When you sit down to watch the 2026 Players Championship this week, you may spot something interesting happening at TPC Sawgrass. Players breaking their own course strategy rules; aiming at pins they shouldn't. But there's a good reason for it.
There are advantages hiding in plain sight, and in golf Cory Jez—the founder of a company called Tour IQ—has been at the forefront of a new strategy that more and more tour pros use.
It doesn't pop up on every hole, and it can change based on pin positions. But the opportunities do arise.
We dive into it in the latest episode of Golf Digest's Game Plan, which you can watch right here...
3 buckets of shots
If you hit 100 shots and plot where they all land, that's called a shot dispersion, and most people talk about that dispersion as a tidy oval for reasons we discuss here.
Now, that is generally how they work. But the problem with this is that it assumes every shot is evenly distributed, which isn't quite true.
Cory has found that golfers' dispersions follow more of a bell curve — and the distribution matters.
So let's say a 10-handicap hits 100 shots from 150 yards. The outcomes will largely fall into three groups.
- Bucket 1 (68%) — Good-to-ok shots. Within ~40 ft of target for a 10-handicap (~20 ft for pros)
- Bucket 2 (27%) — Ok-to-bad shots. Roughly double that distance
- Bucket 3 (5%) — Disaster shots. Worse than Bucket 2, often by a lot.
The takeaway
Golfers massively overprotect against outcomes that are statistically unlikely, and occasionally miss scoring opportunities by playing too safe with their Bucket 1 shots.
The standard rule still stands (mostly)
Most of the time, the core of course strategy remains the same: avoid real penalties that force you to pitch out sideways — water, dense trees, pot bunkers. Same with short-sided shots.
Aim away from them, sacrifice some Bucket 1 shots to keep your Bucket 2 shots safe. This is still correct, still the default. We get deeper into that here.
But there's a wrinkle. A time when it's smart to break those rules.
The loophole...
Cory found, using the tour's ShotLink data, that certain short-sided positions have up-and-down rates well over 70 percent for tour pros. On paper they look dangerous. In the data, they're not. Let's call them pretend penalties (a few examples here).
When a pretend penalty sits near a tucked pin, you can flip the math — aim more aggressively at the flag, improve your Bucket 1 position, and let half of your Bucket 2 shots (about 13 percent) end in the pretend penalty.
The result?
- 68% of your Bucket 1 shots will end up close
- Half of your Bucket 2 shots (13%) will end in a spot that's easy to get up and down
- The opposite half of your Bucket 2 shots will end on the fat part of the green
- The remaining 5% of Bucket 3 shots are too random to plan for
than you think
From 150 yards, your shots don't spread evenly — they follow a bell curve. Most cluster close to where you aimed. Select your handicap to see how your pattern actually breaks down.
What is a pretend penalty?
It's a short-sided position that is easier than it looks on paper. The specific spots are course-dependent, but generally look for things like:
- You're chipping down to the green, not up
- There's an opposing slope acting as a backstop
- You're chipping from light or no rough
- The greens are soft
The bottom line
No, this isn't a license to go flag-hunting on every hole. Real penalties still demand respect, and avoiding the short side remains good golf strategy.
Yes, this is permission to break these rules sometimes — because the data shows it can be the right thing to do, and there's no one-size-fits-all in golf.
Your job, as the golfer, is to recognize pretend penalties on the rare occasions they arise — then have the bravery to attack when they do.
Once again, you can watch the full video right here: