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A good sign is that I am feeling/recognizing pretty early in the downswing if I did more old swing feels versus priority piece swing.   

Lost ball is recursive, so lost ball is basically dropping yourself back into the tee shot again and adding 2. If we simplify the math a little, then I think it's something like this: 10% left OB, 15% left rough, 50% fairway, 15% right rough, 10% right OB (let's say - I'm not 100% sure what right miss is like). Left is a better miss than right if it's in the rough. Left rough for a PGA Tour player is going to be perhaps 3.25, right rough 3.35 (more shots that is). Fairway about 3.1. So doing the math, we get: 20% x (X+2) + 15% x 4.25 + 15% x 4.35 + 50% x 4.1 = X 0.2X + 0.4 + 0.6375 + 0.6525 + 2.05 = X 3.74 = 0.8X X = 4.675 So 6.675 is the score from OB. 

Because strokes gained is not about pars or birdies, its fractional benefits of hitting the ball longer and taking into account expected score from the rough, bunker, or fairway. Also, it isn't really OB 20%. He said missing right is OK. 18% OB is really being overly conservative. I will be consistent.  As an example, if someone had the shot zone that produced 20% OB (just being consistent), 40% rough, 40% fairway. They play this hole 100x and hit driver each time. Odds are the golfer is going to have outcomes like this: 9 OB left, 20 left rough, 40 fairway, 20 right rough, 11 right OB.  Using PGA Tour data, from 180 yards out. The average score from the possible outcomes is,  Rough: 4.3 strokes (adding the tee shot strokes to the expect score from 180 yards out in the rough) Fairway: 4.1 strokes Lost ball is difficult. I think something like 6.2 is probably close.  Here is the weighted average, 4.3 * 40% + 4.1 * 40% + 6.0 * 20% = 4.6 (math works out to me) Let's inflate the PGA Tour data to make it more relevant to a scratch golfer. I think 10% actually might work out well. Let's say a scratch golfer shoots like a 78 on a PGA Tour course, and the PGA tour player averages 68. That is like 12%. Maybe it is closer to 15%. So, I inflated scores by 15%.  Rough: 4.9 Fairway: 4.7 Lost Ball: 7.1 (not sure this makes sense. would a scratch golfer average triple bogey from hitting on OB. oh well).  Scratch weighted average = 5.26, maybe that sounds better?  Looking at the 2-iron example from 240 yards out but inflating the PGA Tour strokes gained data by the same 15%. I get expected score hitting 2-iron off the tee to be 5.08 strokes.  Like above, the difference between the driver and the 2-iron is not that big. 0.18 strokes on average.  So, PGA Tour 4.12 expected score. Example golfer with 20% OB rate, 5.26 expected score based on questionable inflation of PGA tour numbers. 🤣

So I dug back through the last time an event like this was played there. On that occasion, the 10th was 435 yards so tee must have been a little up and the average score was 4.72. 3 birdies, 41 pars, 44 bogeys, 12 doubles and 3 others. This is also making me think perhaps my memory is playing silly buggers with me and it's actually not quite so death or that's a penalty area left. Otherwise I'm sure there'd be more "others". It was the 2nd hardest hole though. Hardest was a 445 yard par 4 on the front - that was more about pin position though. Pin on the back of the green and if you were about 15-40 feet short of the flag with your approach/pitch/putt, the ball would collect at the front of the green about 80-90 feet away. 

Maybe. 50 guys in the league, 10 seniors (75+), but less than half of them actually play from the senior tees. Perhaps that could solve the problem; a smaller prize for the contest with less people competing. Anyway, the managers took a poll of all the members and the results were pretty much 50/50 for and against so we'll just do what one responder suggested...table the whole question until next season.