Pretzel

I know there are certainly days where I've felt like a vanity handicapper, especially last year when I reactivated my handicap in September 2020 for the first time since 2017-2018ish. It still had 20+ rounds on record from 2017-2018 and gave me a plus handicap that was stuck on my record as the lowest index of my past 12 months until September 2021, meaning the rise of my handicap was limited. I definitely started out playing to somewhere between a 10-15 handicap while my index was pegged at it's upwards limit of about 4 or so, until eventually working my way back down to match the index and lower it slightly from the upwards cap. It was pretty funny seeing scores of 80+ next to the name of a "plus handicap" on the leaderboards regularly for a month or two, but there wasn't much I could realistically do. Now I'm in a similar scenario - have played 3 times since last November and am more than a little bit rusty despite my handicap still being the same as it was at the end of the season last year. It's an annual occurrence in places with winter though, so not too worried there.

Personally I quite like my BagBoy Nitron for the main reason of me being lazy and wanting a push cart that's quick/easy to setup and takedown in the parking lot before and after rounds. The Nitron can be unfolded or re-folded in less than 5 seconds, and so far for me (over two years of use) has proven to be plenty durable. The only things I wish were different really would be slightly larger wheels like the Clicgear (makes pushing a bit easier) and perhaps a little bit larger diameter for the cupholder.

I've seen two different causes for driver shafts snapping at the hosel. The first, as mentioned by @iacas, is hitting the ball off the extreme heel of the club. The second is hitting the ground before the ball, particularly if it's been cold out and the ground is frozen hard. Beyond that I haven't personally seen it happen on a swing with good contact, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily impossible. Unlikely unless the shaft was already damaged, is it possible that you're applying pressure to the driver while storing or transporting your clubs? I've had a driver shaft failure due to club storage before (Bi-Matrix shaft left in a hot trunk all summer, two of them, that later separated where graphite meets steel). In this case just having pressure applied would be your point of concern since it's not an issue with an epoxy bond weakening and later failing.

I'm interested now that my move is completed and I'm in the (general) area

It's going to be interesting to watch development for the coming months, and even the coming year or two. It will be interesting to see how upgrades shake up the order, particularly as teams figure out how to better solve porpoising issues with improved suspension designs. I'm more interested in seeing how the budget cap affects the development of various teams, with big names like Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari used to spending more than twice as much as they're allowed to nowadays with other teams more accustomed to slimmer budgets. It will be interesting to see if the larger names have better efficiency or just had deeper pockets, and whether that helps keep things constantly fresh or if it just locks in a set order for the regulations with not enough room for innovation to overcome initial disadvantages.

They certainly won't have any of the BBQ pork sandwiches for attendees though, unfortunately. Or $4 beers, considering there won't be any beer at all.

Ferrari and Mercedes both had the most "wild" car concepts for this year, with the two of them being so opposite one another (maximum sidepod vs virtually no sidepods), and it's fun to see that one of the really unique car designs is (so far) the most successful of the pack. I would have never guessed that a pair of bathtubs on either side was the ideal design, but they're definitely getting results.

I've got a long road trip coming up for a move to Virginia, I'll have to see if I can't download the season from Netflix to watch during times I'm a passenger. I've heard that it's been a decent improvement over season 3, and I'm hyped enough for the next season I'm sure I'll enjoy it regardless.

It's definitely a large issue this year, mainly as a result of the suspension and tire changes more-so than the ground effect changes since the previous cars already made the majority of their downforce from the floor even if doing so while creating more dirty air. The easiest way to see it's an issue primarily with the suspension is to watch Max Verstappen cruising into the pits and experiencing very similar issues at speeds far too low for ground effect to be the culprit. The teams lost their 2 main sources of suspension damping in the form of the dramatic reduction in tire sidewall and the banning of hydraulic damper setups that were previously the norm.

The most laughable claim about these ugly pieces of bar stock is that they're the only putter out there with zero torque at impact. Only people with zero knowledge of physics make that claim or believe it to be true. Amost every conventional putter design out there has a point on the face where there will be zero torque about the shaft when you make contact with the ball. It's a basic geometrical concept called the center of rotation. It will be further towards the toe or heel based on the shape and weight of the head, neck, shaft, or grip as well as the lie angle and length. The only thing different/special about the directed force putters is that they adjust the lie angle and length to move the center of rotation into the center of the putterface as opposed to different styles of hosel or clubhead shapes. The thing is, however, it doesn't matter in the slightest. If you make contact with the ball at the center of rotation it doesn't make any difference whether that's in the middle of the face, towards the heel, or way off the toe. You'll have no torque or twisting so long as impact is in line with the center of rotation, it's the same reason bladed irons have a sweet spot further towards the heel. Directed force just makes it "easier" to find the sweet spot because it's in the center of the face, but most people can find the sweet spot on a putter within 5-10 strokes because you can feel where you're supposed to hit it pretty obviously. To clarify, when I mean the center of rotation is shifted I mean by somewhere in the neighborhood of +/- a quarter inch or so on most common designs. The classic standard Ping Answer/Scotty Newport style has a sweet spot slightly shifted to the heel, but not by enough to substantially notice unless you hit enough putts to wear in the sweet spot like a certain famous someone. It's a small thing, and like I said most people can figure it out within 5-10 putts.

