This episode is brought to you by Michelobaltra. Michelobaltra is perfect for more than just the summer heat this year, because not only is it refreshing and crisp with only 95 calories, but ultra is also the official beer sponsor of Team USA at the Olympic Games Paris 2024. Celebrate every point, race, and moment with Team USA and Michelobaltra for the Olympic Games Paris 2024. Stock up on Michelobaltra and cheer on Team USA. Enjoy responsibly, copyright 2024, and Heisler Bush Michelobaltra, light beer St. Louis, Missouri. Welcome back to another episode of The Sweet Spot. This is John Sherman from the Foundations of Golf, and as always, I'm joined by Adam from Adam Young Golf. So I'm excited about today's episode. We got a mutual friend of ours. Guy who's been in the online golf community for a while. I think some of you listening will know him, and we're going to talk about one of our favorite topics. Double bogeys. Wah, wah. Cue them. Wah, wah music. No, but this is going to be, I think this is going to be a good one. We got a lot of stats and sights from millions of golf shots. So welcome to our buddy, Mike Hutchinson, affectionately known as Hutch. Welcome to The Sweet Spot, buddy. Hey, thanks so much for having me guys. It's kind of surreal to be here because I've been a long time listener, I guess, first time caller. That's right. And when you asked, I was more than happy to come on and super excited about what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. So Mike has, I know he's worked with Adam. He's been listening to the show for a while. I've actually played with him, Joel. I've played with him more than you. I've met him. What he's not saying is that he's beat me mercilessly every time that we've played. Not at all. Hell, I didn't. That's true. That's true. That's a close match. I've played with Hutch. Was it last summer we played? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I watched him record a very nice eagle. You had a very nice eagle earlier around the driver off the deck. Yeah. Yes. That was a sick shot. So there's going to blow people's minds. Both of us have met Hutch in person, but Adam and I have still never met in person. I think that's a little known fact of sweet spot listeners. Wow. We have never met in person. Allow that to sink in, everyone. I'm killing Vegas trip. Yeah. Well, we were all going to meet last year, this time last year. Right? That's right. It didn't work out. Yeah. I bailed on everyone, unfortunately. So yeah, Hutch, I think you have a very interesting story. He works for Arcos now, but he's been someone who got back into golf, got really interested in golf improvement. Like he's done a bunch of cool stuff on Twitter with practice experiments, broke into the golf industry using his, can we call you a data scientist? What are you? I don't understand what you do. Hey, data scientist, analyst, yeah, that's fine. Okay. He's way smarter than me. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Not sure about that. He's gotten to scratch level. So he's done it all. He's been, he's a huge member of the chasing scratch community. I was on a trip with him to one of their events. We had a blast. So before we get into all the stats and all the wonderful stories, we're going to be telling about the numbers. Tell us a little bit about your personal journey with golf, because I think a lot of people will see themselves in you. Yeah. And a similar story to yourself in a way, John, I played in high school. I was a decent player, but recruiters weren't knocking down my door or anything, got kind of burnt out a little bit on the game, largely because I just didn't know how to get better. And took about a 20 year hiatus from the game where I'd play, you know, a scramble or two a year, but really nothing, yeah, nothing substantial. And then I went on a buddy's trip to spyglass in Spanish Bay. And I think I birdied like three of the first five holes at Spanish Bay. And that was it. I just got completely bit by the bug again. I've always been a bit obsessive by nature and golf became my obsession. I discovered that there was this whole universe out there of tools for improvement that really didn't exist when I was younger. So launch monitors, science of skill development that you guys teach, strokes gained and arcos, which was actually one of the first improvement products that I bought when I started to get back into it. And I realized that as someone who was working in data science, pretty skilled with it, I could quantify my improvement and be super targeted in my practice. So I set off on that path, realized very quickly that I, you know, there were these huge deficits in my game and fortunate enough to go on a trip to Vegas and meet up with Adam and got a lesson from him. And we started working together, that in-person lesson and then worked online. It really just, I started to improve by kind of leaps and bounds, got very obsessive with you know, tracking my stats, ended up getting my own launch monitor. I moved to a golf course and I was able to go from about a nine or a 10 handicap down to scratch in about three years. And you know, after that, the next logical step was to leave my nice cushy job at Amazon and join the team at Archos to hopefully help others. So yeah, that's, that's good. You're a little obsessive, right? Yeah. Let's just live on a golf course. Got, you know, if you're not going to go all in, what's the point? Yeah. You know, it's funny because I've gotten over the years I've gotten so many emails and messages from golfers who are like, how do I break into the golf industry? And it's not an easy industry to break into, I don't think, or at least that's been my experience. And you've done that. So it's very cool. So how long have you, it's been about a year since you joined Archos? Am I remembering? Yeah. I was consulting with them in summer of last year and then I moved full time at January of this year. So I've been with them. Let's see. What is that? About seven months now? Six, seven months. And yeah, absolutely loving it. I was hesitant to turn my hobby into a profession, but I am very glad that I took that risk. What specifically are you doing for Archos? Yeah. I mean, I think people would be surprised. They think that I kind of go over the statistics and numbers similar to kind of like what Lou does. And it's actually a lot more about machine learning and model development and some of the features that we're going to be bringing into the app that I wish that I could talk a little bit more about today, but you'll see them. You should say AI to say AI, which everyone wants to hear AI. It's AI. Everything's AI. Yeah. All day, every day. Are you an AI? You know, at this point, I'm not sure. You might be. We don't know. Like we'll talk about that. Like we all could be AI is like Adam and I will talk about that below everyone's minds. So I always been interested in the data and I get to work with a lot of it. We have, I think about a billion shots on Archos and this huge set of data that is a lot of fun to come through. But yeah, my day to day, I'm doing a lot more building kind of machine learning models and things that you'll be seeing in the app within the coming months and years. Cool. So we've taken you a little bit outside of your role to dig up these stats. I would say I'm doing it anyway. It's not the main part of my job, I would say. Okay. Sorry for doing that too. No, not at all. We'll get your bosses some nice PR points here, so they'll be happy with that. So we asked you, I'm looking at a Google document. That's 12 pages long. I know I was thinking, be in touch, we shouldn't do a podcast together unless you want eight hour episodes. Yeah, it would run four hours and we're going to do our best here. So we've got the main topic we asked you to look at was double bogeys. But we also got some pretty good, we always get great questions from Twitter. So we might do some quick hitters on Twitter afterwards, but let's go into the big question that the double bogeys and you uncovered a decent amount here, there's a good amount to get to. We'll let you kind of run off on some of your talking points and then Adam and myself will hopefully provide some color commentary onto this stuff. Perfect. But yeah, you know me, I'm always trying to fight the war on double bogeys. Yeah, I mean, that's what actually inspired me to want to look at it was to help you in the war. Oh God, I made two triples in the last two weeks in tournaments. So I might be fighting the war on triple bogeys if I'm not listening to myself. Well, fortunately in this case, I looked at doubles and worse as a category. So if you hear me say double bogeys, what I'm probably saying is double bogeys or worse. Okay. In this case. Where do we start? Yeah. I mean, I think we can start at, you know, the impact of double bogeys on around and you guys have covered this at length, Luke Stagner's done a ton of great work on this, you know, the fastest way to lower scores is eliminating and reducing the number of double bogeys that you're making. Depending on your handicap group doubles are responsible for anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of your above par score. And so with the ARCO data that I have, what I really want to analyze was where golfers are making them and would love to, as we're doing this, get your insights on what golfers can do to reduce them. So I'm coming with the numbers, hopefully you come with the fixes, but let's start by just kind of how I grouped golfers for this, because there is significant differences between where doubles are made between, say, scratch golfers and higher handicap golfers. So we've got five different groups, scratch golfers, who I included anybody here that was a two handicap or better. So congrats. If you're a two handicap, you're now considered scratch for the day, and they're making about a little less than one double bogey around with the average score of plus four. So you can see that accounts for about 50 percent of their score above par there. Single digit golfers do the next group, so that's like two to seven and a half. And they're scoring on average nine over per round, and their doubles are worse are accounting for over par of that. Then we've got the 10 handicaps, that's seven and a half to 12 and a half, shooting kind of mid-80s. They're making 3.1 doubles per round, impacting their scores plus seven there. Double digits, you know, we start to get into the 90s shooters, and the impact of doubles for them is even more, it's about 12 strokes per round. And then you get into the high handicap and beginners, which is a 20 handicap plus, average score near plus 26, and the impact of doubles is actually plus 20. So magically eliminated all doubles from them and put them up par, they would be shooting plus six. But as you know, we're just trying to reduce doubles to bogees, or hopefully in some cases par. Yeah, so as handicap increases, the doubles are worse disproportionately take more strokes, which makes a lot of sense. And especially the triples too, triples are worse. The number of scratch golfers, as I said, they may make a double a round or so, but they're keeping it in a lot of cases to know more than that, whereas when you get into the higher