STROKES GAINED EXPLAINED
Strokes Gained on the PGA Tour compares a player’s scrore against the entire field’s performance, providing a layer of
context that score alone does not. For example, a 68 on a day when scores are high is weighted differently than a 68 when plenty
of players go low. The field average is zero, so interpretation is easy: The higher the strokes-gained number, the better the
performance. A player’s strokes-gained total is broken down into categories – driving, approach shots, short game, putting- to illustrate what parts of the game contribute to a score. The bigger the drive, the closer the approach,
the longer the putt made, they all lead to a higher strokes-gained mark.
50 / JANUARY 2018 / GOLFDIGEST.CO.ZA
words and mountains of images, golf is
really a numbers game. And the numbers
are huge, the embodiment of Big Data.
There is no more vivid example in golf
than the PGA Tour’s ShotLink system,
which tracks every shot hit every week and
produces player data in 653 statistical cate-
gories, including the revolutionary strokes
gained statistic, a predictive-analytics model
that calculates how a player is performing
from every place on the course compared
to the field.
Data at that level has been the exclusive
domain of tour professionals – until recent-
ly. Over the past few years, in-round stat
programmes, like those from leaders Arccos
and Game Golf, have tracked almost three
million rounds and more than 250 million
shots, providing amateur golfers with statis-
tical profiles for every club in the bag. This
growing surge of information might be the
game’s most promising frontier.
“Golf is one of the better sports for data,”
says Game Golf founder and CEO John
McGuire. “It’s very data-driven. Our job
is to take the data, contextualise it, and
make it useful.”P
erhaps the biggest step in golf ’s Big
Data revolution came in 2017 when
Arccos launched Arccos Caddie as
part of a partnership with Microsoft using
their Azure Cloud. The Arccos 360 system
($250) works with a smartphone and mea-
sures shots using sensors placed in the grip
of each club. The Arccos app is free, and
Arccos Caddie is available for an additional
fee. For now, Arccos Caddie provides club
recommendations only off the tee. Why
only off the tee? Because those recommen-
dations can be made before a round begins,
which makes it legal in the eyes of the
USGA. If digital recommendations were
“live” during a round, like on approach
shots, they would violate Rule 14-3, which
governs the use of artificial devices and
unusual equipment, says Thomas Pagel,
the USGA’s senior director of rules and
amateur status.“Golf is still a game of skill and judg-
ment, and anything that can give a player
an advantage and diminish that judgment
is a problem,” Pagel says. “The com-
pilation of two or more data points to
provide some recommendation that takes
that judgment away from the player, that’s
where the issue comes in.”
What the rules-makers are wrestling
with is this burgeoning interface between
human knowledge and computed data.
The work that Arccos Caddie does
theoretically could be done by a human,
but certainly not as fast. For example,
Arccos Caddie analyses not only a player’s
data but the data of all similar golfers in
its system and all golfers who have played
that particular hole.
Based on GPS information, weather
forecasts, topographic maps and propri-
etary algorithms, it calculates the terrain
and the forecasted wind and temperature
and assesses their effects on your location.
This all goes into the mix before it spits
out a club recommendation and displays
your predicted score, your odds of
making par with that club and your
odds of hitting or missing the fairway
or green. And it does that in less
than three seconds.
In a TED Talk, data scientist Jeremy
Howard noted that AI already is better in
some instances at diagnosing cancer than
expert pathologists are. “We now know
that computers can learn to do things
that we actually don’t know how to do
ourselves.... The better computers get at
intellectual activities, the more they can
build better computers to be better at
intellectual capabilities, so this is going to
be the kind of change that the world has
never experienced before.”
That is precisely the informational
precipice upon which the rules of golf
sit at the moment. There is a virtual
data explosion that could let all golfers
know not only how far they hit every
club but whether they chip better with
a 50-degree wedge than a 54- degree. Itknows with cyborg certainty that a 25-hand-
icap on a short par 4 will score on average a
half-stroke lower hitting a 3-hybrid instead of
a driver off the tee, even though his 3-hybrid
goes 42 yards shorter than his driver. Is that
an unfair advantage? The ruling bodies want
to maintain the human element in the game’s
strategic decisions, Pagel says.
“More and more data points are going
to exist that can be aggregated together,” he
says, “so what does that mean for playing
the game? The rules shouldn’t be viewed as
a hindrance to technology and innovation.
They provide structure so that we’re able to
be thoughtful about where the game might
go and ensure that it doesn’t become robotic.”
Still, delineating what kinds of information
are allowed can be murky, and it risks alien-
ating a generation that consumes more data
in a single morning than its ancestors from a
century ago did in a lifetime.G
olf ’s data surge creates powerful
information, self-knowledge that can
have a profound effect not just on
your scores but on your enjoyment of the
game. Big Data, AI, machine learning are all
ways that, if properly mined, might increase in-
terest in the game. (Data mining and machine
learning already are shaping how courses are
maintained, even how clubs and balls are de-
signed.) And this is without even considering
the social aspects of a data-linked golf commu-
nity, key features to the Arccos and Game Golf
apps. Already these apps feature virtual contests
between golfers playing courses all over the
world at the same time. Arccos even lets you
text your buddies with a diagram of how you
just played your last hole.
“Bringing the Cloud to golf helps it stay
relevant to the times,” Syed says. “If golf resists
these developments, then golf won’t be a part
of our lives. It seems a little backward to think
that that should be disallowed.”
For now, though, the USGA clearly is still
not completely endorsing the idea. But Syed
thinks he has a solution: “I’ve looked at the
rules, and nowhere do they define that a
caddie has to be human,” he says. “So maybe
there’s a loophole.”