Lou Stagner's Newsletter #48

Tenth Hole at Riviera

Author

Lou Stagner
February 16, 2024

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From 125 yards in the fairway on a par four, scratch players will average 1.95 putts to hole out when they hit the green. How many shots on the average will it take them to hole out after they miss the green with their approach shot?

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Tenth Hole at Riviera

The PGA Tour is at Riviera Country Club this week. This is one of my favorite events of the year. I especially enjoy the tenth hole. I have posted a lot of content about the tenth for tour players. Below I am going to link to a cool interactive dashboard that allows you to play around with 17 years worth of data.

Today however we are not going to look at tour players, we are going to take a quick look at how amateurs have performed on this hole. Thanks to my friend Hutch at Arccos for passing along this data to me. Hutch leads up data science at Arccos Golf (use code DATALOU15 to save 15%). He is one of the smartest people I know AND a scratch golfer to boot. If you don’t follow him on X (Twitter), click his name above and give him a follow.

Below is a breakdown of performance on the tenth hole by handicap:

The tenth hole gives you the option to get it close to the green, or lay back to a longer yardage. How do low handicap players (index of 5 or less) do when “going for it” versus laying up. Low index players that decided to layup scored almost a half shot higher compared to those who went for it.

Click the picture below to access the interactive dashboard for tour player data. You can select different pin positions, lies, distance off the tee, etc… Mouse over one of the dots to get info about that shot, including who the player was.

This probably looks best on a desktop, laptop or tablet.

My Thoughts

The 10th green at Riviera is diabolical. That does not mean you should be laying back. Get the ball down there as far as you can (making sure you are always factoring in penalty strokes!!!).

Have fun messing around with the dashboard and enjoy the event this week!

See you next week!

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    Have a great week!

Lou Stagner

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