handicaps, you start seeing the triples and the quads and that a lot more, which inflates the score even more than that. Yeah, I think we've talked about this on the show before, if you've read my book or seen Adam's work. It's so simple after the fact, when you hear this stuff, it's like when you read about World War II, and you know what happened, that led to it, you're like, "Oh yeah, all that stuff made sense." But at the time they're like, "No one could see all these events leading to it." And when you hear these stats, of course it's the doubles are worse, but when I was playing golf for a long time, I thought it was the miraculous stuff that was going to make me better. And the more I've learned and the more I've seen, what's the difference between a scratch and a two handicapper, a five and a ten? It's always the "oh crap" shots of the difference, not the "oh, I stuck it to ten feet and made the birdie putt." That's a hard thing for people to accept because it doesn't sound as fun, but one of the reasons we asked you to do this was we wanted to reinforce the fact that, yeah, you got to get your hands dirty, so to speak, to lower your handicap by a significant margin. And we can get into, we're going to get into the reasons why people make doubles are worse. They're skilled deficits, and then there's playing skilled deficits, which is, you know, the giving up, the strategy, the mindset, but that's how I view it. If someone comes to me and they say, "I'm a fifteen, I want to get to a ten," or whatever it is, it's like, this is how you take out the big chunks by thinking about this. And when you have this mindset, I believe it's a more truthful way to approach the game. So you're a bit more patient on the course, you're not as stupidly aggressive in spots. All of the things that, again, we've talked about, and yeah, it's kind of a hard part of the game for people to accept. Yeah, I'm looking at the table here, Hutch, just to go off the back of John. It looks like if you were to take the doubles and turn them into singles, it almost looks like everybody would play pretty similar. Me, almost within three, five shots of each other, right, even the scratch to 26 handicaps. Basically, what I was seeing is that whatever level you're at, if you wanted to get to the next level, all you need to do is remove the number of doubles and replace them with bogeys. That would do it across the board. That's crazy. Yeah. When you think about it, it's crazy. Yeah. Because if you polled golfers, like if we did a poll, everyone would say, "Oh, it's more birdies and pars. That's going to do it." Yeah. And it's just not the case, as we know. We've seen plenty of data. Birdies are obviously nice, love to make them as much as anybody else, but I like not making doubles more, let's put it that way. You don't even have to turn those doubles into paws. No, just an unrealistic thing. If you just turn those doubles into singles, looking at this table here says that the guys who averaged 19 over par, if you turn the doubles into singles, they would save 19 or 13 to 19 shots. They would almost play like a scratch golfer if you just turn those doubles into singles. Exactly. Yeah. There we go from 19 to plus 13. Oh, okay. Yeah. It says, "Don't jump too far ahead. Let's look at people too excited." Okay. Okay. Okay. Maybe I misread the table a little. To be clear, to become a scratch golfer, you need to make a lot of pars. I just want to make sure on the same page that we could do the math there. You've got to make a lot of boring pars to be a scratch golfer. Exactly. We did do an episode on scratch golf, which did anger a lot of people. We got a lot of hate mail for that one. Oh, baby. Wait. Was it on real scratch golf? Or... No, it's Twitter scratch. Okay. Cool. It's Twitter scratch, of course. There's big difference between the two. Still waiting on the definition of that one, but yeah. We'll be waiting forever until- What do you think will come first, AGI or getting the definition of a real scratch golfer? Well, hopefully AGI gets us to the definition of a real scratch golfer. That's my bet. I think that's the order of things. Great. All right. So you broke this down even further. Do we want to move on to whole types that was next on your list here? And I thought this was pretty fascinating what you found out. Yeah. Depending, maybe you haven't seen the numbers in here. What type of holes do you think golfers are most likely to double? And do you think that that changes by handicap group? Now I can't offer because I was reading this beforehand. Yeah. Yeah. I think I would have said par fours. I don't know. It sounds like the right answer, just because there's more of them, but that wasn't the right answer. Well, as a person, looking at it as a percentage of holes played. Yeah. So not- Okay. If you opportunities as the kind of denominator there. Yeah. You wouldn't have said par fives just because you've got kind of like, let's call it an extra half to full shot to play with. And par fours, you just, you have the opportunity to inflict more damage to yourself off the tee than you would on a par three because, you know, most people are playing par threes that are, I don't know, 120 to 180 yards. So much less can go wrong because you have a shorter club in your hand would have been my assumption. But again, full disclosure, I did look at this beforehand. So I'm not, I'm not that smart. I would have said par fives initially, but I was thinking in terms of who's more likely to make double bogeys and that's higher handicappers. And then I think we'll hire handicappers on par fives tend to struggle because, you know, they don't have to reach and whereas when I read your article, yeah, it made sense what you said, which I'll let you elaborate on here. You're both right. The par fours. Both right and wrong at the same time, right in your own ways, par fours are the most likely. And for the exact reasons that you skate on the, it's fewer opportunities to make mistakes than a par five on a par five, you can get back into position. The likelihoods do change by handicap. Now for everybody, it's par fours across the different handicap groups, but the lower handicap golfers are more likely to make them on par threes. Whereas the higher handicap golfers are more likely to make them on par fives. And when you get into that high handicap group, our fours and par fives are about even at 48% of the holes that they're playing. So their par threes are actually at 35% there. So there's quite a big difference there. And it's largely because the par five, there's just more opportunities to screw up and to get yourself even into worse conditions, whereas the lower handicap groups, you get into trouble off of a par five, and most are pretty good at getting, you know, taking your medicine, getting back into play and making a bogey at worse. So there's a lesson in itself, right, is that in order to reach a better level, your ability to recover, you know, which may be curving around a tree, things like that. That's going to help you because, you know, the high handicap on a par five compounds things. I mean, they mix things worse, whereas the low handicapper, they get in the trees, they can at least hook it around and get it a few, maybe a hundred yards extra up the fairway or not do something stupid and compound the mistake. Well, yeah, that's the flip side of that, too, is like, I want to have people try and slot it through three foot gaps. Yeah, it's not that they're threading it through a small gap, you know, getting that they're finding their way back to the fairway, advancing it as far as they can without, you know, reasonable risk and then they're hopefully saving par, but unlikely to make double at that point. So to recap, just, most golfers are making their doubles on par fours, but the higher handicap players are on the non par four holes, the higher handicap players are struggling with par fives versus the scratch or single digits seem to be making those mistakes on par threes where doubles come into play. Is that the good summary here? Yeah, exactly. And it's pretty even across the board for the lower handicap scratch golfers. It's like double five point five percent of the par fours, five percent of the par threes and like about five percent of the par fives or four percent of the par fives. Yeah, it's interesting to think about like what would cause that like I'm just spitballing here. But let's say the lower handicap players making doubles on par fives, you know, maybe they're short-siding themselves and getting too cute with it because they think their skill levels higher and they're not getting it on the green, something like that. That's kind of where those doubles would come from on par threes because again, you're not, I don't know how many obese or penalty are coming in from that, but I'm going to guess that's not the culprit for the lower handicap players. Oh, we'll get into those, but I think you're right on with what you're saying here. And then hopefully we got some numbers to back that up. So yeah. So everyone think about where they are in this. You can kind of reflect on your game as we go through this. That's our goal here is for you to like think about where these bigger errors coming from in your game are their common patterns. You know, if you are a 20 handicap and you're thinking about the par fives and that makes sense to you, like, are you not taking your medicine when you're out of position? Are you chewing off too much? Yeah. Everyone's got to kind of reflect on their own game here and see where they fit in. That is interesting how that occurs, though. Okay. So now we've got this one was we're going to go into the leading causes, which is what's actually going on. Yeah. This stuff I wouldn't have. I'll fully confess what you're about to say. I think surprised me a little bit. Yeah. I'm guessing you're saying what contributes to the most double bokeys. And here I look specifically at penalties off the tee, recovery shots off the tee, three putts, multiple chips and approach shot penalties. And I was going to ask you guys to guess which one you would think but it's too late for that reflect back to before you knew what would you guess? If I'm being honest, I would have said like the tee shot stuff would have been higher than what you're about to say. Yeah. So in this case, it's, and this is looking at all golfers and all double bogeys in aggregate, which I think is important to explain because again, it does vary by handicap group. But three putts are the most likely contributor to double bogeys. After that, we get to multiple chips, then recovery shots off the tee and penalty shots off the tee. Now when you combine recovery off the tee and penalty off the tee, I think we get closer to go on our intuition there, which is that, you know, okay. So those are more, I'm thinking of like the oh crap swings off the tee and some of those are landing in the trees and depending on the layout and design of your course, some of them are OB or in a penalty area, it has a red line. So yeah, it's death by a thousand cuts here, but it's, yeah, we'll call that big mistake off the tee if we grouped it into one and I'll say I was really surprised by the penalty off the tee because for