Round in Review - Should you pick targets like placing a bet?

Round in review - in this blog I’ll go through a recent round and show how I use Tangent to evaluate and learn. My goal is to improve from every round of golf. Good or bad. 

I recently took the hour long drive across the Red River into Oklahoma to play the Redbud golf course at WinStar Resort and Casino. It was a great day. Low winds. Perfect day for scoring. 

I was playing with my dad and two uncles. One who I was teaching to use Tangent as we went. And I played quite well cruising to a 1 under 71. 

That’s a solid round for me and if I’m being honest was a pretty stress free day. I hit 14 greens and almost 60% of the fairways. When I missed a fairway it was typically just barely off and in good position. 

This is because for the most part, leveraging the AI Caddie in Tangent, I made ‘good bets’.  

What do I mean by that? 

If you’re a gambler, you can think of every golf shot as a bet. Picking a target is a basically placing a bet that if you hit at that target you will have a favorable result. 

The potential positive outcome, hitting the green or fairway, is equivalent to the amount of money you place on the bet. If you are aiming at the flagstick, it’s like placing a max bet. Your potential upside is holing it. 

Contrast this with laying up. This is a more conservative bet that minimizes potential losses while still giving a chance for small gains. Depending on what the dealer is showing (a face card in black jack) sometimes the layup is the prudent play. 

Your ‘odds’ for a golf shot are set by your dispersion for the club and target you choose. So if you choose a club you are confident with that has a tight dispersion, you are increasing your odds of a good outcome. If you choose a club with a wider dispersion, your odds aren’t as good. It brings catastrophe into play… like the dealer flopping a 21 in blackjack. 

Another factor for your odds is what the dealer is showing in the blackjack analogy… if the dealer is showing a 6… that’s a bust card. In that case you want as much money as possible on the table. This is when you double down. The golf equivalent is a middle pin. No bunkers or hazards to worry about. A perfect number. Very little risk. Let’s fire away. It’s time to score. 

Contrast that with the dealer showing a face card. A 10 while you’re sitting on 16. This means caution. You’re behind. Odds aren’t good. Gonna be a tough hand to win. If you could surrender you might. Cut your losses and move to the next hand. The golf equivalent of a tucked pin surrounded by water and bunkers. Technically you can still win the hand, but if you’re too aggressive you could also lose badly. 

This is no time for bluffing. The house in golf is unforgiving. 

Every target you choose, every shot, is a micro bet on the golf course and your goal is to keep placing bets that have positive outcomes. You can’t beat the house on any single shot. To beat the house you have to be super disciplined time and time again and hope the ball bounces in your favor. 

On this day, I placed good bets. I favored the fat side of greens. 

For the most part I selected good targets and maximized my potential to score. Let’s talk about one time where I didn’t.

On the 5th hole I made a blunder off the tee. A bad bet that cost me one of my three bogeys. 

What happened?

Looking at the Tangent app, you can see that I hit my tee shot into the fairway bunker on the right. Right at that fairway bunker the fairway is at its narrowest. Thats a tough spot to fit a driver. In fact, standing on the tee the Tangent AI Caddie suggested 3 wood. It knows my dispersions and the golf course. It knew that driver brought the bunker into play and it knew that the fairway was going to be a small target given my dispersion with a driver. I saw this suggestion and I ignored it. You can think of the AI Caddie as ‘the book’ in gambling. ‘The book’ is an essentially a document of the statistically best decision you can make in any situation for long term best outcomes. Playing by ‘the book’ gives you the best chance to succeed strategically… Even when the odds are not in your favor. 

In gambling and golf, you certainly don’t have to play by the book. In fact, it is possible that with any given decision you can go against the book and still win! Dealer showing a 16 and you want to hit that 13? Go ahead. You very well might pull an 8 and hit 21! A likely winner! But if you make that decision enough times, you are almost certain to lose your stack. It’s a bad bet.

In this situation, I was feeling good. Hitting the driver well so as I stared at this narrow fairway with a bunker on the right… I read ‘the book’ (or the AI Caddie in this case) and saw that the suggested play was 3 wood… and I ignored it.

I got this. That book doesn’t know the deck like I do… And I proceeded to smash a driver right into the fairway bunker. A good shot, well within my distribution. Not an outlier… but I left myself with an extremely difficult second shot. Basically, I hit on 13 and busted… when I could have let the dealer bust.

So why does ‘the book’ (or the AI Caddie) say to hit 3 wood on this hole. Well… It’s pretty simple. Using the Explore Mode in the Tangent app, I can show that the expected outcome for a 3 wood lands in the fatter part of the fairway and its not long enough to reach the bunker. The potential for a positive outcome is much greater and barring an outlier shot, it avoid all the trouble.

Above on the left is the AI Caddie suggestion and on the right is the why it’s suggesting that. The 3 wood distribution (yellow arc by the ‘3W’) shows that it stays short of the bunker and is 90% in fairway. Contrast that with the driver arc where >30% of it is not in the fairway and 20% of it is in the bunker…. Right where my ball went.

It’s easy to see that this was a bad decision in retrospect and sometimes in the moment it’s hard to not play emotionally. Or even get emotional when it goes in the bunker! Tell yourself ‘What a terrible break!’ Or ‘What a terrible shot!’

The reality was, it wasn’t a terrible break or a terrible shot. That bunker is directly in my expected distribution with a driver. That was an average driver for me. Not an outlier. Unfortunately, the aggressive target meant I paid the price with a really difficult 2nd shot. An 80 yard shot from the fairway bunker, means a partial wedge. One of the hardest shots in golf.

To be fair, I hit a pretty good one from the bunker. I got it on the green. But I had a 40 foot downhill slider that I just couldn’t get close enough and ended up with my only 3 putt on the day…

Now, I could get mad at the 3 putt. Curse my putter, but the mistake was off the tee. My bunker shot gained 0.18 strokes on the PGA Tour! My tee shot lost a third of a shot according to the Tangent Golf Shots table. 

It’s a little hard to defend my putting in this instance, but I’d venture to guess I wouldn’t have left myself near as difficult a putt had I hit the 3 wood in the fairway.

In that way, golf is a lot like gambling. It’s usually the first bad decision that starts ball rolling in the wrong way. You dig yourself a hole and you start doubling down trying to chase getting back to even. It’s a bad way to bet and it’s a bad way to play golf.

Learn better strategy and play by the book with Tangent and the AI Caddie.