Expected strokes, the tables PinFlag uses

The tour average number of strokes needed to hole out from a lie and a distance, published by Mark Broadie from PGA TOUR ShotLink data: tables for the tee, fairway, rough, sand and recovery lies in yards, and a putting table in feet. Strokes gained for any shot is the expected strokes before it minus the expected strokes after it, minus one, and every PinFlag number is built from these tables.

2.945 from the fairway, 3.190 from the rough and 3.250 from the sand on the published tour tables. From 100 yards in the fairway it is 2.800 and from 200 yards 3.190, which is why the table is nearly flat inside 120 yards and steep above 150.

1.626, which means about 37 percent of 10 footers drop. From 3 feet the average is 1.053, from 20 feet 1.878 and from 40 feet 2.058; PinFlag prices every putt from this table at the distance you placed the leave.

The tee table runs from 100 to 600 yards, the fairway, rough and sand tables from 20 to 300 yards, the recovery table from 100 to 300 and the putting table from 1 to 90 feet. Outside those ranges the value is held at the nearest end, and PinFlag and the calculators say so rather than extending the curve past the source.

Yes. Between the published distances every yard from the tee to the green and every foot on it has its own price, so the number moves as you move the aim, and a longer putt is never priced easier than a shorter one.

Yes. The calculators on pinflag.io and the app price from the same published tables, so a shot priced on the site is the shot priced in the app, to the same figure.

The published tables are tour averages. A handicap level lens adds a fixed per shot share of that handicap’s gap on the site’s benchmark model, labeled Modeled, which is how the same shot reads against a scratch or a 15 handicap table instead of the tour.

Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, in his 2011 paper on assessing golfer performance on the PGA TOUR and his book Every Shot Counts. PinFlag uses his published tables as its TOUR baseline, and the methodology page prints the arithmetic.