The St. Simons Open, pt. 1
A deep-dive into how I prepare to play a professional golf tournament.
This is my first installment of a series I’m doing on the tournament I played last week, the St. Simons Open on the GPro Tour. It’s going to be a pretty deep look at the inner workings of preparing for a tournament and interpreting the results. I’m really excited to bring it to you all.
I have some housekeeping to start with — if you’re disinterested, scroll to the section break (and then hit a button to open this email in a browser — see housekeeping for why).
A quick status update to start things off: I’m thinking about moving publication to Fridays moving forward. To be honest, zero thought went into choosing Thursday in the first place, and something feels nice about this being a Friday read. But I’ll leave it to you all.
Second, I said this week’s edition would be a comprehensive breakdown of my most recent event, the St. Simons Open. Turns out, that’s a ton of material. I could either condense it into an abbreviated breakdown, or I could have it come out in multiple installments. I’m choosing to preserve the depth and stretch it over multiple weeks (this thing is called Into The Weeds, after all). It’ll give me space to explain things more clearly, let me add detail, and generally deliver a better product.
So, this is the pre-tournament prep edition. Even this section is running well on the long side, though I think it’s good enough material for a deep dive. I imagine I’ll be able to fit mid-event adjustments, post-game performance assessments, and future adjustments in next week’s edition. But that’s next week’s decision.
All of this will get technical at times, but I’ll provide clarifications in the footnotes as I go and try to make it accessible, regardless of your golfing knowledge. I’ll also talk about some minutia/corner cases1, so it’s a coin flip whether any footnote is a 100-level class or 400-level. Either way, probably worth a glance.
Lastly, as I’m publishing this now, it seems there’s a limit to how big a newsletter can be to be viewed as an email. There’s a bunch of images in this edition, and that’s blown through my data limit. I’m hoping it’s easy to just click a button and look at it online, but I’ll monitor that once it comes out.
There’s the housekeeping — without further ado:
The GPro Tour is a mini tour operating in the Southeastern US. It hosts 54-hole (three-round) events with a cut after the first two rounds. This week, a field of 84 players was cut to the top 30 and ties after 36 holes. GPro hosts fantastic events: they’re expensive to enter ($995), but they’re well run, held on quality golf courses, and they pay well. This week, 33 players (the top 30 through 2 days, plus ties) competed for $68,000, with the winner taking home $10,000 and the top 26 players making their entry fee back.
This week’s event was held at King and Prince Golf Club in St Simons, GA (my new hometown). It’s a par 72 playing 6462 yards. The course is rated at 71.82, though we played it 70 yards longer than the tips on the scorecard, so we can assume it’s bang-on average, difficulty-wise. However, the slope rating is 1403, which will be relevant later.
Looking at historical data, I’m guessing the cut will fall at –7. [Yes, the event happened last week, but we’re still going to future-tense it.] In 2024, the cut was –4, but the wind blew. It’s going to be calm this year, and, when it was calm in 2023, the cut was –7, so we’ll use that as a benchmark. –7 over 36 holes is basically –4 each day. So I have to find a way to shoot a pair of 68s. (Of course, it’d be great to beat this, but we’re hopefully setting 68 as a floor when we start planning out strategy.)
Here’s the back-of-the-napkin math. On a good day, you’d birdie all 4 par-5s, but it’s tough to count on that (after all, a 500yd par-4 would likely play over par). So we’re saying I’ll find a way to birdie 3/4, playing them –3. As for the 4 par-3s, playing them even par for the week will gain you strokes on nearly any field. Lastly, I’ve recently averaged 3 bogeys per round, which I think I can knock down to 2 with better strategy decisions under tournament conditions. Add up par-5 scoring, par-3 scoring, and bogeys, and that gets you to –1. Meaning, I need to find 3 more birdies to get to my goal of –4. That means birdieing 3/10 par-4s.
The question of how I make these birdies gets a bit more technical. The simplest way to think about it is to work backwards from the hole. If you want to make 3/10 birdies, you should give yourself an average birdie putt with a 30% make rate. On Tour, this is right around a 12-foot putt4. Now, work backwards from there: from how far away do Tour players average hitting it to 12’? Turns out, around 45 yards5. This means, based on the math, I’d have to average leaving myself 45 yards to the green in the middle of the fairway to make my three birdies. And that’s just to make the cut.
You can see my problem with expected-value type golf math in general. The numbers add up for Tour setups, and they give good guidance for most players. To be clear: a golfer without rudimentary understanding of Strokes Gained and DECADE is like a poker player who doesn’t know implied odds — you can have all the fun in the world, but you’re leaving decidedly better performance on the table.6 With that said, to make the top-10 in this event when it was played in 2023, you needed to fire –14 for three days. And, when it comes to these mini-tour setups when guys are taking it way deep, the numerical analysis basically says “damn, those guys played great” and not much else.
