u/kinghippo33

Last week I ran the "300 yard fairway drive or sink every putt inside 10 feet" question through shot-by-shot data on 1,000+ real 18 hole rounds using Data Driven Golf’s strokes gained shot data. The drive won every handicap bucket by a mile.

The best pushback in the thread was that "300 yards, always in the fairway" is two superpowers stapled together, and the fairway is probably doing most of the work. So I split them.

Three versions, same rounds, same rules otherwise:

* 300, always fairway. The original version. Every par 4 and 5 over 320 yards you finish 300 out, in the short grass. Under 320 you finish 20 yards from the pin. Never rough, never OB. Par 3s are unchanged.
* 300, your actual lie. Same 300 yards, but the ball ends up in whatever lie your real tee shot found. Hit it 210 into the right rough, now you're 300 down the right rough. Penalties still happen, the ball just travels 300 yards before it finds them.
* Sink every putt inside 10 feet. The first putt you face inside 10 ft on each hole goes in, every time.

Strokes saved per round:

Handicap (round diff) |300, always fairway |300, your actual lie |Sink 10 ft putts
+2 to 2 |4.0 |2.1 |2.8
3 to 7 |5.5 |2.9 |3.3
8 to 12 |6.7 |3.8 |4.3
13 to 17 |8.3 |4.8 |5.0
18 to 22 |10.1 |6.4 |5.8
23 to 27 |11.6 |8.1 |6.9

It flips. If we take the guaranteed fairway away, putting wins every bucket up to a 17 differential. The drive only wins out at 18 and above.

The fairway part is worth more to good players than to bad ones. The same-lie drive keeps 52% of the full superpower's value for scratch rounds, rising to 70% for the 23 to 27 group. So better players get most of their gain from the guaranteed lie, and worse players get most of theirs from the raw yardage boost.

13 to 17 differentials is a coin flip, 4.8 against 5.0. If you play to a mid-teens differential you can argue either side.

How penalties work in version two: the superpower belongs to the drive, so the ball travels 300 yards before it finds the water. Your drop sits at the 300 yard mark instead of wherever it actually sat, in the same lie, and the shot you play from the drop is left exactly as you played it. The average penalty drop in this data already sits 226 yards down the hole, so the ball only moves forward about 74 yards. Stroke and distance is the exception, because a re-tee sends you back to the tee no matter how far the ball went, so there it's the re-teed ball that gets the 300.

Full write-up with the method, the quality gates on the rounds, and the original numbers: https://www.datadriven.golf/blog/300-yards-or-ten-feet

There was a thread here yesterday asking which you'd rather have: a straight 300 yard drive every time, or every putt inside 10 feet goes in. It seemed answerable rather than arguable, so I checked with data from a free strokes gained app I built. I have shot-by-shot data on a few thousand logged rounds (every shot, its lie, and its distance). I pulled over 1,000 complete 18 hole rounds and simulated both.

The rules, informed from the original thread:

* Fairway drive: every par 4 and 5 over 320 yards, you advance it 300 yards in the fairway. Under 320, you finish 20 yards from the pin, in the fairway. Never the rough, never a hazard, never OB. Par 3s are unchanged.

* Putting: the first putt you face inside 10 feet on each hole goes in every time.

Rounds are bucketed by their USGA score differential, so it's how the round actually played for that round rather than their official handicap.

Results, strokes saved per round:

| Handicap (round diff) range | Avg score | 300 yard fairway drive shots saved | Sink 10 ft putts shots saved |

| +2 to 2 | 72.4 | 4.0 | 2.8 |

| 3 to 7 | 76.6 | 5.5 | 3.3 |

| 8 to 12 | 81.4 | 6.8 | 4.3 |

| 13 to 17 | 86.2 | 8.4 | 5.0 |

| 18 to 22 | 90.7 | 10.2 | 5.7 |

| 23 to 27 | 94.6 | 11.7 | 6.8 |

The drive wins in every bucket, by 1.5x to 1.8x. I thought there may be a crossover somewhere with better golfers but there isn't one.

Three other observations:

1. The forced 300 actively costs good players strokes on some shots. The premise is exactly 300 every time, so on a 340 yard par 4 you're 40 yards out whether you like it or not. Scratch-level rounds average 266 off the tee, so occasionally they blast one past 300. A mandatory 300 makes things worse on 12% of their par 4s and 5s. That drops to 1% for the 23 to 27 golfer bucket, who average 201 yards off the tee. I counted those as losses rather than throwing them out, and the drive still wins.

2. Everyone faces about the same number of short putts. Scratch players face a putt inside 10 feet on 16.5 of 18 holes. The 23 to 27 group faces one on 17.2 holes. Basically identical. High handicaps don't get more short putts, they just miss more of them. That's what caps the putting superpower: there are only so many strokes sitting inside 10 feet, and many of them are near gimme distance.

3. A big chunk of the driving gain is just not hitting it OB. Penalty strokes off the tee erased per round go from 0.34 for scratch to 1.34 in the 18 to 22 bucket. For worse players the perfect drive is as much an accuracy superpower as a distance one. The 300 yards is honestly the less important half.

Methodology caveat: replacing your tee shot changes what you face next, and I can't replay an approach you never hit. So the rest of the hole is valued at your own expected strokes from the new spot, calibrated to how you actually play. That's standard strokes gained logic, but it does mean the driving number is an expectation and not a literal recount. The putting number I can count literally as the changed putt ends in the hole.

The obvious follow-up: the fairway is doing more work here than the 300 yards. A 300 yard drive with your *normal* accuracy, finding the rough and the trees at your usual rate, should be a much closer contest. That's the version I'm running next.

Full method, the data quality details, and the rest of the numbers:
https://www.datadriven.golf/blog/300-yards-or-ten-feet