AI Caddie Just Got Smarter

If you’ve ever used TANGENT and thought… I don’t trust Caddie, I wish it could tell me where to hit this 3W… Now you can.

In the latest release (3.0.0), you can now get a recommendation for any club in your bag simply by swiping through the scroll wheel at the bottom of the screen. This is shown below in Creator Mode and works for any shot on the course.

Beautiful, quick caddie recommendations for any club in your bag. Now you can hit with confidence with any club.

Even better… In version 3.0.1, we’ve added this capability to your watch as well. Not sure where to hit the Optimal club? Want to get another recommendation? Simply tap on the club button on the caddie screen to bring up a map view of what to hit and where to hit it. You can use the ‘More Club’ and ‘Less Club’ buttons to scroll through your different options to find exactly what you need, without pulling your phone out.

Keep in mind, that your phone still needs to be nearby for this feature to work as it relies on the phone for processing.

Check it out and let me know what you think of the new feature. What should we add next?

Buddies Trips: Is Bandon the best?

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Bandon Dunes Golf Resort twice so far and have a third trip planned for this summer. I’ll be taking my pops there to experience the courses while he’s still healthy enough to walk 36 holes a day, which hopefully is true for many years to come.

Bandon has to be my favorite golf destination and I’ve played some great ones.

What separates Bandon is the quality of all 5 courses, their affordability for the quality, and the vibes. Having to walk, the restaurants, the practice facilities, the staff… Everything. Bandon is a special place. Don’t believe me? Don’t miss the latest series on The Good Miss where I was able to film rounds on all five 18 hole courses and both par 3s.

I used the TANGENT Golf app to track every moment. Competed with my Caddie Matt and had an absolute blast playing some pretty good golf.

The series is almost wrapped up with one more episode at Sheep Ranch and The Preserve left to go. Check it out and let me know if you’ve found anywhere that rivals the good times at Bandon Dunes.

Golf Smarts: The Anatomy of a Golf Round 

Putt for dough huh? The old cliché couldn’t be more misleading.

While the winner on the PGA Tour each week often putts well… It is typically the player that putts best… out of the best ball strikers… that wins.

What do I mean? It’s hard to win a tournament hitting the ball poorly and putting great, but not so difficult to win a tournament hitting the ball great and putting poorly. See Scottie Scheffler in 2023. He fixed his putting in 2024 and won 7 times in addition to his Olympic gold medal.

There are still many golfers out there counting putts and while the old guard was led us to believe this was important, the number of putts is largely representative of how good your ball striking is. Nobody makes putts over 10 feet on a regular basis.

Putting is hard. The hole is small.

This means that you really need to get it inside 10 feet to have a chance to realistically make putts. There are two main ways to get it inside 10 feet…

1. Be an elite ball striker like Scottie Scheffler.

2. Miss the green and be scrambling to get up and down.

Ever notice that your rounds with the fewest putts are often your rounds where you missed the most greens? Those stats tend to be inversely proportional.

But enough of setting the stage, another interesting way to look at where to spend your time when practicing is to just look at the Anatomy of a Golf Round. How many shots do you hit from each category? The categories are:

• Driving: All tee shots on par 4s and 5s

• Approach: Everything else outside 50 yards

• Short Game: All shots inside 50 yards not on the green

• Putting: All shots on the green

The misleading part about putting is… say you have 35 putts in a round of golf where you shoot 80. On the surface, putting is 44% of the shots for that round! Surely, if you want to improve your score you would focus on putting almost exclusively! Not quite. For most golfers, almost 50% of your putts are tap-ins.

Unless you are missing tap ins… there isn’t much value in practicing them, because we all make them… or pick them up when your buddy says ‘its good’. You could practice make-able putts, but if even the best in the world don’t make many putts outside of 10 feet, your practice is better spent on the rest of the game.

Stats are important, but they can also be misleading without a trained eye to interpret them. This is part of why I’ve spent so much of my effort working on the round report and adding intelligence to the backend of the TANGENT Golf app that interprets your golf data. TANGENT simplifies the complex and extracts the key insights for you so that you don’t waste your time working on the wrong things.

Take the plot below for example. An easy observation is that as handicap gets worse, the percentage of short game shots increases.

Naturally, higher handicaps should work more on short game, right?!?

Not necessarily. Unless that higher handicapper is 2 chipping, taking more than one shot to get on the green, working on short game is not the best use of their time. If you can effectively get the ball on the green and have a putt to save par (or bogey), then there are diminishing returns on short game. Your time is actually better spent on approach and driving.

It’s counter-intuitive. If you want to reduce your percentage of shots that are short game, you need to miss less greens! Which means your approach shots need to be better.

This is true even at the PGA Tour level. The players that have the highest strokes gained stats for Short Game (they call it ‘Around the Green’) tend to be golfers that also miss the most greens. You have more opportunities to ‘gain’ strokes for short game if you miss more greens.

Don’t fall into this trap! Use the TANGENT Golf app and the Round Report or Player summary to guide you down the path of what to work on to improve the fastest and watch 2025 become your best year on the course.