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Putting Averages

• Blackwood 32 Posts

  Thu, Feb 4 2010 3:29 PM

  I have been suspecting a problem with the % of Putts Made from xxx feet for a long time. Finally I decided to keep some data in an Excel Spreadsheet and compare it to what WGT is posting as my averages. I played 10, 18-hole rounds and kept track of the distance of every putt I took and whether I made the putt or not. I put them all in my Excel Spreadsheet and this is the result:                                           

                       WGT post                          My data

  1. % putts made from <5ft     47.42%            95.83%                                     
  2. % putts made from 5 - 10 ft  11.78%        75.00%                                     
  3. % putts made from 10-25 ft     6.70%       27.69%                                     
  4. % putts made from 25-50 ft     0.55%        5.26%          

  I had some terrible rounds (and a few good ones) with a lot of missed putts, but you can see that my actual putting is significantly better than what WGT has been supposedly been keeping track of. I never had a putt over 50 ft so didn't include it here, but I can tell you that in all my time here, I haven't had more than perhaps 20 putts greater than 50 ft, so my 0.05% is not accurate either (you would have to miss 199 putts and make 1 to have that average). My conclusion is that WGT is not tracking this correctly and should remove this from our stats until it is fixed.

  PS. Sorry this is hard to read, but I don't know how to make it all line up.

• YankeeJim 25,827 Posts

  Thu, Feb 4 2010 4:25 PM

  LOL-The problem is with 13, 700 putts!! You're looking at a fraction of the whole picture and it will take you forever to get the stats where they actually should be (don't think it's possible anyway.) This is why there has been some clamoring for resetting the stats, or at least be able to filter them.

• marioh 1,055 Posts

  Thu, Feb 4 2010 4:34 PM

  I never understood the point to those particular stats as they never seemed right from the beginning.

  But maybe I'm just missing something?

• Kosei82 144 Posts

  Thu, Feb 4 2010 6:11 PM

  yeah marioh..the putting stat % is not correct

• nivlac 2,188 Posts

  Thu, Feb 4 2010 11:56 PM

  % Putts Made from 0 - 5 Feet	48.51%
  % Putts Made from 5 - 10 Feet	15.98%
  % Putts Made from 10 -25 Feet	8.50%
  % Putts Made from 25 - 50 Feet	0.64%
  % Putts Made from 50+ Feet	0.01%
  Total Putts	14,812

  Ok, there's my stats and here's my take.

  I think your percentages are being calculated off of your Total Putts.  It's saying that 48.51% of my 14,812 putts were put in the cup from inside of 5 ft.  15.98% of my 14,812 putts were made from 5-10ft and so on down the list.  If you add all the percentages together, you get 73.73% putts made and 26.27% missed.  That suggests I make slightly less than 3 out of every 4 putts I take regardless of the distance to the hole.  Basically it's telling me that in my career I've made 10,920 of the 14,812 putts I've ever struck and that I've missed 3,892 of those 14,812 putts. 

  According to my stats I average 1.35 putts per hole.  If you take 1.35 and multiply it by 18, that means I would average about 24.3 putts per 18 hole round, 18 of which go in the hole.  Divide the 18 holed putts by the 24.3 total putts and we get 74%.  The minor variance can be explained because it's likely the percentages shown are rounded off to 2 places.

  To further this theory, I know for a fact I have made only one putt over 50 feet and my stats show 0.01% for that category.  If we assume that the .01% is approximately .0068% rounded up to two places we get 1.007.  Again, close enough to suggest this is how it's calculated.

  Just crazy enough to make sense?

• YankeeJim 25,827 Posts

  Fri, Feb 5 2010 4:45 AM

  I think they picked the wrong guy for A Beautiful Mind.

• marioh 1,055 Posts

  Fri, Feb 5 2010 5:13 AM

  nivlac:

  % Putts Made from 0 - 5 Feet	48.51%
  % Putts Made from 5 - 10 Feet	15.98%
  % Putts Made from 10 -25 Feet	8.50%
  % Putts Made from 25 - 50 Feet	0.64%
  % Putts Made from 50+ Feet	0.01%
  Total Putts	14,812

  Ok, there's my stats and here's my take.

  I think your percentages are being calculated off of your Total Putts.  It's saying that 48.51% of my 14,812 putts were put in the cup from inside of 5 ft.  15.98% of my 14,812 putts were made from 5-10ft and so on down the list.  If you add all the percentages together, you get 73.73% putts made and 26.27% missed.  That suggests I make slightly less than 3 out of every 4 putts I take regardless of the distance to the hole.  Basically it's telling me that in my career I've made 10,920 of the 14,812 putts I've ever struck and that I've missed 3,892 of those 14,812 putts. 

  According to my stats I average 1.35 putts per hole.  If you take 1.35 and multiply it by 18, that means I would average about 24.3 putts per 18 hole round, 18 of which go in the hole.  Divide the 18 holed putts by the 24.3 total putts and we get 74%.  The minor variance can be explained because it's likely the percentages shown are rounded off to 2 places.

  To further this theory, I know for a fact I have made only one putt over 50 feet and my stats show 0.01% for that category.  If we assume that the .01% is approximately .0068% rounded up to two places we get 1.007.  Again, close enough to suggest this is how it's calculated.

  Just crazy enough make sense?

  Hmm, I guess it does make sense when you put it that way !

  I'll stick with the one, two, three + putt percentages in order to see how my putting is.   It's simpler and doesn't make smoke come out of my ears thinking about it.   :)

• Infinito3010 3,689 Posts

  Fri, Feb 5 2010 7:08 AM

  Here is my two cents worth. 

  Lets say I have a total of 3000 putts. Based on Nivlac's example.

  Putt Distance              Conversion                      #putts

  0-5ft                                  48.51%                           1455

  5-10 ft                               15.98%                             479

  10-25 ft                             8.50%                               255

  25-50ft                              0.64%                                 19

   

  The above example represents an overall putting average based on the total number of putts. Hence 792 putts out of 3000 were not converted at the specified distances.

  Now if we knew how many putts one had the opportunity at each distance then you can examine putting percentages at each distance.  These values will be significantly different.   For example lets segregate out of the 792 putts  that were not converted, 265 of those putts were in the 0-5ft range and 300 putts were in the 5-10 foot range.

  Putt distance                   Conversion                       Percentage

  0-5ft                                   1455/1720                               84.59%

  5-10ft                                 479/779                                    61.48%

   

  Hence, the first table gives you an overall view and the second table gives you a per distance view.   Each are valuable.  The second table can give you a better indication of what you need to work on.

  However, if you following your game and keeping notes like I do, (spreadsheet form) you already know what areas you are improving on and what areas you need to improve.  

  Thus resetting the putting stats from time to time or using the last 200 rounds in the calculation will provide more information to a player which is statistically sufficient.  Hence the improvement one may see is entirely dependent on the total number of putts.

• neildiamond11790 1,115 Posts

  Fri, Feb 5 2010 7:58 AM

  Beautiful mind indeed nivlac, and that makes a whole lot of sense to me, and unfortunately makes my numbers understandable and sad.  I got to hit that putting green when it comes out.

  62% holed putts out of 1976

  avg putts per round 28.98, yuck

• NormH3 214 Posts

  Fri, Feb 5 2010 9:10 AM

  At the end of the day, there are only two stats that really matter. The win stat and the loss stat and sometimes they are "don't cares".