my game, that's where I make a lot of my doubles. And so just to assure the listener here, I went a bit of an extra mile to go through and make sure that I was getting golfers who knew how to enter their penalties correctly, took a couple extra steps there. So this should be solid data, I've done everything that I can to make sure that it is. I think it's just, you know, our own intuition for, we remember those penalties very vividly and they happen a lot, but it's the oh crap shots off the tee that are equally as, you know, contributed equally to say three pots and other common causes. And I'll say out of these five different primary causes here, the three pots, multiple chips, recovery off tee, penalty off tee and approach shot penalty, those errors account for about 86% of all double bogeys. So there is some remaining 14% that's out there that could be duffed and thinned approach shots, things that I didn't quite get into this analysis. To some degree, there's probably a accumulation of really average shots that gets you to average or below average shots that gets you to a double bogey. But I don't think that's very frequent. I think most of the time we're looking at one of these errors when we see a double bogey. Here's my thoughts on this is that, so when I look at like short game long game, so three pots and multiple chips are obviously causing a ton of doubles or worse for a lot of golfers. And that's kind of falls into what I've believed on the short game is that if you don't pay attention to it, if you're not what I would call proficient with a wedge around the green and a putter in your hand, like you could easily blow a ton of strokes. And that's why like short game typically gives the mid to higher handicap player quick scoring wins, so we can turn a lot of those sixes and sevens on par fours and fives into bogeys with just getting it on the green and two putting. If you can get, I kind of beat people over the head with this in my book about the short game is like, if you can shift your focus when you're around the green and this is currently my focus to be honest, if you could just get it on the putting surface to like 15, 20, 25 feet and two putt and do that quite often, you're going to be way ahead of the game. And again, that's a hard pill for people to swallow because it goes against what our instincts are is like, damn, if I missed the green, I got to get it to five feet and make my par putt. And when you have that mindset, it's almost counterintuitive. And that's where like double chips come from or the three putts. So a lot of that equation of dropping massive strokes in your game quickly can just be, yeah, can I get a wedge technique that I feel comfortable with around the green? And can I improve my speed control? Eventually, you hit a wall and then we'll talk and then you get to like the T shots approach shots stuff. But like that's generally the low hanging fruit for most, I'm casting a wine at mid to high handicap golfers. Yeah, trying to get too cute on a chip, right? You, you miss the green and you think, right, I need to get less of them down for par. You try and get too cute and then you end up leaving it short. I'm thinking of a shot I played recently doing that. The other one is three putts, right? So if you're three putting and that's causing a double, it's very likely you've missed the green, you chip it onto the green. And then what you're trying to do, you're trying to force holding the next putt. And that's probably going to increase your likelihood of three putting it. I think, you know, trying to force the chip, trying to force the putt those two areas that people could look at. Yeah, I think you're both spot on there with what we're, we're able to back up with the data. And I think the, the intuition is exactly what, what I've seen. Yeah. But the second, the big second part of it, eventually you run into the tee shot problem. That's the harder one to solve in my opinion. And that's where you get the longer lasting gains and scoring potential because it was in Brody's book. It's been mentioned. It's like, if you can't get off the tee, you can't score. Like that phrase has been around for a long time. Yep. And I often like, well, to be like, everyone's like, oh, every shot counts the same. I'm like, well, a six inch putt does not count the same as a tee shot because I can't hit two shots out of bounds with a six inch putt. You can inflict major damage to yourself. Hey, you haven't seen me putting John. Yeah. Here we go again. I've seen your stats though, Adam. Don't laugh to God. Well, we have, if we combine those two, the recovery and penalty off the tee, that combines into the biggest category technically for the doubles or worse and based on our big three that we talk about, that's a face control slash impact location problem with your driver or whatever club you're hitting off the tee. That's the way I view the game is like short game, clean up the mess. You'll get rid of a decent amount of those double bogeys and turn them into bogeys in some bars. And then eventually you hit a wall and it's going to be a lot of it reducing the old crap shots off the tee. That was kind of like the second wall I had to break through in my game and I know hutch had to as well. Still have to. Yeah. Still it's a never ending battle and that approach shots is where you kind of like make your money in terms of those boring powers, I would say. It's good to see all this, but I think it's inspiring or almost, I don't know if inspiring is the right word or relief that the three putting and the duffed chips around the green, like everyone can get better at that. Everybody. Yeah, it's going to say there's the control element of it as well. So everybody can chip it to the middle of the green, you know, lag their putt up with the driver though. It kind of makes sense that especially as even as you get better as a player, that becomes actually more dominant. Am I reading that right hutch that way as you become closer to scratch, the amount of doubles increases based on penalties off the tee? We are going to take a quick break and we will be right back. This episode is brought to you by our good friends at NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. I'm sure by now you've all gotten back into your Sunday routines, but they could be even better with NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV. You get the most live NFL games all in one place every game every Sunday and you can even watch up to four different games at once with multi-view, one of my favorite inventions of this decade. It's exactly what you need to catch all the action. Make your Sundays more magical and also YouTube TV is great. I got it this year. It's awesome. Sign up now at youtube.com/bs, device and content restrictions apply. Local and national games on YouTube TV, NFL Sunday Ticket for out-of-market games excludes digital only games. Yeah. As we're going through this, the penalty off the tee for scratch golfers, if you looked at a scratch golfer all of their doubles, you're going to see a penalty off the tee in 33% of the cases, which is the highest out of all of them. The reason for that is it's the most difficult to get back from. You've just lost a stroke or two strokes and you may be hitting depending on the lateral hazard from a position where you're blocked out. There's a bit of a recovery shot element there. It's tough to get yourself to make a bogey in those situations and when you do, you should pat yourself on the back. When you look at the high handicap groups that off the tee penalty percentage, it's about 17%. That's not because they're doing it less. Because they're finding, let's say, more creative ways to make double dummies. I love that term. I was hungry. They're finding creative ways to make double dummies. I've found so many creative ways to make double boogies over there here. I'm sure everyone else has. Higher handicappers, they are making more doubles with a driver than a scratch. Absolutely. As a percentage of their doubles, it's lower. A scratch handicapper, more of their doubles come from penalties off the tee. That kind of makes sense because number one, there's the element of control, but number two, scratch golf is hitting it farther. If you hit it farther, even if you're all else being equal, it's going to go out of bounds more often. With the control element, like we said, you can control, get it onto the green with a chip, don't three-putts. That's largely within our control, but presenting the face three degrees left and hitting it out of bounds with humans is just going to happen no matter how much you practice. I think you scared a lot of golfers with the MHU posted the other day showing the difference of three degrees open versus two degrees closed or whatever it is and just the impact that that has. Yeah. I think I'll interject with a thought I've been having recently or in the context of reducing doubles for everyone's level. Sometimes you have to go out on the course with the mindset. I played a tournament best played black last week. That puts me in a situation that I'm not used to. Really closer to the situation that, and again, I'm not trying to say 10 or 15 handicap in a disparaging way. I once was that level two, but you have to have different mindsets on certain layouts you're playing. I said to myself, I'm like, I'm going to have to make some really good bogeys today in the sense that I know that this golf course is so hard that it's going to put me in a situation where I have to take my medicine and not try a miraculous shot out of the rough because that course will just eat me alive. So I had to tee off saying like, I can't make doubles or triples today. That's going to kill me. And I did a great job at the first day, but I made a triple on my last hole. Almost shot two under par was brutal to deal with, but it happened. But that mindset got me to to that point to even have that opportunity. And I think that a lot of golfers have a hard time accepting that is like, sometimes you just have to have the mindset where you've got to make a good bogey here and ask yourself that question when they're out of position or it's hard to be in that mindset. But as we're kind of going along here, like the fruits to your handicap by answering that question, well, we'll be substantial. So that's just something I've been thinking about lately and even conversations I've had with different golfers is like you have to have that mentality is like, sometimes there are really good bogeys that you can make and you have to be like open and accepting of that. