Swing Evolution - Ben Hogan

Tell me you've not seen Bill play without telling me you've not seen Bill play? 😄 Just teasing @billchao. 😄 

And like Matt said, and I have hinted at… it's ONE ROUND. Because you have to get hot. Better players than him failed to get through. And… Peaked too soon, perhaps. He could also get injured, get surpassed, lose interest or lose his game… Again, if I trusted y'all to uphold the bet, and if the bet wasn't basically a 15-year proposition… I'd bet y'all. The odds are against him, and heavily so. So… he didn't qualify, and he's playing on a sponsor's exemption. Jordan Spieth was 16 years old when he tied for 16th in a PGA Tour event… and I realize that mentioning Jordan Spieth (who has obviously had a lot of success) seems to argue against my point, but Spieth is the exception and he did better at only a year older than this fella. The odds are strongly against him.

He shot -5 with a bogey on the last hole. Those Monday Q events are seriously tough to get through. Lots of very very good players play in those, including normally a fair few tour players who've lost their cards, including past winners. It is a small sample size, but he also just broke one of Tiger's records (youngest ever to be ranked one in AJGA if memory serves). He's the best 15 year old in the world at the moment. He's also pretty small and skinny - if he grows and fills out a bit and gets stronger, he could be a serious force to be reckoned with. He may of course also go off the boil and struggle or his swing may not last his growth or something, so it's not like he's odds on to make it or anything like that. I think it will be interesting to see how he progresses and if (big if granted) he progresses well, then he will be quite the prospect.

At a basic level, you can take those strokes gained numbers and if you know what the baseline strokes to hole out is from each distance, you can figure out how many strokes on average you will take to hole out from any given spot on the golf course. Then you can take that shot zone thing from shotscope and put it down there and see what the average is for each club and each target you choose. That's not exactly trivial to do though even with a computer, so the strategy guides (like LSW) use rules of thumb to make those decisions easier for you to make on the fly. Most of the time you'll come up with the optimal strategy and on the odd occasion when you don't, the strategy you come up with will be pretty darn close to optimal. If you're anything like me, then you'll probably wind up being a little too conservative with both club choice and target. Fear of penalty strokes can make you play suboptimally. Basically it's a bad idea to base your strategy on a shot that might pop up less than 1 in 20 times. If you happen to hit that shot, then today just isn't your day, but the 19 times you don't, you'll be in that much better of a spot.

That sounds like a small sample size issue. What if the PGA tour event he was trying to get into just happened to fit his game perfectly? Also, he could just be playing hot right now. I’ll put this in the wait-and-see category.