recovery shots and sand shots greater than 100 yards from the hole are not reported (but are included in the total long game strokes gained). Ranks are out of the 299 golfers with at least 120 rounds during 2003-2010.

[Jeff Schley]

Let's factor in the course! Any surprises? Kind of surprised about Pebble Beach, but that is becuase they had a US Open I would think, some for Torrey Pines. Also Westchester CC I haven't played, but is it that tough? Greens must be diabolic as they have it as the toughest course for putting and short shots.

Table 8: Ranking of courses by difficulty factors. Ranks are out of the 45 courses that hosted PGA TOUR tournaments and had at least 12 rounds of data during 2003-2010.

[Jeff Schley]

Maybe this is the type of Data that Eric has access to?  8 million shots. Who says the sand isn't a hazard?

Table 9: Average number of strokes to complete the hole for PGA TOUR golfers from various starting positions. Distance to the hole is measured in yards. Values are estimated using over eight million shots during 2003-2010.

[Jeff Schley]

PUTTING!  We know why Sergio and Vijay didn't win as much as they should have. Actually Vijay was so good tee to green he could have really had a run had his putting been just average.  Also Freddy was terrible during this period on short/medium putts. Where is our poster child in our argument Zach Johnson? Stricker overrated?  Badd's was much better than we remember.



Table 4: Putting strokes gained per round, broken down into three distance categories: short putts (0-6 feet), medium length putts (7-21 feet) and long putts (22 feet and over). Ranks are out of the 299 golfers with at least 120 rounds during 2003-2010.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Maybe this is the type of Data that Eric has access to?  8 million shots. Who says the sand isn't a hazard?

Everyone has access to that data. That's just from Every Shot Counts.

https://thesandtrap.com/gallery/image/41-strokes-gained-table-5-2/

[Michael Felton]

2003-2010 PGA Tour stats to bring to the table. You want to be top right obviously and Tiger is there.  Surprised where Furyk ended up.

Here is the description:Figure 7: Scatter chart of putts gained versus long game strokes gained using 2003-2010 data. Each data point represents the results for a single golfer; a few golfers are indicated to illustrate. The regression trendline shows a slight negative correlation between the two skill categories (the correlation is −14% with a standard error of 7%).

Hey Siri - how do I get to be the best ever?