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think a lot of double bogeys are made from trying to force apart when you should be okay with the fact that you might make a bogey and I'm thinking specifically here about maybe we can jump to the multiple chips. Yeah, that's the one where you're in that exact spot where you're around the green somewhere. And again, we've had episodes on this with like strategy on even green side wedge shots, like evaluating your lie where the pin is and choosing the shot that you're capable of and not the shot that gets you inside of that 10 foot circle that you're hoping for. And dive a little into these multiple chips thing because this is where a ton of golfers are just throwing away strokes. It was the top, no, it was the second highest singular category to recap. Yeah. And it really surprised me how often this occurs. Scratch and lower hat, handicap golf groups are doing it a little less than one in ten chip attempts, which seemed kind of high to me one out of ten times that you're facing a chip. You know, if you're a single index golfer or a scratch that you're not getting the ball on the green. They're that to the higher handicap group and they're doing it about one in every five chip attempts. So I'm looking at these by attempts at chips, not by holes, right? Which I think is the right way to look at it, but I would have expected for the lower handicap groups for this to be closer to, you know, maybe one in twenty, one in twenty five. And I think what we see there is trying to force a shot that you don't have, trying to flop it over that bunker to that short-sided pin and putting yourself in a situation where, you know, now you're really struggling to make bogey rather than get it on, leave yourself a, you know, twenty foot putt and worst you make there is bogey. I want to throw something out here though and this may go kind of against the whole philosophy, but for lower handicappers, making that amount of double chips is clearly coming from times where they're trying to get cute. Is that phrase Americans use, getting cute, getting younger? Yes. Yes. Okay. So getting greedy. There's also got to be, or maybe strokes gained by attempting that strategy as well. So say, for example, you stick someone over, over a bunker and they've got a chance to, they could either hit it onto the green or they could go for the miraculous flop and get it close. Well, some players who are good at that flop shot, they might be able to gain a few strokes and those nine out of ten times where they don't duff it, there's nine out of ten. They might be gaining marginal strokes and yes, that's going to be offset by the one where they dump it in the bunker and they have to double chip. But I'd be interested to see at what level the data or the break even for that is. I don't think that strokes gained data is going to do that. The way that I've historically done that is I'll set people up on a scenario and for listeners you can try this at home. You can set yourself up on a scenario and hit ten chips, hit a hundred chips, you know, based on where the ball finishes, then use some kind of strokes gained analysis or actually hold it out and see, you know, test the two different strategies, go for the safe approach and then go for the flop shot and then see at the end of those ten attempts or hundred attempts, which one had the lowest score for you and that would be the best strategy. The interest in seeing where that break even is, I'm sure it's much more in favor of the safer strategy than people would imagine. It depends on the player because with all of this, no matter what, it's the combination of let's call it the playing skills, your mental state, your target, what you're trying to achieve versus skill. So for some players, the reason they're double chipping a lot is because they're just not good enough with their wedges and they need to get better at that. There's that element of it and then there's the other element of, are you just playing shots that are way too hard for yourself without even realizing it? Like some people are short-sided, they see the pin next to them and they're like, well, I'm going to try and hit it next to the pin. That's the whole point of this game and they might just be like losing strokes that way. So again, the whole point of this episode or for you to track your stats and go back on them is to think critically about your own game and where these mistakes are occurring. It could be decision making, it could be the skill deficit, I don't know, it's different for every golfer, it's likely a mixture of both. But if you're one of these players who is throwing a lot of shots away around the greens with double chips, like can you take the easy way out more often by hitting it a little bit further past the hole and giving yourself an easier chance to get on the putting surface? Like everything in golf, it all depends on the player and your circumstances. So I think this is just hopefully giving people food for thought. I don't know the 100% answer for everyone. It's different. Yeah, I really like Adam's point about go out there and test it yourself, put yourself in one of those short-sided situations and hit 10 balls from each of the different strategies and see what your average score on that is. And I think that gives you a much better risk-reward profile when you're making those decisions on the course. Yeah. And the scenario I could see, and this is a very extreme example, would be someone like a Phil Mickelson, right, who he's got a chance to play a flop shot. Now out of 10 attempts, he might get 9 to within 5 feet. And if he's saving himself half a stroke or whatever the stroke gained is from there, if he's saving himself half a stroke by getting it to 5 feet, as opposed to chipping it to 30 feet, if you do that 9 times, that's 4.5 strokes gained, then you lose that one that you duff in the bunker, okay, so you're down to 3.5 strokes gained, versus if he chipped it to 30 feet every time where he doesn't gain any strokes. So that's an extreme example, you're obviously talking about a player who has a high level of skill, the flop at the 5 feet, which is probably actually beyond even Mickelson's abilities, versus a super, super safe strategy of chipping it 30 feet away. There's got to be a way of figuring out that break-even point for people, but ultimately just go out and kind of test these things a little bit and analyze the data in your own testing. I think you'd be surprised. Yeah, for sure. Should we move on to three spots really quick? Yeah, let's definitely talk about Adomel. So yeah, with three putts, I mean, obviously, as we said, this is the biggest contributor or the one that we see most frequently in double buggies. Scratch golfers, three putt, a little over once around, on average, 10 handicaps do it between two and two and a half times around, high handicaps do it four and a half times around. There's not really any surprises when it comes to what causes these three putts when we look at the data. It's generally a mid-range to long putt that just wasn't lagged close enough and then had a missed short shot. You see this in 24% of the doubles that scratch golfers make and actually 41% of the doubles that high handicap golfers make. So if you're looking at a high handicap golfers round and you see a double bogey, good chance that there was a three putt on that hole. Has that three putt caused more by the short putt that came after the lag putt or was it caused more by the lag putt? Does it vary across the level? It varies would be my guess. I haven't looked deeply into what was the main contributor. It's going to show up in strokes gained as the short missed putt because you're losing more putts there, but be an interesting analysis to take that except further. Yeah, there's less upside to lag putting and more downside to missing short putts because if you miss a four footer, what are you losing, like for a 10 handicap, you're losing over half a stroke. Yeah. That's probably the break. Yeah, they're past the 50% break even. Whereas if you hit a 30 footer to two feet, you're not really gaining a ton. Yeah. And if you hit it to six feet, you're not really losing a ton either. Yeah. I think again, this is another thing where people have to look at themselves and I don't know how much of the data is, but he's giving themselves four footers, they're like, that's good. That's good. That's good. So that could be a mess in there, but that's another thing where you have to kind of reflect on your game. Like, is it a speed control issue? Are you dreadful from 20, 30, 40 feet getting it like somewhere near the hole or are you missing a ton of four, five, six footers disproportionately to your handicap level? The one thing I want to say is like, when I think about this stuff, you also have to consider what happened beforehand. So there's a reason, if you have a ton of 40 footers for par, there's a reason why you have a ton of 40 footers for par, like what happened on your T shot approach shot and the pitch shot before that are contributing to that to your proximity. So if you're giving yourself a lot of situations where you're putting pressure on yourself and you've got 30, 40, 50 feet for your par putt, then yeah, you're going to make more doubles because you're going to three putt more often from that. So it's kind of all connected. But yeah, there's clearly low hanging fruit from speed control and better face control. You can go back to our episode with Preston Combs on putting to clean up maybe a couple of double bogeys around for some people. That's a reasonable thing where you could drop a few of them just by improving your putting performance. My overall point is is that the rest of their game, like you'll hit a point where that becomes like your upside's limited and it's more so what's happening beforehand that it's contributing to a situation where you're struggling to make a bogey. That's going to be long game like T shot approach shot stuff. So yeah, again, I keep going back to like short game cleans up a quick mess, but eventually you need to look to the long game for more sustained, bigger impact. Yeah. 100% right. Well, if we get to some of the questions there was one about approaching between different handicap levels and we see exactly what you're talking about play out. It's cleaning up the short game, but it's a focus on teat green that gets you to that next level. So you have a few other, I want to try and get, I want to make sure we don't miss out on some of these Twitter questions. So let's cherry pick some of the better points here for double bogeys and then maybe we can get on to the, to some of the other topics like what else stood out to you approach penalty has the lowest occurrence, but it's deadly when it happens. Very difficult to get that back when you get it into the water or lateral on approach. Again, it's not the largest contributor, but it's tough to get back from that. I think we did we skip T shots requiring recovery. I think we do, but very similar insights there to the penalties off the tee. The big difference there is scratch golfers are able to make bogey or better 78% of the time in that situation, which is much better than any of the other groups. So they're very good at not compounding errors there and getting the ball back into position, taking their medicine and maybe making a par, but probably making a double recovery game is important. Yeah. Your perspective has to shift and if you did make a mistake off the tee is like, what can I do to make a good bogey here instead of trying to do the gambler nonsense. Totally. And the last couple of things I'll go over here co occurrence, like where you have multiple of these things, you know, it does happen. I looked at the absolute disaster hole, one, you know, holes that had all of the above. So where they did this, and I found that it occurred at about one in every 