Golf term
Verified Course
A verified course is one whose geometry — greens, tees, fairways, hazards, and boundaries — has been confirmed accurate by a professional survey or a physical, on-the-ground walk, rather than left as unverified map data.
Most course mapping is built from satellite imagery, aerial photography, or crowd-sourced points, which is usable for a general on-course map but not necessarily precise enough to price a shot in strokes down to a specific yard. Verification closes that gap by confirming the geometry against reality, one course at a time.
PinFlag holds a single verification standard: a professional survey or the operator's own ground-truth walk of the course, and nothing weaker earns the label. A course that fails a check on units, topology, or hole count doesn't get to call itself verified with a caveat attached; live strokes gained is disabled on it instead.
Verification status travels with everything computed on that course. A Measured reading requires verified geometry as one of its four conditions, so an unverified course can only ever produce Estimated numbers, regardless of how good the GPS signal is that day.
Related terms & guides
Glossary
Measured vs. Estimated
Measured vs. estimated is a disclosure standard for strokes-gained data: a number is labeled Measured only when verified course geometry, a user-set pin, a supported lie, and a real GPS position are all present together, and it reads Estimated otherwise.
Glossary
Lie (Golf)
A lie is the surface and condition a golf ball is resting on before a shot — fairway, rough, sand, and so on — and, together with distance, it sets a shot's expected strokes.
Glossary
Baseline (Expected Strokes)
A baseline is the average number of strokes a benchmark golfer needs to hole out from a given distance and lie — the reference every strokes gained calculation is measured against.
Guide
Strokes Gained Explained: The Complete Guide