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Weekly Quiz!

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Second Hole at Talking Stick

The second hole at Talking Stick North Course (Coore & Crenshaw design) is a par-five stretching about 510 yards, with out-of-bounds running along the entire left side. There's debate about whether aiming close to the out-of-bounds on the left gives you an advantage on the approach shot. The thought is you have a better angle from the left side.

Huge shoutout to my good friend Rick for the idea to write this one. I had written about this hole a few years ago (using tour data). Rick reached out to me asking me about amateur data on this hole. Rick is an awesome follow on twitter by the way. He plays a ton of amazing courses and his course reviews are legendary! Highly suggest you give him a follow here!

Off to the Arccos Golf database we go (Use code DATALOU15 to save 15%).

For this analysis I only included players that kept their initial tee shot in play. If the first tee shot was hit OB, that player was removed from the analysis.

I looked at players who landed their tee shots in three different parts of the 75 yard fairway: the left 20 yards, the middle 35 yards, and the right 20 yards.
I looked at this by handicap. There were a couple thousand rounds to look at.

The hole:

Here is the scoring average, from each part of the fairway, broken down by skill level. For each row, the best scoring average is highlighted in green and the worst scoring average is highlighted in red.

Here is the birdie percent broken down by skill level. Remember, this only includes players that kept their tee shot in bounds.

My Thoughts

The data above is clear. There is no advantage to being up the left side. In fact, players up the left side score worse than they do on the right side in every single handicap group! They also are not making more birds up the left side.

Don’t forget, in this analysis I removed players that hit their tee shot OB. I do not know, but given that this is a 75 yard wide fairway, my guess is that players that hit the ball OB off the tee likely had a target that was closer to the left side than the typical player. I do not know this for sure, but I think it is a fair assumption. If we included those players in to the mix, the scores on the left side would likely be even worse.

Also - when you look at second shots, players from the left side are more likely to hit it OB. I am guessing that is because many players on the left are adhering to the old myth that they can be more aggressive from that side because they have the “good” angle.

Your objective on every tee shot should be to avoid trouble as much as possible. Incurring penalty strokes is not a good recipe for low scores. When the course gives you a 75 yard wide fairway (which is a poor design in my opinion 😉), you should not try to play up one side of the fairway. Use all that space to your advantage. Make the fairway as big as possible and take trouble out of play. Keeping it in play is how you will shoot the scores you want to shoot!

See you next week!

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