RAWGOLF · TOOLS

The Field Reader

Every course asks a different question. Some weeks it is length, some weeks it is a wedge to fifteen feet, and some weeks it is whether you can read grainy Bermuda at five in the afternoon. Set what this week actually demands and watch the field reorder itself. Runs entirely in your browser — move a slider, the board moves with it.

The short answer

What is course fit in golf?

Course fit is the idea that a course rewards particular skills more than others. A long par 71 with small greens pays for approach play; a short course with heavy rough pays for accuracy and scrambling. Weight each skill by how much the week demands it, score every player against those weights, and the ranking that falls out is the fit.

Set the week

70

How much raw length is worth. High on a long, soft course with wide fairways; low when the rough punishes a miss more than the extra fifty yards helps.

85

Small greens, firm surfaces and long second shots all push this up. It is the single biggest separator most weeks.

55

Runoffs, deep bunkers and thick greenside rough. High when missing a green is genuinely expensive.

60

How much the greens decide it. Each player is scored on the surface below, because a good Bermuda putter is not automatically a good Poa putter.

Before Thursday

This board is live in your browser every week the feed updates — there is nothing to subscribe to for that. What lands in your inbox is The Card: unfiltered player ratings and the stories PR reps tried to kill, every Friday.

How the fit score is built, and what it cannot tell you

Each player carries four ratings from 0 to 100, where 50 is a tour-average performer: distance, approach, short game, and putting on the surface being played. The fit score is a weighted average of those four against the weights you set. Set approach to 100 and everything else to 0 and you get a pure iron-play ranking. That is the whole model, and it is deliberately simple enough to argue with.

A fit score is not a probability. It says a course asks for skills a player happens to have. It knows nothing about form, injury, travel, the draw, the weather on Thursday afternoon, or whether someone is putting well this month. Golf is won by whoever plays best over four days, not by whoever fits best on Tuesday. Treat the board as an argument, not an answer.

The shipped field is archetypes, not real players. Every card on the board is labelled. They exist so the model is usable and testable out of the box. A real field is loaded by editing /data/tournament-field.json with real strokes-gained numbers from a source you can point at. Estimating a named player's numbers by feel and publishing them would be inventing statistics about a real person, so this tool ships without doing it.

Questions

Does putting surface really matter that much?

More than almost any other single factor. Bermuda grain, afternoon Poa bumpiness and the true roll of bentgrass reward different reads and different strokes. Players with a real surface preference show it in their numbers, which is why putting is split three ways here.

Are these real players?

No. The shipped list is archetypes, each one labelled on the board. Load a real field by editing the tournament feed with sourced numbers.

Is this a betting tool?

No. It ranks skills against course demands. It does not price markets, take stakes or predict winners, and a fit score is not a probability.

Where do my picks go?

Into your own browser, alongside everything else in the locker. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account. Clearing browser data deletes them.