15,500 holes. So if you do it, it's impressive, maybe not for the reasons that you'd hope, but if you bat for the cycle on the common errors, do you have to buy a round of drinks in the bar for that one? It seems like you should have to with that or, you know, flip the hole in one thing and people get to buy you it around them after that one. Yeah, if it's one in 15,000, then that was the odds of a hole in one or one in 12,500, right? Yeah. So disaster hole insurance, I think makes sense at most courses. Yeah. It's ridiculous that you have to buy other golfers drinks when you get a hole in one. I've never had a hole in one, so I haven't had to do this, but I just think that's insane. Yeah, I just think the it should be the other way around. Like if you have this disaster hole, again, people should buy you drinks. Let's let's make a movement there. I'm with you. I will sign on to the petition. And last thing that I thought was kind of interesting was bouncing back after a bad hole. And here's the area where scratch golfers are actually the worst compared to the other handicaps. This was shocking to me. Yeah. I mean, it's not a huge difference, but yeah, after making a hole, scratch golfers after making a double or worse, scratch golfers score 0.11 strokes higher than their average score. The other groups are lower than that. They're 0.08 strokes higher than their average score or 0.06 strokes higher. I think there's some evidence there that scratch golfers get a bit more rattled by doubles than other handicap groups because they make it so infrequently or, you know, because there's a razor thin line to, you know, in terms of the number of bad shots that you can hit it around that gets you home at a power or better and it can get in your head. You start trying to force something. There's some opportunities there for scratch golfers to work on. So am I right in reading that as after a double bogey, a scratch golfer is very likely to make another bogey? There would be a 0.33% likelihood of making a double bogey. Yeah. They're average full score and this is like 0.22 and you add another 0.11 for what they would do here. So it's like 33%. Oh, 0.11, I think you said 1.1. Right. Okay. Right. Again. That's bad. But yeah, it's significant. We're looking for incremental gains in places that we can kind of improve a little bit and this seems to be one of them where it's at least for the good golfers. So don't go chasing the birdie after a double to try and make up for them because. Do not do that. Yeah. And get yourself re-centered and whatever you got to do to shake it off before going into the next hole because yeah, there's a chance it could carry over. All right. So should we tie the bow on our double bogey discussion? We got some other good Twitter questions here. Yeah. Absolutely. I think I don't know anything that you guys wanted to cover there or. I think, you know, I mean, for the most part, if you've been listening to this show for a while, hopefully this reinforces a lot of what we've been talking about. But yeah, I think it's, you know, you have to place your focus here and really take a hard look at your game and see what's going on. And as I say, you got to get your hands dirty. If you really want to get that handicap down big time, like you got to get your hands dirty in certain categories that maybe you wouldn't want to. And hopefully this kind of illustrated that for you just showing that it's the doubles and worse that are just mind-blowingly different between handicap levels. It's not the birdies and pars necessarily. So hopefully that lights a fire under some people's butts. Love it. Nothing to add there. Yeah. What was our first or should I say our second Twitter question? So this was the one that I actually, it was a really interesting question and I actually decided to go deep on this one as well. So from Blaine Sledge, my buddy correlation between play frequency and improvement, what are the quantified values over time across a body of golfers? Is there a sweet spot of frequency and are there diminishing returns? So I started this with looking at frequency in general. I took all our archos golfers from 2023 that had a USGA index. I measured their season. How many weeks between their first round and the final round that they played in 2023 kept only those that had four weeks of play and I bucked them into their lowest handicap group for the year. I then calculated the number of rounds per week they recorded over their season. I'm curious to get your guesses here in the play season. How often are golfers playing by different handicap groups, the ones that we've mentioned previously? I can't guess. I've got a table in front of me. And when I say play, I'm saying recorded archos rounds, so forget about scrambles or anything like that. I've always written that you've got to be playing enough golf to get better at golf. So I've always been of the mind that if you're not testing your game enough, you're not learning enough and you can't adjust enough. So more is better in my book, but I've got the numbers in front of me. So again, yeah. I would have guessed that scratch and plus players are playing twice a week. I'd say it's quite hard to play to that level doing once a week, but really I'm wrong. So yeah, it surprised me to scratch the plus is playing about once a week, single digit, a little bit less than that, 3.84 times every four weeks, 10 handicaps, 3.55, double digit, 3.18 and 22.83, but yeah, it surprised me that people even at the high levels are able to maintain a high level of play with just that amount. However, the question was kind of about improvement. And so what I did is I took those same group of golfers and I looked at their worst parts of the season, their highest five round scoring average throughout the year. And I also looked at the best parts of their season where they had the lowest scoring average of the year. And I took golfers that had a large scoring average difference between that best and worst period. And I said five strokes. That's a significant amount of difference for a five round rolling average. Now in this, we're then talking about golfers who made big time improvements. And regardless of handicap level, when you compare their worst period of golf to their best period of golf, it's about a half a round more per month, which doesn't seem like a lot. But what I found more interesting in this is that when you look at these golfers, because we're looking at golfers that made a big swing in their season, lots of improvement, we see a large increase in those baseline number of rounds that I just went over. So if we talked about that scratch group averaging four rounds a month for this cohort of golfers during their peak performance, they're averaging six and a half rounds a month. And even the high handicap group jumped over a round of week to 4.4 rounds a month in this. And this may or may not surprise you guys. But when you look at that worst period of golf and that best period of golf, the groups are making on average three to four times fewer double bogeys than during their worst period. So they're playing a lot more golf. They are avoiding the big mistakes, I would say, they're finding their sweet spot in terms of frequency at at least once a week, hopefully a little bit more than that. And then I don't know how much they're practicing, but we can assume some level of practicing between those rounds. We are going to take a quick break and we will be right back. Now are they playing better because they're playing more or are they playing more because they're playing better? Because I know after my mates play a good round, their instant thing is, can we play again tomorrow, guys? The correlation versus causation. I knew we'd get there at some point. I honestly couldn't tell yet, but I think it's probably a bit of both. The way to do it is look at after their best round, do they then increase frequency or do they increase frequency first and then see the lowest scores come? There's a task for you, Saj. You and I can workshop that one. I'm going to need your help on it, but yeah, I'd actually love to look at that. This was a bit of a relief to me, and I'm going to stick with the former, meaning I don't know who can get around this other than freak athletes. We're seeing sauce gardener on Twitter right now, the cornerback for the Jets, who literally took up golf two weeks ago and he's like, he's on land. Yeah. Aside from those people who are freak athletes, you have to be playing enough. I've said this a million times. We've talked about this a million times. You just can't, once a week is, I always think, you want to get really good at this game. That's always been, you got to be able to play once a week. Then from there, you can adjust, but I just don't know many golfers who can play once a month, twice a month, and really expect any big strides in their game. It's just much harder. I really believe those are the outliers, and I think this kind of shows that. Yeah. Here's a task for you, Hutch, is find the most talented golfer by looking for the person with the lowest scoring average, plays the least as well. If there's someone who plays, they'll probably be playing once a year. Although, you could just have a good round, right? That could be really interesting. It's like sticking your money in the slot machine and then walking away after winning. Well, that's the type of player. I think Marty Jertson said this a long time ago in our show, and it always stuck with me. It was a compounding skill, I believe he said. Where you reach a certain point and you've played so much and you've practiced so much that there is that golfer, I'm thinking people who used to play professionally, they'll only play like five, 10, 15 times a year, and they could still shoot four or five under par. Those are the outlier types of players, and again, the athletic freaks, maybe, they're out there for sure, but they're not normal. I played with the guy who's a Mackenzie Tour player not too long ago, and he said he hadn't played in three months, I'm a new kid, blah, blah, blah, we're not in shot 64. Yeah. That's so... It was the easiest 64 I've ever seen in my life, but yeah, those are the exceptions to the role. You got to play a decent number, a decent amount of golf, and especially if you're looking to improve, it really helps to push that beyond once a week. Yeah, and there's two sides to this point. So a lot of people, this is kind of a bummer to hear this, and I totally get that. And this is part of the expectation management part of golf is that if your job and family and life obligations and budget only allow you to play once or twice a month, and you're not practicing a ton in between, and this was me for a long time, because I lived in New York City, like don't be like I was a beat yourself up and expect to play great. Like I was so miserable when I played like infrequently, and it's just you're almost setting yourself up for disaster if you don't have the frequency and the expectations are too high. Yeah, if you're someone who just can't play enough, you do have to alter what you can expect of yourself, and then we've got millions of golf shots here showing that. But yeah, if you can play three or four times a month in your