GolfDigest.com has an article about 5 Statistical Oddities From the 2014 PGA Tour Season, which is a summary or excerpt from a book called “Pro Golf Synopsis” by statistician Richie Hunt. Hunt has analyzed the statistics from the 2014 PGA Tour and discovered a few trends in strategy to help pretty much all golfers.

The first one mentioned in the article is that “Laying up on a par 5 or a par 4 should be considered the last option”. Everyone scores better from closer to the green, so unless it’s to avoid a hazard you should never lay up and just get the ball as close to the green as possible.

Also found is that “Tour players tend to be more accurate with their driver than their 3-wood off the tee”, and “Scores are typically lower in the morning than in the afternoon”.  What I take from this is, stick with your driver and get the earliest tee time possible. I think they are more accurate with their drivers because they probably practice hitting drivers more than their 3-woods, and scores are lower in the morning than the afternoon not because of higher winds in the afternoon, but because play is generally quicker in the mornings than in the afternoons. In my experience, faster play makes for lower scores.

The other trends noted in the article are “The better drivers of the ball often split their misses closer to 50/50” and “Round 1 Scoring Average has the strongest statistical correlation to PGA Tour success, followed by Round 2 Scoring Average”. These ones aren’t so interesting to me.