I went ahead and edited my earlier post after reading further to see the specifics of your question. Sorry for the confusion, but the explanation you're looking for is now included in my previous post at the bottom. The path is changing throughout the downswing because it travels along the diagonal sweetspot path that wraps around your body, not a vertical path straight away/towards the target. Think of it like holding a hula hoop vertically up/down versus laying it at an angle, with the hoop being the path your clubface traces as you swing back and through. You can see how the path angle, relative to a target you might be aiming at, changes throughout the downswing.

Closure Rate is an angular velocity. It is the speed at which an angle is changing, nothing more than that. In this case the angle is the measured difference between the direction your clubface is pointed and the direction of your swingpath. If your path is neutral (0 degrees open or closed) and the clubface is 2 degrees open, then the measured angle is +2 degrees. If your path is 2 degrees open (in to out) and your clubface is 2 degrees closed then the measured angle is -4 degrees. A low Closure Rate means your clubface angle is relatively constant over time when compared to the swing path. A high Closure Rate means the clubface is rapidly opening or closing relative to the swingpath. Low closure rates are beneficial for controlling the trajectory of the golf ball, because the difference between clubface angle and path angle is the largest factor in what direction the ball will curve and how tilted the spin axis is (how much the ball will curve). As you approach impact, the club continues to wrap around your body and the path of the club changes. Unless you come heavily over the top, your downswing starts on a substantially out to in path because you're swinging along a circular arc. As you approach the bottom point of your arc (where impact is located, approximately), this path will point more directly towards the target. In the follow through the path again changes as the clubs wraps back around your body, making the path change to be more out to in than it was at impact. That's the counteracting item that you're missing, because the swing is on a diagonal plane (look up 5 Simple Keys' Diagonal Sweetspot Path for a good explanation) instead of a vertical plane.

It absolutely is generational wealth, like I said you're making 7 figures a year for 20 years. Being known to be a cheater is less than ideal, but if you're living a quiet retirement it doesn't make you any different from a nobody. It's a much different kind of stress to spending 20 years wondering if this is the year you'll be "laid off" because you didn't perform well enough. The stress of that can start to ease after the first 5 years with enough savings though, because you'd at least have a fallback plan sorted out by then.

I'll go against the grain and say with certainty I'd choose option #1. It's the difference between spending 20 years of your life worried that this year could be your last year on tour (risking getting sent back to the meat grinder that is the Korn Ferry) because you're struggling to make that top-125, or spending 20 years of your life comfortably retaining status and playing the best golf of anyone on the planet during that same timeframe. To be clear, it has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the amount of stress you're going through during that 20 year period. 125th on the FedEx Cup standings last year was Chesson Hadley, who still earned $940,986 in prize money and enough from his various sponsorship deals to comfortably push him into 7-figures annual earnings. Those guys right on the cusp there are playing in every tournament that will accept them into the field every year (based on their priority ranking) just hoping to do well enough in a couple weeks per year to get to the ~350-450 FedEx cup points required to stick around in the top 125. Almost all of them have between one and three top-10 finishes, maybe another one to three top-20 results, and the remainder of the tournaments scraping by with ~50% made-cut rate. Just incredibly stressful to live knowing each week you need to perform and get that next top-10 to keep your priority ranking, only able to relax some for the remainder of the season once you've reached the 400 FedEx Cup points. You also are less likely to get to play in the biggest and best tournaments, and specifically would be unlikely to earn an invite to the Masters unless you got lucky with a win once or twice in your career. While your reputation in option 1 gets tarnished after you're done playing golf, you still played a much less stressful 20 years on Tour. You won't be considered the greatest of all time and some of the lifetime benefits historic players receive could be revoked, but you had 20 worry-free years that you can follow up with a quiet retirement of doing whatever you would have done anyways had you chosen option #2 (where you wouldn't be getting lifetime benefits or sponsor arrangements anyways after retirement).

McLaren, Haas, and Aston Martin all publicly stated they're showing off older versions of their actual vehicle design. The rest of the teams used the F1 show car we've seen for the last year or two because they purchased their own copies of those to paint liveries onto, but those 3 teams did not purchase show cars and used older version of their design (almost certainly with some obfuscating pieces added as well) for their livery reveals.

