Now that you’ve hopefully got many games of 2011 under your belts, you have a pretty good idea of the holes on which you score well, but more so, you probably know which holes are giving you fits.  Ever wonder if other players like you are struggling on the same holes?

Better yet, wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure if laying up for birdie on a tough par 4 will net you a better overall score than if you alternate between the tough eagle and the disastrous par or worse?  If an average player knew that a good player only eagles certain holes a small % of the time, he could decide to play the odds and take the safe birdie.

Well, a short while back I was approached by Jeremy Olson, a statistical analyst from Chicago who plays under the name NIGHTRAIN !.  He had developed a model to handicap each hole on the course based on certain variables and the scores he was shooting on them, but he needed a larger data set.  With the help of the GTF community, we’ve gotten many volunteers to give us access to their hole-by-hole scores on the 2011 courses, and with this data, Jeremy has been able to develop some awesome-looking spreadsheets and dashboards with great statistics for each hole!

SO, let’s take a look at some data!  These statistics are from 7-8 players whose handicap ranges from 15 to 21, which turned out the be the ideal audience for this type of analysis.  Also, the first few rounds played on these courses and any obvious outliers (blow-up rounds at 2AM, for example) were excluded.

First, pop open this spreadsheet and browse over the first tab.  Each course has all its holes classified into one of 5 categories, as defined below (remember that GT Par is the best score you can normally shoot without holing out — we used a slight modification of GT Par and called it “Potential”):

Easy:  75% handicap or better.  Only unforced errors can lead to dropped strokes.
Moderate:  50-75%.  Player is NOT faced with a decision whether or not to lay up.  Probability of GT par is reduced because of course variables, but chance of a penalty stroke is minimal.
Risk/Reward:  40-55%.  Player IS faced with a decision whether or not to go for GT par. Average score should be within +/- 0.10 of birdie (meaning the risk of getting Eagle is in balance with the penalty of par).
Professional:  40% or less. GT par is very difficult.  Risk of bogey outweighs benefit of Eagle.
Difficult:  50% or less.  No option to lay up with significant danger.  Probability of GT par is negative.  Chance of bogey high.

The % column shows how often players score the potential value (normally GT Par) on these holes, and the Avg. Score column shows that value for these holes.  You may find that “Potential”  is flexed a little bit towards what average/good players can realistically be expected to shoot on particular holes.

Now, click the Scorecards tab.  Here you see the hole-by-hole breakdowns for each course.  You’ll see an additional column for Handicap — the holes have been handicapped based off players’ percentage of realized Potential on those holes (again, you can also think about this as the ranking of a player’s average score on this hole relative to GT Par).  We didn’t always want to use GT Par as the standard for handicap because there are certain holes like Alpine #7 that may have a low GT Par %, but they are not necessarily difficult to birdie.  Now you truly know which holes are causing players in the 15 to 21 handicap range the most trouble!  You can use this knowledge to help with course management, and you can also use these ratings when playing with your buddies to know where to give strokes if you want to even things up based on your handicaps!

That’s the overview, but it gets bigger and better — each hole is analyzed in further detail in the write-up for each course!  Alpine and Grizzly are done and will be published soon, so be ready to head on over to those sections to see even more detail.  I’ll also soon be rolling these stats into a new format for each hole’s write-up!

Finally, we’ll be updating these statistics at various times throughout the year to keep them up to date, so hopefully this data can help your scores improve!  We’ll normally be pulling the 100 most recent games to get a good representation of how all our volunteers are currently performing.  Thanks big time to Jeremy for putting in the effort to gather up this valuable data for us!

I hooked up with a stats analyst to take a better look at Golden Tee 2011, and I’m looking for volunteers to help donate their statistics towards our cause!  Check out this example. If you want to help classify all these holes, send me a note with your handicap and your goldentee.com login and password — then we can pull your stats from the site and help grow this database for analysis!  Contact me with any questions — thanks!

Ever wonder how GSPs are calculated? All I used to know is that if I hole out from 300 yards, I get 30,0xx GSPs, but where does the xx come in? Fractions of a yard? Possibly I guess.

More importantly, I wondered how they were calculated when you land within 5 feet, let’s say from 300 yards? Probably something to do with starting at 30,000 points and then deducting based on distance from the pin…

Well, our buddy Skipper put together an entire grid so that you can look up how many GSPs you’ll get in any given situation!  Click here to open the spreadsheet and take a look at the grid.

And here’s another note — it measures how far the ball traveled from point A to point B.  So if you backspin the ball in the cup, you’ll get a few more GSPs than if you rolled it in (due to the width of the cup).  Also, and probably more importantly, if you backspin the ball to within 5 feet, you’ll get a handful more GSPs than if you rolled it up to within 5 feet, because that’s 10 more feet of total travel distance.

Just another fun fact that you can use to impress your friends!

Most of this information was borrowed from a thread on the ITS games forum — thanks to SkipperRipper, Dannyboy, bigdog423452, Thor, and the other guys on the forum for the information!

Your player rating is actually your number on the ELO rating system, a system used to rate players in two-player games like chess. It doesn’t come into play unless you’re playing in a handicap tournament, but you can compare it to other players to see where you rate — the higher, the better. If you beat players in a contest whose rating is higher than yours, your rating goes up, and vice versa. DNFs really knock your rating down, from what I understand. Most of the top players rate over 3000, with the best even topping 3300.

You earn a handicap after playing 36 holes. There is a formula for figuring that too, but it’s usually about 3.5 to 4 strokes higher than your average. So, if you average about -15, your handicap will be +19. Your handicap is always updated based on your last 25 games played.

The following statistics are tracked for each player during a live round of Golden Tee, and the leaderboard will show what player had the best/most of something on that specific machine.

Longest Drive
Longest Putt
Most Birdies
Most Eagles or Better
Driving Accuracy
Greens in Regulation

Great Shot Points
Great Shot Points are awarded for just that. If you’re 80 yards or more out and land a shot within 5 feet of the hole, you get a certain number of GSPs. You also get a big amount of GSPs by holing out from anywhere outside 25 yards. Great Shot Points are one of the statistics kept by the game for each player to have played a specific course on that specific machine. If you accumulate the most GSPs for a particular course, you’ll see your name on the leader board!

Golden Tee Points
Golden Tee Points are also accumulated for each player on each course as you’re playing a live event. The breakdown of GTPs is as follows:

Triple Eagle – 2500
Double Eagle – 1500
Hole in One – 1000
Eagle – 250
Birdie – 100
Sand Save – 75
Par – 50
Green Hit – 50
Great Shot Points – 1 point for every 100 Great Shot Points
Driving Distance – 1 point for every 10 yards for drives (in the fairway only)
Putting Distance – 1 point for every foot for made putts