Revealing the Strategies Hidden in Variance

IntroductionThis is the second part of a discussion about variance in golf. It started out as a long-form piece that involved a ton of programming for the visualizations. Now that the work is done, I’m breaking it up into three parts so it will be a bit more palatable. Here, though, remember that I’m trying to build up to something throughout the three-part series.Part one was about how hole design transforms uniform dispersion patterns into different probabilistic outputs.Part two will be about visualizing variance: how we can show strategic tradeoffs by illustrating risk-adjusted strokes to hole.Part three will be about what we mean by “good shots” and “bad shots,” and will illustrate why the two different frameworks divide the golf community.In part one, I outlined the idea that golf course features transform shot quality into result quality. We can think of this as taking the input randomness (the golfer’s dispersion pattern) and then converting that random distribution into a…