I'm mostly just excited by the fact that cars will be dramatically different from one another, as evidenced by the Haas reveal's massive difference in design particularly around the sidepod philosophy compared to AM's longer but narrower "double-floor" design.

That's the thing - if only the stars are playing then there will be more fans watching compared to standard PGA Tour events. Doesn't matter if it's a new tour or a new format of competition. The Match between Phil and Tiger had more viewers than any other cable golf telecast in history at 6.3 million. Only big-time majors like The Masters pull more viewers than that. The star power is where the viewers go, and where the viewers go so do the sponsors.

I just want them to have a ridiculous joke of a CAD model for the car up on every monitor, maybe some guys sitting there for half an hour rotating a single wheel nut in Solidworks while they're at it. A car with a black silk drape that's absolutely covered in pool noodles and other bits/bobs underneath to make the shape look different.

Pretty much all brands use either Torx or security Torx bits in their wrenches, the only specific advantage of the branded tools is that they have a torque limiter built-in to prevent you from damaging things. The thing is, most players don't need, use, or even want the wrenches that come with drivers. I had the screw holding the weight onto my driver come loose while out playing, just making an annoying little rattle, and discovered that my wrench hadn't gotten moved into the new golf bag when I switched everything out of the old one. Afterwards I asked the pro if he could torque it down for me before I forgot, and he just handed me a box filled with dozens of the wrenches and told me to take as many as I wanted. Probably 90% of his customers specifically told him they didn't want the wrench after getting fitted for and buying the new driver that was already adjusted to their specs, so he had amassed a large collection over the years. To me it seems like a bit of a non-issue. It's unfortunate if you don't already have the tools required and want to tinker with your clubs, but it's also pretty much irrelevant because pro's and shops are already overwhelmed with too many spares of the wrenches that they can't even give away for free. The number of golfers who change their driver from the fitted setting is very few, and the only reason that companies use the adjustment systems is to consolidate production into a 1-2 SKUs that can be quickly and easily tweaked to fit all customers instead of producing all the different glued loft, shaft, and weighting combinations. It's advertised as though adjustability is a consumer benefit, but the reality is that consumers don't want or need adjustability and it's just meant to make inventory management easier and manufacturing substantially cheaper. If you need to change the weighting or loft of your driver on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis you have a swing problem, not a driver problem.

The main thing that scares the PGA/Euro tours is that their events become substantially less valuable in comparison if a competing league with ONLY star-studded fields pops up. They don't want somebody to take advantage of their large investments by essentially using their top-level productions (the PGA/Euro tours) as a feeder series to create even higher quality events (from an advertising/revenue perspective anyways). It completely discounts the entire basis of the PGA/Euro tours' current values, which is the substantial mini tour systems that exist to find and funnel the best talent (best here meaning the most profitable talent, those who are streaky enough to go on a run of wins) to the top-level productions. Why would a company pay top-dollar for sponsorship and advertising at many different events that have a few stars and mostly nobodies when they could spend their money instead on several high-impact events with fields of nothing but stars? The money comes from the stars, and the current arrangement benefits both the PGA and Euro tours by allowing them both to take advantage of the money that comes along with hosting tournaments where the best players are present. If the best players decide to go elsewhere because they got better offers, they take a VERY substantial portion of the PGA/Euro tour's revenue with them. The effect wouldn't be immediate but the delay wouldn't be long either, sponsorship and advertising deals would plummet in value and some might even argue in court (likely unsuccessfully, but still expensively) for a breech of existing contracts if the primary reasons for the sponsorship/advertising (the viewers that tune in or show up to watch the best of the best play) are no longer there. It's not that they're worried about someone new taking a piece of their existing pie, it's that they're worried somebody is going to make their existing pie worth less. Even worse, they'd be doing it by using the most exciting pie flavors the PGA/Euro has tours spent years and billions of dollars developing. The thing that has been the PGA/Euro tours' biggest advantage and best business strategy for decades - using other smaller budget tours to recruit the most profitable talent - would now be used against them.

