Combine (Skills Test)

A single round mixes skill with a lot of noise — weather, course setup, and plain luck all affect a score — which makes rounds an unreliable way to benchmark one specific skill against a standard. A combine controls for that by fixing the stations, the number of shots per station, and the distances in advance, so the same test can be repeated and compared over time or against other golfers.

The hardest part of designing a combine is scoring it. A driving station, an approach station, and a putting station each produce results in different units — yards off line, feet from the hole, makes out of a set number of attempts — that don't add together into one score on their own. Converting every station's result into expected strokes against the same baseline solves that: a strokes-gained score folds any station, at any distance or lie, into the same comparable unit a full round would produce.

PinFlag's strokes-gained engine — the same frozen, Broadie-verified engine that grades an on-course round — is built to convert exactly this kind of multi-station result into one score, so a driving station and a putting station land on the same scale.