peak seasons, then you got something to work with there, that's enough time to gather feedback, feel all the things on the golf course, the nerves, the decision making, all the playing skills, going back to the drawing board and adjusting from the feedback you got, that's where the magic happens when you have that frequency available to you. It's hard to accept that about golf, but you need to spend a lot of time on the golf course to be comfortable there. It would be interesting to see when players do see this improvement through playing more, which areas of their game specifically improve? Is it patting? It would be logical for me that things like patting- Hotting and short game is what you think, right? Yeah. Yeah, it would be interesting to see that. Here's 20 extra hours of work for you, Hunch. Yeah. Come on. Adam and I will have office hours and we'll dive into all of these. No, I think there's so many questions I would love to be able to answer, and that's one that I would love to dig into. All right, let's keep moving along, because I know we've got a few others you want to get to. So what was the next one? Yeah, you want to read the next one, and then Jay and Grandorf. Okay, so what clubs aren't we playing that we should be, or which clubs should we take out of the bag because they aren't helping us? For instance, should most golfers have a five hybrid instead of a five iron based on the data? Ditch the three wood and replace with a four or five wood? I've done that myself. So yeah, this is a question of club selection based on data and what you're seeing. So what did you, I don't know if you dug into this too much, but- Yeah, I dug into it a bit. I'd love to do an actual deep dive into this, and I'm sure that we will with some of the stuff that we've got on the product side for helping people identify the right bag set up for them. But the biggest issue that I see is golfers carrying four or five iron when they should have a hybrid or fairway wood. And so for a lot of golfers, when we're looking at their smart distances, we calculate, we see this tightening at that gap where they hit those irons about the same distance. And it has to do with, I'm sure Adam, you could get into this, but the physics of slower swing speed and trajectory and all that. So I think in a lot of cases, the low hanging fruit there is, if you're one of those players who struggles with your long irons, go look at getting fitted for hybrid or seven or seven wood or even nine woods now, something that you can get into the air and that can hold the green and feels good to you to look down on. Is that true even at the lower handicap levels replacing the four or five iron with a hybrid? I couldn't say there and lower handicap levels, we'd have to control for driver distance as kind of a proxy for swing speed to see if that's the issue. I'm very curious because I have a four iron is my longest iron and then I have a three hybrid. And I also have a four hybrid that I could use to replace it. The reason I don't is because I like to have the four iron for punch out scenarios, but maybe a good bag choice for me. We had some discussion about this. We have an episode or episodes with Woody Lashon on club fitting where we talked about driving irons, fairway woods and hybrids and a lot of it boils down to swing speed and loft presentation. So lower swing speed players just can't get enough speed on a three iron or four iron, which can't generate enough ball speed or spin to keep the ball in the air, whereas the hybrid and the fairway would are very good at adding ball speed and spin. So the ball can get up in the air quickly and stay there. That's the case for me. I do have the ball speed, but I deliver less loft and spin at impact. So I need the help from a hybrid and a higher lofted fairway would to get the ball into the air on a higher trajectory with more spin. So it's player dependent, but the good rule of thumb is is that like, yeah, as your swing speed decreases, you're going to need more help likely from a hybrid or fairway would and they're getting better and better with the adjustments on them. They can make with like center of gravity and loft and the spin and certainly the shaft set up. So it's a huge trend. I think fairway woods are kind of almost displacing hybrids at this point. They're becoming more popular and even at the pro level, like there's a ton of guys playing five, seven woods now that weren't five years ago. I think that's the bigger movement and equipment right now. There's also the issue with quality of strike in that different clubs react differently to different strikes. So yeah, an iron, for example, doesn't have any gear effect or has very little gear effect or in some cases, even have slight reverse. Whereas a wood is going to have more gear effect for nerds out there. The reason why is the syndrome masses farther behind the face that increases gear effect. So say, for example, in my own testing, I have a two iron and I also have a two hybrid and they both go the same distance. Now when I miss strike the two iron, the ball goes straight, but it loses a little bit more distance. So I get a drop off in the front to back, you know, increase rather in the front to back dispersion side to side remains very similar. Whereas when I have my hybrid, my front to back dispersion is better because a slight miss strike tends to maintain the same ball speed, but my lateral dispersion increases because there's more gear effect with that. So it's almost a case for me of what do I want from that club? Do I want to make sure it hits the fairway or do I want to make sure it hits my distance? It's definitely a distance dispersion trade off. And again, like the higher skilled faster swing speed player can pull off the two or three iron. And if you can't strike it as well and you don't have as much speed, you're going to get more help from the hybrid and fairway wood. So I think like I was playing with the kid who's I think it was a high school senior and he was committed to Notre Dame and he was playing with the two iron. Oh my God, he was mashing this thing. He was hitting it like 250 like high majestic. I'm like looking at it. I'm like, what club is that? He's like, Oh, it's a two iron. I'm like, I don't think I could get that thing off the ground. Like you just, you know, loft presentation, but it's all got to be really good. But for most players, I think the trade off with gear effect for the hybrid and the fairway wood is going to be the better trade off for most people. Yeah. I'd say that happens above scratch level. So really the plus figure handicaps that really benefit from the two I maybe up to a five handicap if they're super consistent at striking him. Yep. The next question we can move on was, I like this one a lot. Okay. Robert Hamilton at big nose two, two, three, three, four, four. I love this. Nice. Yeah. Nice handle. I realize our coarser similar data capture is most complete. However, I would like to know what three to five lines on a scorecard. Could I record that would be enough to review and determine meaningful actions for practice or improvement? Hit, hutch. Yeah. This is a great question. The first thing I would say is stop tracking fairways and regulation and putts per round. They're just not good indicators. They don't correlate well with score. In fact, when we've worked with PGA tour for some of the broadcast stuff, we were asked at one point to provide fairway and regulation stats. And we're just like, this is not going to tell the story that you think it will because in a lot of cases, the fairways and regulation are higher for certain handicap groups, especially ones that hit it shorter. So get those off of your scorecard immediately. Instead, I would say number one, track greens and regulation that correlates so well with score and gives you an indication of your T degree and game shots off the tee that end in penalty or require recovery. This kind of goes back to the double bogey shots. Are you leaving yourself a clear path to the hole? You can frame that more positively as a number of clean approaches into green or however you want to think about that, but drives where you've got a shot at the green. Multiple chips, again, going back to double bogey. Those are scorecard killers, three putts. I'd break that down too to miss putts inside five feet. There's definitely some actionable things that you can do within that range to make yourself a better putter. And three putts will also indicate that you may have some speed control problems that you can work on. After that, I would say missed greens from 100 yards. Those are real opportunities and if you're missing those greens, that hurts you and is going to give you fewer birdie opportunities and you shouldn't be making bogey from there. And shortsighted misses on your approach. How often are you leaving yourself shortsighted? I expect that your listeners are savvy enough to know what a shortsighted miss is versus I guess longsighted. Fat sided. Fat sided. I mean, so the other thing that I would say along with this and I'd also be curious to get your guys stats, but when you're tracking those, note what occurred through the lens of what you guys talk about as the big three, provide some level of objective analysis to it. Missing those greens in regulation is it because you're hitting your shots thin or fat or off the toe or heel or missing them left or right. Something that you can come back to to see, "Okay, here's what's occurring and that's what I can then work on." So connecting those stats to the actions that you can take on them. I think I don't really care for trivia stats. I want them to be actionable for my game and hopefully for others that are looking to improve. But yeah, I would love to get what would you add or take away from that list? I like your list and I always opt for as much information as possible when getting things. But if as the question was asking, you had to limit things to three, then obviously I'm going to say. Three or five. So I went one over. Yeah. Okay. Well, obviously the main ones for me would be when you miss, when you hit a bad shot that you feel costs you strokes, was it ground contact? And then you can just put in the column F or T to indicate fat or thin. Was it face contact? So again, you could put H or T in to signify heel or toe or was it directional? Just put an L or an R in that column. So there's your three things and then from there you can see, right, which one is costing me the most and what is the actual pattern that's occurring if there is one? So that's very actionable because you can now go off and you know what to practice. If it's fate, if it's ground contact all the time and everything's fat, fat, fat, you know, you need to go off and practice something to make the ground contact less fat. And luckily here's a little plug for everybody. I have a stats tracking sheet that I use in conjunction with my strokes gained apps as well. But yeah, this is the very actionable stuff that tracks these things and then things like mental faults such as club selection. So you know, if I was to add to those three things, it would be club selection, those type of things. So go to adamiongolf.com/track to download that for free. Yeah, I don't