Benchmarks and lenses

Tour, Scratch and handicap levels. The Tour lens prices every shot against Mark Broadie’s published PGA TOUR tables; the Scratch and handicap lenses reprice the same shots against a table for that scoring level, derived from the published tables and labeled Modeled. Switch the lens and every number in the round moves to the new scale while the shots stay exactly as recorded.

From Broadie’s published finding on where amateurs lose strokes to a tour field: about 65 percent in the long game, 20 percent in the short game and 15 percent putting. The strokes a handicap gives up over the tour average are spread over stated shot counts, 14 long shots, 7 short shots and 30 putts, and the per shot share is added to the table. The model is printed on the methodology page.

Because the Tour lens compares every shot with a tour field, and nearly every amateur shot loses a little to that average: on the benchmark model a 15 handicap sits about 16 strokes a round behind it. That is the scale working. Switch to a handicap lens and the same round reads near zero, with the gains and losses in the places that separate you from your own level.

On the Tour lens a 15 handicap is modeled at about 16 strokes a round behind the tour average: 10.4 in the long game, 3.2 in the short game and 2.4 putting. A category moving toward zero across a season is improvement even before the score shows it.

It changes what you are measured against, never what was recorded. The lie, the distances and the finish of every shot stay as you logged them; the lens changes the expected strokes table they are priced from, so a round can be read on the Tour lens and a handicap lens without touching the data.

A lens is a scoring level to be measured against, labeled Modeled in the app, and it is separate from a handicap: a handicap summarises your scores against course difficulty, while a lens sets the table your shots are priced from. The two are useful together, since the lens shows where a handicap’s strokes go.

Yes. Any round can be repriced under any lens after the fact, so a round read on the Tour lens for the season trend can be reread on the Scratch lens for a competition, and the shot values change while the shots do not.

From the published tour tables and Broadie’s published split of where amateurs lose strokes. The tour tables are his published anchors; the amateur columns apply his split over stated shot counts and are labeled Modeled wherever they appear, on the site and in the app.