50 Words or Less
The Shot Pattern golf app is an amazing tool for playing smarter golf and shooting lower scores. Preview your rounds or use it on the course to make better decisions. Input your data after playing to learn where you’re gaining or losing shots.
Introduction
The analytics revolution can be seen in all sports, and golf is no exception. Unfortunately for the recreational player, putting all these new insights into practice can be too time consuming. Shot Pattern aims to fix that by packing key visualizations and statistics into an easy-to-use app.
Set Up & Ease of Use
One of the things that most impressed me about Shot Pattern is the quality of the app. Any tech-inclined golfer knows that many golf apps have great ideas behind them but fall short on usability. Shot Pattern is not one of them.
When you open the Shot Pattern app, you’re offered tutorial videos, Course Preview, Play Golf, and Account & Stats. The tutorial videos, available on Shot Pattern’s YouTube channel, are very helpful in walking you step-by-step through the different methods of data entry.
You can upload batches of data from a launch monitor, which is the fastest way to get a lot of data into Shot Pattern. Additionally, you can enter your shots as you play. My favorite method is to use my Shot Scope data [I’m using the new V5, review HERE] and enter all the shots post-round. This takes about five minutes, and I found it took about two holes for me to get the hang of it.
The two primary modes, Course Preview and Play Golf, both work intuitively. They start with selecting a course – Play Golf uses your location to identify nearby courses. From there, you’re presented with an overhead image of the hole (below) where you can plot out the optimal strategy.
Benefits
In one sentence, the reason for using Shot Pattern is to improve your decision making on the golf course. It does this in two ways: by creating a visualization of you shot pattern on tee and approach shots and by giving you Strokes Gained stats before you hit your shot.
The two pictures above show a tee shot in Shot Pattern. On the left, I selected the 70 yard arc; on the right, I selected the 40 yard arc. This little white arc is the secret sauce of Shot Pattern as it shows you your entire range of likely outcomes. I can’t overstate the value of this visualization. If you’re looking at a hole and wondering, “Can I safely fit my drive between the trees and the water?” Shot Pattern will give you a definitive answer.
In addition to the white arcs, Shot Pattern can show the actual dispersion of all the drives you’ve entered into the system (above, left). In my case, this includes some poor strikes and some big foul balls, but it’s very useful to see this so you can pick a realistic target.
Beyond visualizing a good target, Shot Pattern lets you know what risks are worth taking by giving you real time Strokes Gained stats. If you look at the two examples above, you can see the value of hitting it an additional 25 yards is about 0.08 strokes. That may not sound like much, but if you multiply that advantage by fourteen drives, you’re at over 1.1 Strokes Gained for the round. The moral of the story: hit driver [but you already knew that if you read THIS]. You can get that same data for questions like, “How much will the rough hurt me?” or “What’s the value of hitting the green vs laying up?”
Shot Pattern gives you a different visualization for approach shots. Above left, you can see the 15 foot circle with the 50 foot circle on the right. This is extremely helpful for picking smart targets that will keep you out of stroke hazards [more on that HERE]
You can use Shot Pattern while you’re playing or to preview your round. As someone who prefers to be device-free on the course, I like preview more, but I would pull out Shot Pattern to confirm a particularly tricky decision if I were chasing a personal best or trying to win a big bet.
While the Course Preview/Play Golf modes will help you make good decisions, I also spend a lot of time in the post-round analysis. Above left, you see the report you get back after each round: a hole-by-hole score alongside your Strokes Gained in the four major categories. You can also see these stats for all your rounds to see how they vary (above, right).
Digging to the next level, you can see a stat summary or dive into each category. As you can see above, there are numerous conventional stats like up & downs, fairways, and total putts. I find more value in the non-traditional stats, especially those off the tee. As you can see, I only hit four fairways, but twelve of my drives gained strokes (relative to a 10 handicap) due to every drive being in play, no big misses, and above average length. Let the big dog eat!
Two other things I love are the breakdown of putting stats into different distances and the “Key Stats” category (above, right, top). If you’re a higher handicap player who wants to shave off strokes as fast as possible, focus on those Key Stats and you’ll see your scores plummet.
Finally, at the nerdiest level, Shot Pattern shows you the Strokes Gained for every shot you took during the round (below, left). This may seem like overkill, but it’s tremendously helpful for your strategy and mental game. As an example, I had a round where I felt like my putting was pretty mediocre. When I looked at my stats, I discovered I was wrong – I gained strokes on most of my putts. The only times I lost strokes was when I set up a three-putt with a poor lag. This reminded me to ease off the pressure on the fifteen footers and practice more fifty footers.
Value
The Shot Pattern app is free to download and use. In the free mode, you can use the Course Preview mode and see both the tee shot arcs and the approach shot circles.
Unlocking the premium features of Shot Pattern costs $11.99/month or $74.99/year – a 47% savings over paying monthly. The premium mode gives you the Strokes Gained Predictor tool, Strokes Gained stats on every shot after your round, and customized shot patterns. Shot Pattern offers a one week free trial of the premium features.
Downloading the free version of Shot Pattern is a no-brainer for anyone who cares about their score. This is a must-have strategy tool. Getting the most out of the premium features requires more effort as it relies on you inputting your data, but the value is tremendous for competitive players.
Conclusion
If you want to play smarter golf, Shot Pattern is one of the easiest ways to do so. The app is streamlined and intuitive, allowing you to shave strokes off you handicap without an advanced degree in math or hours of time spent over spreadsheets and satellite images.
Listen to our podcast with Shot Pattern’s creator, Eric Duffet, HERE