have too much to add for the sake of brevity here, but I've always said if you want to think about golf in a simple way, like build your game around hitting more greens and regulation. That's the only stat that has true correlation to scoring. We had Mark Brody on it. He still doesn't love that stat. He said, why don't you just tell me what you shot was his response? I think we had him on two or three years ago. And that's a fair statement too. But I think of it more like what's your rallying call as a player. If you can, again, keep it in play off the tee and increase your distance. So that's the other stat of how many opportunities did you have to hit a green and regulation, track that stat. The flip side of that is the oh, crap shots, so reducing those near green and regulation is another stat that people like. And I've heard before where it's like, well, even if you missed the green from 150 yards, did you leave yourself a straightforward pitch or chip shot or you're not short sided and you can just get the ball in the green and two putt? So that's another not everyone's, you know, if you're not a scratch golfer, you're going to hit less than 50% of greens per round. So what's occurring on those other ones? And then of course, Adam's point, we've done episodes on tracking stats, where it's like, you got to get to the source of the issue and it always gets back to the big three. Obviously, I concur with him there, but yeah, I like all those. I think they're, they're good things to focus on versus like, if you just focused on putts per round fairways hit up and down ratio, like that's not going to lead to anything actionable. It's just not enough information. And of course, we'll give a plug to your employer, our coast, because they are providing the nice stat repository to dig deeper. It does make it a lot easier. Yeah. Taking the time to do this and want to give credit where it's due. All right. We got more questions. Let's keep moving. Let's go. The Tom bag at the Tom bag. Is it easier to recover from a penalty, O.B. on a par five versus par three? Alternatively stated, do people score better relative to their handicap when they incur a penalty on a par five versus a par three slash four? Yeah, we kind of covered that. We made this much easier to recover from a penalty on a par five and a par three, give you a sense. Scratch golfers make double or 70% of the time when they have a penalty on a par three and 35% of the time went on a par five. So it's twice as likely that they'll double on a par three where they've hit it into a hazard then on a par five. And then that kind of goes into the next question here. I know, so Tony Andrade, who's been a great contributor on Twitter, Tony, always, always appreciate your comments. He asked looking at low handicaps, what if any areas had gains that directly impacted getting to scratch golf most often in players who achieved it? And I think you had some data from our buddy, Lou Stagner on this as well. Yeah, Lou has done a lot of great work here for just about every handicap level. So whether you're looking to go from a 20 to a 15, 15, 10, 10, five, five to scratch. Most of that improvement is going to be seen in off the tee and approach game. Roughly 65 to 70% of that improvement is T degree, T approach and 30 to 35% is going to be short game and putting. I did a deep dive on five handicaps who got to scratch or better looking at specific players. And I found that those golfers on average, they improved by two and a half strokes a year. So to give people a frame of reference, you can improve by two and a half strokes a year. You're doing amazing. And for those golfers of that two and a half strokes, 32% of it was drive 41 approach 17 short and 10 putting. So really looking at incremental improvements, we're talking about fractions of a stroke here or maybe one stroke per year, which seems very reasonable is very hard. But the other thing that I noticed when I was doing that analysis is that, yes, this is what it looks like when it's aggregated. But when you find golfers that have clear deficits in their game, that's where they're making the improvements quickest. It's what is that lowest hanging fruit. And that's why it's important to have something like Arcos or Tangent or whatever the strokes game tracking that you have is, it does allow you to see for each of those facets of your game, how you're doing, where you compare to people in certain handicap ranges. You're pointing the finger at me, aren't you? It's pointing at everyone. It's pointing at me because as you're putting, oh, all right. It's always the same. I mean, it backs up like everything we always talk about at Brody's research. It's like, yeah, the big picture, long game approach and tee shots are the biggest longer lasting gains. But again, everyone's game is unique and some people are disproportionately losing strokes on the green or inside of 50 yards, me with their wedges. Adam's now hiding off camera. Yeah. Going into it. Is that the putting conversation? Yeah. There's generic stats and there's truths about golf and scoring in general, which hold up for most people. And then there's you and then there's your fingerprint of your golf game and you take a look and you see where you need to improve. All right. Let's keep going. We got a few more and we want to get to all of them. This one's a good one because it was kind of relating to our discussion on short game shots. Paul Sandmer asked inside of 30 yards, how different are the stroke skein stats for short sided shots versus not being short sided? Is it equivalent to being in a recovery situation or in the bunker? It's a really good question. It is. More to come here as it gets fairly complicated by the degree of short sidedness that you have and things like the, you know, the slope of the green, if it's running away from you. But as a general rule, you could say that short sidedness adds 0.3 strokes to the difficulty of the chip. So if you wanted to go through and adjust your stroke skein for short sidedness, your approach shot would then be 0.3 strokes worse and your expected strokes to get down from that next shot would be about 0.3 strokes higher. Again, that's a very rough rule of thumb and, you know, there's potentially some stuff that, you know, you'll see in the future with ARCOs that gets to, you know, some of these more granular insights on these kind of areas where strokes gained, you know, has a bit of room for improvement, but, you know, as a high level rule, that's kind of the way I approach it. Yeah. It's just harder. You're making the game harder for yourself when you're short sided, either being too cute or even if you take your medicine, like you're going to have to hit a shot that goes well past the hole and you're kind of saying like, okay, I'm accepting like bogey at worst here. And that's, that's the penalty for short sided yourself. And, you know, Scott faucet when he was kind of building decade, he poured through tons and tons and tons of shot link data on tiger. And what he found is what Tiger was saying in press conferences was true. Like he was remarkable at not short-siding himself on par threes and par fours and he did all of his scoring on par fives, a lot of boring pars on threes and fours, made some pots and then he made a ton of birdies on the fives and they let everyone else make the mistakes. Much easier said than done. Yeah, sheffler too, he's using the same exact playbook, like that's the playbook to shoot lower scores. It's way easier said than done because then you got face control and strike and all the stuff we talk about to make that happen. But all the reason to pick appropriate targets and be a better iron player. But yeah, that's good to have that confirmed and it'll be interesting to see what else you guys uncover on that in the future. The next question from Lyle McKeeney, sorry if I mispronounced her name, curious how often people miss approach shots short. One of my favorite questions, you hear pros say that it's a common mistake that they see from amateurs but I'd love to know the actual numbers. Yeah, and I have the actual numbers, I'm actually just looking for the exact piece here. But the percent of total approaches where the green was missed short, for scratch it's 21%, for single digit 25, 10, 30% all the way up to 20%, or 20 plus handicappers at 43. But on average, if you look at this group, golfers are three times as likely to miss the green short than they are to miss long and left or right. There's some numbers to back up the sayings there and there's a lot of truth in amateurs missing their approach shots short. What I've started to do in my game to kind of do this and I've got myself closer to 50-50 short to long miss is I think never up, never in, but for my approach shots. And that's to say if it's at a distance where I'm not comfortable that I can carry it, you know in most cases then I'm going to take more club. But I very rarely, like let's say unless it's to a back pin and going long to be in one of those short sided situations, I'm trying to hit something that I know can easily get there. You know, it's made a big difference in terms of my green, it's in regulation and scoring from that. Now 20 handicappers, they miss 43% short. I'm actually surprised it's not bigger than that. But when they miss a green, what percentage of it is short? Does that make difference? It's a slightly different way of phrasing it, right? Also I'd like to see versus left to right to see, I mean, that might be too difficult for you to pull. Don't we? I've got you covered here, Adam. He's going to do live stat pulling, incredible. I see the numbers whizzing around his head right now. So you wanted first the percent of greens of missed greens that were short, long left or right? Yeah. So when they miss, where is the miss or what percentage is short? Yeah. So when they miss, the percentage miss for scratch golfers is 45%. For high handicaps, it's 57% and everybody falls kind of into a range in there. Long, 17% and 23% left, 26% and basically 26% and right, 26% and 29%. So basically, scratch golfers do a better job when they're missing greens of not being short than higher handicap golfers and you'll notice that the numbers that I gave don't add up to 100 because you can be both long and left or long and right or short, right? So don't try to add those up to 100. But yeah, it's three times more likely there that when they miss that they're missing short than long. Yeah. We've definitely beaten that one to death. It's always good to hear. I'm a tiger at a quote recently where he was talking about in the last year or two about approach play and I think maybe Scheffler is on his level at this point with iron play, if not better. But he just said, I was always pin high to my target, to my number, meaning he controlled his distance really well and he always talks about accessing the center of the face. And a lot of that is strike quality, well, for him, it's strike quality. He's not worrying about ground contact as much, but that's with good iron play. We're talking more about it's a north south problem and that's a strike and ground contact issue, a little bit of face control for sure with the left and right. But yeah, we've beaten that to death on this show. You want to get to the lowest handicap level, take enough club, don't be a hero. And then as you get better, be more truthful about your distances and make smart decisions, even at Hutch's level, he's gotten to scratch and he's asking himself these good questions. But yeah, most people just don't air mail, like prove to yourself that you're going to air mail a green first and then adjust from there. Some of the people are just so scared of that and I get that fear too, I have it, but like prove it to yourself first and then you'll hit more greens. 