Strokes Gained
Why Pin Location Matters (and When to Ignore It)
Expected strokes change with where the pin is cut on a green, not only with how far away it sits, which is why short-siding a shot is usually more expensive than missing long on the fat side. Pin position should widen or narrow your target, and on a handful of dangerous pins the right move is to play to the center of the green and effectively ignore the flag.
What does pin position actually change?
The pin can move within the same green without the approach shot changing at all, and that alone shifts the expected strokes of an identical swing — because the baseline for the resulting putt depends on distance to a hole that just moved.
Pin position (hole location): where the cup is cut on a green for a given day’s play — it can move many yards within the same green from one round to the next, independent of the green’s overall size or shape.
Picture the identical approach swing — same club, same strike, landing at the same spot on the green relative to its front edge. If the pin is cut in the front third that day, that landing spot might leave a comfortable 15-foot look. Cut the same pin back-right instead, and the identical shot can leave 40 feet. Nothing about the swing changed — only the target moved.
| Result | Expected strokes to hole out |
|---|---|
| 15 ft (front pin) | 1.780 |
| 40 ft (back pin) | 2.060 |
That is a 0.280-stroke swing (2.060 − 1.780) from pin position alone, before a single swing thought changes. Multiply that kind of gap across a round of eighteen pins, and it is easy to see why two rounds with identical ball-striking can produce different scores purely because of where the holes were cut that day.
What is short-siding, and why is it the expensive miss?
Short-siding — missing on the same side as the pin, with little green to work with — turns a routine recovery into a much harder one, because the safe landing area for the next shot has shrunk to almost nothing.
Short-siding: missing an approach shot on the same side of the green as the pin, leaving little or no green between the ball and the hole for the next shot to work with.
A short-sided miss is expensive for a specific, mechanical reason: it removes the margin the next shot needs. A chip or pitch played toward a pin with plenty of green to land on and release is a very different shot from one that has to carry a bunker lip and stop within a few feet, because there is no green to work with on that side. The lie itself often gets worse too — short-siding regularly means a tighter, sandier, or more downhill spot than missing to the fat side would have left.
Consider a shot that finishes short-sided in a greenside bunker, 20 yards out (baseline 2.530), against the same swing missing long on the fat side and leaving a friendly 40-foot two-putt (baseline 2.060). The gap is 0.470 strokes (2.530 − 2.060) — and that is before accounting for the fact that a bunker recovery is also less predictable than a lag putt, so the realistic gap is usually larger still.
What is the fat side, and how do you find it?
The fat side of a pin is whichever side has more green — and less trouble — between the flag and the edge, and it usually flips hole to hole, so it has to be read pin by pin, not assumed from habit.
Fat side: the side of the pin with more usable green and less immediate trouble — the safer miss, even though it is often further from the hole on average.
The fat side is not a fixed direction. On one hole it might be short of a back pin; on the next it might be right of a pin tucked left against water. Reading it requires looking at the specific green that day — where the trouble sits, how much green is available on each side of the flag, and how the ground around the pin slopes — rather than defaulting to a habit like “always favor the pin” or “always play safe.”
The strokes-gained logic here mirrors the dispersion argument in golf shot dispersion: a target’s average proximity is only half the picture. A shot pattern aimed at the fat side trades a small amount of average proximity for a much smaller chance of the short-sided miss — and because that miss is disproportionately expensive, the trade is usually a good one, not a timid one.
When should you ignore the pin entirely?
On a genuinely dangerous pin — tucked tight behind a bunker, perched over water, or cut on a severe slope — the center of the green is often the higher-expected-value target, and playing away from the flag on purpose is a legitimate strategy, not a concession.
Ignoring the pin does not mean ignoring the hole — it means recognizing that, for a specific pin position, the strokes-gained cost of a center-of-green miss pattern is lower than the strokes-gained cost of a flag-hunting pattern that occasionally finds real trouble. This is most clearly true on the pins tour players themselves call “sucker pins”: tight to an edge, guarded on the short side, with a false front or a slope that repels anything short.
The center of the green is rarely a bad target in absolute terms — it is simply the target with the least exposure to the pattern’s tails. A coach explaining this to a student is not asking them to play more conservatively out of nerves; the numbers make the same case a good caddie would: on this pin, the width of your pattern costs more near the flag than the extra proximity is worth.
Descriptive, not automatic
None of this means always bailing to the center — the decision should follow the pattern and the pin, hole by hole. PinFlag’s iOS app, currently in pre-release, is built around exactly that comparison: the strokes-gained cost of a flag-hunting target next to the strokes-gained cost of a center-of-green target, computed from your own dispersion, before you commit to either.
How should a coach build this into lessons?
Walking a student through a green, pin by pin, and asking where the trouble sits builds the same judgment the numbers describe — and pairing that habit with a season of logged approach data turns a feel-based lesson into one backed by each student’s actual pattern.
The fastest way to teach pin-position awareness is on the practice green or during a practice round: stand at a hole, point out where the trouble actually is relative to that day’s flag, and ask the student to name the fat side before they hit. Repeated over a season, that habit becomes automatic — most good players eventually do this without consciously thinking about it.
The numbers reinforce the habit rather than replacing it. A student who sees, over enough logged rounds, that their short-sided misses are costing more strokes than their long misses has a concrete reason to change a target pattern that a single bad hole never provides. PinFlag for coaches rolls approach and around-the-green numbers up by student, so that pattern is visible across a whole roster rather than reconstructed from memory hole by hole.
Frequently asked questions
Does pin position change my strokes gained numbers?
What does short-siding mean in golf?
How do I find the fat side of a green?
Is it ever correct to aim away from the pin on purpose?
Does strokes gained account for pin position automatically?
Sources
Keep reading
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