Here’s the additional problem: the course setup takes away my best skill. I’m a very good driver of the golf ball. On average, I’ll gain about a stroke against PGA Tour players off the tee in every round I play. Here’s my breakdown over my last 9 rounds:
This strength is two-fold. First, I hit the ball hard: my average tee shot goes 296 compared to the Tour average of 280, and I average 328 yards with driver while Tour pros average somewhere around 300.7
At the same time, I’m a very accurate driver of the golf ball.8 I’ve hit an average of 60% of my fairways in my latest sample. As such, while I gain 0.9 strokes off the tee with driving distance each round, I also gain 0.6 strokes with driving accuracy.9
Using these statistics, I can expect to gain 1.0-1.5 shots off the tee compared to a Tour player each round — by far my most valuable skill.
Here’s the problem: King and Prince doesn’t allow players to take much advantage off the tee. You’ll remember the slope rating is pretty high at 140; this is largely because there’s OB on both sides off most tees, thick trees lining fairways, and plenty of water. Most holes are just too tight to pull longer clubs and push up towards the green.
Let’s use the 17th hole as an example, a 420-yard par-4. In theory, if you can push a drive 300 yards, leaving a 120yd approach from the fairway, you’d gain 0.17 strokes with that tee shot.
However, a 300 yard drive will have (roughly) a 65 yard dispersion, meaning you need a 65 yard window between penalty shots to hit into (remember, penalty shots are to be avoided at all costs — it’s a full shot you’re giving up automatically, sometimes two!). On this hole, the distance between OB stakes is 54 yards, which is far too tight to hit into. Additionally, there are trees up the right side close to the tee, meaning you’d have to hit a big cut over the trees to hit the fairway at 300yds.
Scaling back to 2-iron, I hit it about 275 total yards with a dispersion around 53 yards.
On this hole, there’s 54 yards of space at 275 yards — in theory, this is enough. However, to hit the center of that window, I need to aim pretty much into a bunker. I’d much rather not hit that approach shot from a bunker, so this also doesn’t seem like a good option.
So, for the week, I’ll be hitting 4-iron off the tee on 17, leaving myself in front of those two bunkers with around 180 yards into the green. Against Tour average, if I execute this shot and hit the fairway, I’ll actually lose 0.06 strokes. But there simply isn’t room to push my tee shot any further up the fairway than this. Again, this is where Strokes Gained doesn’t tell the full story: on this hole in particular, it’s straight up irresponsible to push a tee ball up into a place where you’d be gaining strokes off the tee — and that’s according to the same numerical approach that the statistic itself is based off of.
This is the difficulty of mini tour golf for my skill profile: It’s really hard to take advantage of skill off the tee. It effectively takes driver out of my bag. As a spoiler: after going through the whole course, I’ll hit 3 drivers, 3 2-irons, 6 4-irons, a 5-iron and a 6-iron off the tees on par-4s and par-5s. That means I’m hitting 4-iron just as often as I’m able to hit anything longer than 4-iron. With my skill off the tee effectively neutralized, I’ll have to find another way to attack the golf course.
As I see it, there’s basically two routes to go. Either I can commit to playing aggressive and scrambling hard, or I can play conservative, avoid mistakes, and hope the birdies fall at some point.
There’s two reasons not to play aggressive. First, on most holes, there simply isn’t space between OB stakes to make aggressive plays off the tee. It’s one thing to punch out of the trees from a bad spot and another to reload and hit my third shot from the tee. Second, we’re on an island in south Georgia — the grass is grainy Bermuda, and the soil is silty and soft. The bounce is out to lunch and will not help you. I find it a nightmare to chip from. So banking on a bunch of shortsided up-and-downs to elevated greens feels scarier than it ordinarily might.
As for the conservative route, the penalties off the tees put a high premium on driving accuracy, and the greens are small, meaning I’ll have a decent number of birdie looks simply by hitting the green. So the goal is simply to hit as many greens as possible.
The best way to hit a green is to have an unobstructed shot towards it. This sounds silly to say, but it’s the basis of my strategy this week. Instead of measuring between penalty shots, I’m picking a smaller window: the window between overhanging trees that would obstruct my approach shot.
Let’s look at the 2nd hole as an example:
I start by drawing a shape that has corners on the edges of the green and sides that run along the tree line. This means that, if I hit it anywhere along the base of the shape, I’ll have an unobstructed look at the entire green. Now, I have to extend the sides of the shape back until the base is wide enough to fit the dispersion for one of my tee clubs. The hole is too narrow to fit driver, 4-wood, 2-iron, or even 4-iron. But, at 225 yards, I have 43 yards of space, which is roughly the dispersion of my 5-iron.10 And that’s why, on this 370-yard par-4, I’m going to hit 5-iron pitching-wedge.