100%. Yeah, couldn't agree more. So all right, we got one more, we're approaching our time here. So this is a good question just because I think anyone who watches PJ Tour broadcast has noticed that they're starting to incorporate our co stats in there and they're showing like, oh, to 15 handicap too. It's pretty cool. I think it's, I think this is work off broadcast should go like let's make them more educational and formative and relate them to the common player. I think it's a very good idea. So one of the questions we got from our buddy, Eric from the shop pattern app, which we love, he asked, we'd love to hear more about the research he's doing for PJ Tour broadcasts and some of the challenges of trying to portray a 15 handicap alongside what the pros are doing. Yeah, love Eric and shop pattern is definitely a good question because there are a lot of challenges in trying to do it, not just technically with trying to mix different data sets and things like that between the amateurs and pros and how things are calculated. But take for example, sawgrass 17, you know, we wanted to do a show the dispersion patterns for golfers into sawgrass 17 where the balls ended up. And in doing that, we aren't able to see as our ghost where that shot ended, right? We know where their next shot was taken from. No, no one can take the GPS into the water. Yeah. Into the water. See, I can imagine loose Wagner swimming right now, pressing his watch. Yeah. Let's not ruin any upcoming features. We tried to get him to that, but yeah, he didn't have a scuba license. But yeah, no, so in that case, we had to go and we had to find local eye calls with similar wind patterns, distances, try to show where the shots that missed the green would have ended up based on that. And that's been one of the kind of challenges is, you know, if we have sufficient data for something, if not, where can we find kind of look-alike scenarios? How can we simulate it or model it in a way that makes sense? There was a couple early on, Fairways and Regulation asks that I mentioned earlier, and we had to, you know, explain, "It's probably not going to be a very compelling story there." You know, the one that I struggle with is make rates from inside X feet. Yeah, that's always a misleading one. Yeah, so we had to work with them, you know, some of the buckets, and they've been absolutely phenomenal partners this entire time. It's just been kind of, in some of these cases, getting to know each other, and since they don't know our data, having to explain what we're seeing. But yeah, the make rates, that was, I think, a bit of a challenge to get small enough boxes to where, okay, this actually makes sense and doesn't look like people are making 90% of their pots from inside 10 feet because most of those are two footers. I think the big, kind of high-level difficulty there is trying to show just how good two or pros are and how that compares to amateurs, and even really good amateurs. You know, so the two or pros are playing from completely different tee boxes, have different pin conditions, they're playing from rough, that's so much thicker, and they're hitting into greens that where the pin is tucked three off the edge. It's a different game, and so we've had to get creative in terms of, how do we get us close to what would happen in real life if we put an amateur golfer into this situation? Even though I have raised my hand and said, "I would be happy to go out there and record my own game," and... I think the biggest question that always get asked in major championships is like, what would a scratch player shoot on this US Open PJ Championship setup? And most people don't give it the respect it deserves because they're not accounting for what you said. The rough, the firmness of the course, the length, and the pin positions, like, God, I mean, I look at some of these setups and I'm like, "I'd be happy if I broke 90," especially with like the pressure too. So yeah. Oh, yeah. And I always said like for entertainment purposes, like they should just throw like a zero handicap out there as like a marker and like the first group in the morning and just for fun being like, "Oh yeah, that's dude shot at 98." Yeah. Well, my pitch was we should take a simulation for the PJ Tour Championship of a golfer and see how many strokes we would have to give them since you can start with the lead for them to be competitive at the end. 50? Of course. A tournament. Definitely. Oh, it's more than that. 100? Yeah, it's about 100. Yeah. There's all types of fun questions like, "Or where would you start someone at Augusta?" Like if you started like a 15 handicap on the putting green, could they win the tournament? Like if you started them from 50 feet away from every moment. I think it's clear they would be fine starting on the green. Yeah. But if there were 50 yards away, no chance. 50 yards? Yeah. Yeah, with those green complexes. But yeah, I think like finding fun ways to contextualize it and communicate just kind of what a different game it is and how skilled these pros are. But also, we're doing stuff that helps people understand how they compare to pros. We've got a feature that's rolling out right now called Tour Quality Shots in which it'll record shots that you hit, approach shots that you hit that were Tour Quality based on proximity to the whole and what that would have been. Now, it doesn't obviously account for how difficult the pro setups are. But I think people are going to be really surprised when they see some of the distances that qualify as a Tour Quality Shot or greater than 50% of the shots and how conservative into a lot of those greens, the pros are especially out of the rough. It'd be even interesting to see if you could break that down into Tour Quality Direction versus Tour Quality Distance. So lots of people might find that... Oh, interesting. ...it's still left for Argos on you. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see like, because you know, lots of players, they'll hit a bad shot and they'll go, "Oh, I pulled it." And you're like, "Well, actually, that's only a few yards left. That's not an offline shot, but the fact that it's 30 yards short, that's what you should be worrying more about." Yeah. That's a really good idea. All right. Race to the finish on that one, Adam. Yeah. So, as we wrap up here, I know you can't reveal some future features that are coming out, but do you want to give you... Again, thank you so much. You took a lot of time to do this. I know this wasn't a 20-minute endeavor to create all of this data for us, so we really appreciate it. We thank you. You know, the floor is yours to plug, promote, whatever. Argos is a great company, and I think they're doing a lot of cool stuff, so yeah, anything you want to plug or tease, go right ahead. This is your moment. All right. Yeah. I mean, first, obviously, just thanks so much for having me on. You guys have been a huge part of my improvement and continue to be. And so, it's really an honor to be able to be on here, and I will pull data for you guys anytime. Like I said, I'm looking at this stuff constantly, and I think at Argos, we're very data-obsessed company, and I think that there's a lot of exciting stuff ahead for us as a company, and that people will start seeing sooner rather than later. Again, I wish I could preview more of that, but there will be, in addition to making the experience of shot detection and, you know, kind of validating your rounds as seamless as possible, and all of that, a connection of what you're doing to what you should be working on and where you can find the improvement in your game. So in addition to kind of like fun features, like the tour quality shot, which, you know, is good for getting people to compete against each other and a bit of bragging rights and stuff like that, we're serious about game improvement, and we want to make it as easy as possible for the majority of golfers to make serious strides in their game. So yeah, I mean, other than, look, if you're interested in what I talk about, most of it is you can find me @hutch_golf on Twitter. Sure, sometime I'll have a website and all that stuff right now, but that's kind of right now where my, the rough draft of my thoughts go. I'd say that regardless of what product you choose for tracking your game, obviously I'm partial to Arcos, did lose Adam to tangent, but they're a great product as well. I think so many golfers would really benefit from tracking their stats, but doing so with the mind of how can I take what I'm doing and turn it into action that makes me a better golfer. And I think we'll do a better job of trying to connect those dots for people, but I think the clearest path to improvement is one where you know where your strengths and your weaknesses are, you're able to get kind of granular into that, you're able to focus your time and make the most of it. And I think that's what Arcos and other kind of shot trackers provide. So thanks again for having me on guys, been a blast and hope that this helps at least some of the people listening, make fewer doubles and you have better decisions out on the course. Awesome. Well, yeah, I'm excited to see where it goes too, because we want people to make the right decisions. And if you're recording data, it's only useful if you're going to change something or learn something from it. So it'll be cool to see what features come out in the future from all these companies, including yours. Yeah, man, thanks again. It's been awesome to get to know you personally play golf with you and see the strides in your game. And you're also becoming an awesome or you've been an awesome follow on Twitter. I've seen some of the articles you've written for Arcos and you're doing really cool work there. And it's been fun to watch. So thanks again for doing this and hopefully everyone either learned something new from this episode or reinforced, you know, something we've talked about in the past or you've heard elsewhere and it was tons of fun. So yeah, thanks again, man. Adam, where can everyone find your stuff? Adam, young golf.com forward slash track T R A C K is where you'll get that tracking sheet for free. So that could be used alongside Arcos or whichever tracking app you're using at the moment. John, where can people find you? You can check out my book, the four foundations of golf in my video course at the four foundations of golf.com. Fortunately, a lot of the stuff I've talked about reinforced some things from the book. So I wasn't lying through my teeth. It was nice to have some of that backed up. So appreciate everyone's questions on Twitter for this episode and your feedback and we'll see you next time with a new episode.
