Last weekend I played a pretty good round at Half Moon Bay's Ocean course, finally ending my birdie drought. I didn't keep score but know I had 4-5 pars and 1 birdie. I also know that I didn't have any blowup holes thanks to no OB, nothing in the hazards, etc. Maybe 1 triple. Might have actually broken 90 without realizing it.
In any event, I got curious if there were some formulas, relationships between pars and score, birdies and score, GIRs and scores, etc. Luckily I'm not the only golf geek. Lucius Riccio did a study back in the 90s and found several relationships, some stronger than others. For example, the relationship between score and pars is
score = 102.6 - 2.7 * number_of_pars
This is the equation for GIR
score = 95.1 - 2.0 * number_of_GIRs
Other relationships are listed here.
What caught my attention was the weak relationship between putting and scores compared to the strong relationship for GIRs. That is, you can have a good putting day and still score poorly, you can have a bad putting day and still score well, etc. This goes against all that I've been told, that you must putt well to score well.
Base on these relationships I think I should focus the majority of my practice time on the mid/short irons. You figure on a typical course you'll probably have a mid/short iron approach shot 10 times? Just getting half of those mid/short irons on the green (5 GIRs) puts you at 85 according to the equation.