To go back to the back-of-the-napkin math: let’s say I still play the par-fives –3 and the par-threes E. If I make two bogeys, I’ll need three birdies on the par 4s to get to –4. But then bogey avoidance is the same as a birdie. If I can avoid bogeys, I only need one birdie on the par fours. More likely, I’ll make a bogey somewhere, but then 2 par-four birdies — or a birdie on a par-3, or birdieing the fourth par-five — will get me to –4 for the day. Do that twice, and I’ll most likely have made the cut and will cash a check.
And so that’s the way I’m approaching this golf course. I’m going to play conservatively off the tee, hit a shitload of greens, and try to roll in some putts. To be honest, it doesn’t set up great for my skillset. But I’m deciding that the best way to attack it is to play smart, play conservative, and play patient, and hopefully let good things come. As for whether they did, stay tuned for next week’s installment, and thanks for reading!
Get further into the weeds, if you will.
This means that a scratch golfer (or a golfer with a handicap of 0) would meet their handicap if they shot even-par 72. This isn’t quite the same as their average score — it means they’ve played reasonably well, a little above average. The handicap system is strange — don’t worry about it much.
While course rating tells you how a scratch golfer would play, the slope tells you how much harder the course is for a bogey golfer versus a scratch golfer. The higher the slope, the more a scratch golfer (handicap 0) is supposed to beat a bogey golfer (handicap 18) by. The average slope for a US golf course is 113, with the very highest being 155 — so 140 is quite high. Meaning, while it’s of average difficulty to a scratch golfer, it’s substantially more difficult for a bogey golfer — about four shots so, meaning a bogey golfer would shoot +22 if they played at the same relative level of a scratch player who shot even.
If you’re unfamiliar with the logic here, by far the greatest determinant of how often a player makes a putt is the length of the putt. A good golfer will make a 3’ putt 99% of the time. For 8’, it’s 50%. These are PGA Tour statistics, and I’m not a PGA Tour player, but the numbers are close enough for our purposes.
Similar logic here: how close a PGA Tour player hits it to the hole is determined by how close they are to the green. The closer they are to the green, the closer they’re expected to hit their next shot.
If you’d like to learn more, I’m having a tough time finding a simple explainer, but you can start with this video from Scott Fawcett:
Simply put, Strokes Gained measures progress to the hole in units of strokes. If an 8’ putt is 50/50, then you average 1.5 strokes to hole out from 8’. If you make the putt, you’ve advanced the ball 1.5 strokes closer to the hole with 1 stroke, meaning you gained 0.5 strokes on that putt. The same math applies to any other shot: if you’d average 3 strokes to hole out from 165 yards, and you hit it to 8’ on the green, you’d also gain 0.5 strokes with that approach: 3.0 (avg. from 165yds) – 1.5 (avg. from 8’) – 1 (the stroke you made) = 0.5 (strokes gained on that shot).
A more technical note: These stats are way skewed, and if you’re reading this footnote it means I’m about to give away the punchline. Basically, if I could hit driver more often, I’d average way more than 296 off the tee — closer to that 328 driver average. HOWEVA, I’m not playing a 7400 yard PGA Tour setup very often, and I’m forced to hit a lot of shorter clubs off the tee — this skews my average driving distance well down.
You might be asking, “wait, if driving distance statistics are skewed down because you’re hitting a lot of irons, then are driving accuracy statistics skewed up because you’re hitting iron?” Great observation! In reality, I don’t think there’s much skew — after all, I’m hitting iron because I’m hitting it into a tighter spot. Also, if my 2-iron goes the same distance as someone else’s driver, then any angular deviation from the target line creates the exact same lateral dispersion from the target for the both of us — it’s actually not any easier to hit it straight just because it’s an iron. In theory, I’m taking on about as much difficulty accuracy-wise by hitting iron that someone would by hitting driver on a bigger golf course. However, I do not have the data to back this up — this is all just gut feel. It’s probably a bit skewed, just not as much as you’d think.
As for the penalty strokes, another bit of a data artifact here. These statistics include casual rounds and money games. By and large, penalty strokes off the tee are a function of poor strategy: penalty strokes are so detrimental to scoring that strategy off the tee revolves around avoiding them at all costs. As such, most of those penalty strokes can be attributed to casual golf when I’m taking on excessive risk or haven’t selected optimal targets rather than making poor swings. Again, a generalization, but a useful one.
I’ve made educated guesses to figure out these dispersions. More specifically, someone who knows more than I do has made educated guesses (thank you, Lou Stagner). In case you’re wondering where these numbers are coming from. In the future, I’m going to start measuring things for myself and get my own data.
Nice post, love the detail on stats and dispersion. What app is that for driving target selection - DECADE?