The three skills you need to win the Tour Championship

East Lake Golf Club was built in the early 20th century, and the type of play that is rewarded around the Donald Ross design as it hosts once again the Tour Championship—straight hitting off the tee and precise approach play—still reflects old-school approach. When I analyzed the statistics of recent editions of the Tour Championship using Arccos Pro Insights, it’s clear that a bomb-and-gouge strategy doesn’t work here. Length helps, yes, but watch for players who pair sufficient distance with precision off the tee to keep the ball in the fairway and set up scoring opportunities inside 150 yards. These are the three skills players need to win the Tour Championship.

Accuracy off the tee

Strong play off the tee is required to play well at many tour courses, but it is especially important at East Lake where during the Tour Championship, accuracy has been rewarded more than length. Don’t get me wrong, length is still very useful at East Lake, but playing from the fairway is critical to controlling the ball into the greens. That’s why you’ve seen very accurate drivers succeed here in recent years, like Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland and Xander Schauffele.

Approaches from 100 to 150 yards

At East Lake, short-iron and wedge play is very important. When you analyze the parts of the game that contribute to differences in scoring between players, more than 16 percent of the difference comes from this distance range. That is much higher than the average PGA Tour course, and there are very few courses where approaches from this range are more important.

There are a couple of reasons this range is so crucial at East Lake:

1. The difference between a good shot and a bad shot from this range at East Lake is much bigger than other courses. If you miss the greens, the penalty is high, but quality shots often leave straightforward putts for birdie. The players who are a little off with their short irons will be scrambling more than usual, while those who are sharp will have plenty of makeable birdie putts.

2. Players have an unusually high number of shots from this range at East Lake. During a typical tour event, players average about four shots per round from this distance, but at East Lake, players average more than six per round. Players who are dialed in this area will have plenty of opportunities to separate themselves.

Putting from seven to 13 feet

Given the number of approaches into the greens from 100 to 150 yards, players can have quite a few close birdie looks. The best players from 100 to 150 yards will hit plenty of approaches inside 13 feet, making this short-range putting a big separator between a good performance and a win. The stats show a high correlation between a player’s putting from seven to 13 feet and his final position on the leaderboard.

Players I like at East Lake

All in all, the course tends to favor great ball-strikers. Scottie Scheffler up until last year didn’t have a great history at East Lake, particularly on the greens. Last year was the first time he gained shots on the greens, and he won comfortably. If Scheffler is not firing on all cylinders, you don’t have to look too far down the list of players to find other great ball strikers that are a good fit to the course. Tommy Fleetwood and Corey Conners are in a good run of form and they are some of the best ball-strikers in the game; they both excel inside 150 yards. They could be a real threat to Scottie at East Lake.

EDOARDO MOLINARI, a former U.S. Amateur champion, Ryder Cupper and three-time winner on the DP World Tour, is Arccos Golf’s Chief Data Strategist and is a statistician for players on the PGA Tour and DP World Tour.