This is the heart of the issue. Pick a shot shape, and then use that shot shape for every swing you possibly can. Golf is a tough sport and it's already hard enough only trying to hit one shot every time, no need to complicate it more than you have to. Curving the ball the other direction is only for recovery shots or holes where your standard shot shape simply cannot work, such as a narrow, tree-lined hole with a sharp dogleg opposite your natural shape that you HAVE to get past on your tee shot. Even then, hitting your standard shot shape higher or lower is often easier to control for most golfers than hitting a shot that curves the opposite direction and is usually the better choice if available. For recovery shots you have to know when to take your medicine instead of trying to be the hero. For holes that don't fit well with your shot shape you have to evaluate the risk/reward of larger shot cones/shot zones for a non-standard shot shape compared to the potential disadvantages of using your normal shot shape with tighter shot cones/shot zones. There are strategies to make it easier to shape the ball one direction or the other, but they still require a consistent swing that is not so far biased towards a fade or draw as to make it near impossible to hit the other shot shape. To be brutally honest, most golfers cannot shape the ball both directions with any kind of consistency or reliability. When playing the best golf of my life I was a +2.4 while playing a draw as my primary shot shape, and even then I didn't trust myself to hit a fade that would 100% of the time move left to right in the air unless I was trying to curve it far enough to be what most would call a slice. I could trust that attempting to hit a draw the worst-case misses were that I would hang one out there with no curve or end up with a big hook, but the ball would not move left to right in the air. Trying to hit a fade the double-cross was always a possibility that couldn't be entirely eliminated. While nowadays I hit a fade as my primary shot shape, I still don't try to hit anything but my primary shot shape unless it's absolutely necessary. It's an extra risk that in the long run doesn't pay off unless there isn't much of an alternative.

Along the lines of what others have been saying, I like to try to have a "standard" shot shape that I use for 95-99% of my shots out on the course unless there's a specific tee shot or recovery shot that really requires a different shape to it. Over the years I've hit both a draw and a fade as my "standard" shot shape depending mostly on whatever course I played the most at the time. That said, I don't attempt to change my swing to hit differently shaped shots (at least not for hitting a draw versus a fade). I try to make the same basic swing for the most part, but change the shape by changing my setup. If I setup to the ball with a more open stance relative to the starting line of the ball, face square to the intended start line, that sets me up for a fade with the same swing relative to my body's alignment. If I setup to the ball with more of a square or closed stance relative to the starting line of the ball, face square to the intended start line, that sets me up for a draw. When I switch between a fade or a draw as my "standard" shot I'm really just trying to change the way I usually set up to the ball more than trying to change the way that I swing. I know swing changes are bound to occur, but I try to keep them to a minimum if possible.

That's not quite how steroids work, if it was then bodybuilders wouldn't need to constantly be on the juice when competing since they could just bulk and cut with the steroids, then attempt to maintain afterwards. The thing is, steroids work by heavily encouraging and rapidly accelerating the repair and re-growth phase of muscle development. It improves recovery time in the gym, allowing you to work each muscle group more frequently than you otherwise could, while also both boosting amino acid uptake/protein synthesis in skeletal muscle tissue (makes you better at turning food into muscle mass) and increasing the presence of neurotransmitters at the fiber site that are responsible for triggering that growth in the first place (makes your body start turning food into muscle mass quicker/more easily). Because being on the juice allows you to both workout harder than is otherwise physically possible AND benefit more from an identical workout than a non-juiced athlete it is impossible to maintain the gains made during steroid usage after cessation. You cannot workout as hard as you did on the juice, and even if you could workout just as hard you wouldn't get as much benefit from the same workouts. All athletes that previously used steroids before quitting will see a decrease in muscle mass and strength because they can't workout as hard anymore and their workouts are all less effective than they used to be, just like a non-juiced athlete would see a decrease in muscle mass and strength if they stopped their current daily targeted workout routines and replaced them with a couple light bodyweight exercises 2x a week. They're not working out as much as they were, and they're not triggering muscle repair and growth as effectively as before either - the only possible outcome is an inevitable backslide to whatever their workout program and diet would have been capable of without the assistance of steroids.

Managing expectations is such a big one. When I played the most golf of my life I was a better player than I am currently, and I could hit shots then that I can't now. Getting heavily back into golf again after college I was trying to hit the same shots, or expecting the same results from easier shots, and playing absolutely awful compared to how well I was still hitting the ball. I even had an entire club (looking at you, 3-iron) that was unreliable enough I just stopped hitting it altogether. I was playing as though my Shot Zones hadn't changed, when in reality they were quite different. Once I took the time to actually set and maintain realistic expectations, my scores immediately dropped by 5 shots because I was no longer playing "stupid" golf.

If 3-putts are your concern, the best thing you can do is practice distance control with your current putter or your new putter if you decided to get one. Distance control will make a much bigger difference in reducing 3-putts than if you make 10-20% more of your 5-6 foot putts, simply because you'll have more 2-3 foot putts and across all ranges of player ability you are nearly 2x more likely to make those putts than a 5-6 footer. It's also much easier to improve you distance control from +/- 6 feet to +/- 3 feet than it would be to double your make percentage of 5-6 footers, because even PGA Tour pros only make 70% of putts from 6 feet. If your first putt has the correct speed, even a large error in your read will leave you with a relatively short putt.