Can't plough through any more of this crap!

GL OP.

I'm out.

I never once said that the dead straight downhill putts converge to the original line. If you can find a quote where I said that, then go for it.

I specifically said they converge towards the "hole". A totally reasonable use of the word converge. Bo, if I recall correctly was saying even all breaking putts converge towards the hole which is wrong.

I look forward to your illustration, if it's anything like your last one it will be a doozy I'm sure.

I'm pretty sure the small circle in 5a represents the hole and the intersecting lines there are indicative of a make. Obviously the other points of intersection are not indicative of a make as they are nowhere near the hole.

But you will admit that both launch angles hit the hole, yes? And I think we both know that a putt that hits the hole has a better chance of dropping than a putt that never hits the hole. In figure 5a there are two lines that intersect the hole, in figure 5b there is only one. I'd like to think that two putts hitting the hole results in more makes than only one putt hitting the hole.

BO

This is technically correct, but for the sake of this argument the "point" means the "hole", which has a certain width. In this sense, both putts will converge at the hole (but not necessarily the same point). Other than the bottom center of the hole they will all settle in.

All: One thing that needs to be pointed out is the straight downhillers converge if hit 1 degree (or whatever) left or right of desired line (dead straight), and will "converge" at the hole even if hit at the same speed. This is not a benefit of side-sloping L-R putts. If you aim for an intended line, and hit it 1 degree left (too high) or 1 degree right (too low) the two putts require a very different speed* to "converge" at the hole. This is something Ship's side of the debate doesn't seem to be considering. There is a ton more leeway on the straight downhiller because no matter what speed you hit the putt... if you only deviate a little bit LEFT OR RIGHT, it can go in the hole. On the side-breaking putts, you will have to foul up both your line AND speed and do so in one of the exact combinations that finds the hole.

Again, this is not easier to match up than any flat, straight putt. Trial and error data does not show this to be true, and it does not stand to reason. I refuse to believe this is true.

*Actually.... if you mess up your line on a side-hill breaker... don't you have to hit it HARDER whether your miss left OR right? So maybe it's not as drastic as I originally thought. It's still going to be a completely different speed than you intended, though.

I'm just thinking out loud here but if, on a L-R breaker, if you miss your line right (too low), and your speed doesn't adjust... you'll miss amateur (low) side of the hole, which means if your line is right you need to hit it harder to go in? At the same time, if your line is too far left (uphill too much) don't you also have to strike the putt harder to get up the hill? Maybe we should be striking all side-hill breakers harder than we think so that if we **** up our line either way, it will perhaps have a better shot of reaching the hole!??!???

Actually I'm not sure about this... the lower putt may not have to be hit harder since it has less slope to climb. But it sure feels like it dies short/below the hole if not hit harder. ???

When this discussion tapers off around Masters time can someone post cliffs? You guys lost me at 12" dong.

Yes obviously the small circle represents the hole. No, lines intersecting over the hole don't indicate a make.
Yes both launch angles hit the hole.

And if it is your opinion that having 2 putts hitting the hole results in more makes than only 1 putt hitting the hole I have an interesting situation to describe to you.

Did you know that a straight putt has AT LEAST 2(and sometimes even many magnitudes more than 2) separate launch angles for every single makeable speed except for the very top end speeds that will only go in dead center? You see each speed and angle that goes in left of dead center has AT LEAST 1 twin on the other side of the hole.

That is simply not the case with a single breaking putt. It is the case, except even more combinations, with downhill, straight putts tho which is why they are the easiest putts to make.

So if I am getting your opinion right, if each speed breaking putts can go in on has less launch angles to match up with compared to straight putts, wouldn't that put you on team "straight"?

Disagree. Putts go in left center and right center just as with any other putt.

Since I don't agree with what you said I am certainly not on team "straight". But no matter really, right now I don't think you're going to agree with anything I or ship say.

BO

RESULTS!

Ok, so Mr. Bogey golfer went out to a real live putting green today and did this. It was a trial since my buddy who took the bet wasn't free today.

I found as flat a hole location as I could find on the edge of the green and paced off 33 paces. Happened to be exactly on the opposite edge of the green. As far as 100 footers go, it was pretty darn straight. If I hit at the max makeable speed (prob about 5-8 feet past) it held to about 6" of break right to left. If I tried to die it at the hole, it was about 18" right left. It was ever so slightly uphill over the first 1/3 rd of the putt, then flattened out after that.

Probably one of those putts that a commentator would say is very "makeable" for a pro.

I brought my assistant w me to shag balls. I only had one sleeve of balls (more on that below). So I would putt 3 and he would roll them back to me.

Only took 5 or 7 to find the nuances of the line. I actually lipped out one of the first 10 and burned the edge a few times in the first 20.

I think I hit my inflection point (sorry couldn't resist) of improving on my chances of the putt going in around 30-40. After that I had the line and my crappy putting stroke and needed luck.

I banged away at it and about one of every 5 or 6 felt like it had a chance all the way to the last few feet. Most were misses right away. (Too high, too fast, too low, etc. )

I finally dropped one on # 97!

Some thoughts:
Def need more balls. Tough to get a rhythm and feel when you have to stop every few. Noticed that the third ball in each 3 ball group was usually closer on average. 10-20 balls at a time would be ideal with someone shagging and clearing.

Easy to get lazy in the beginning and just whack away trying to get lucky. I gave away way too many attempts without taking the time to ensure I was lined up correctly, felt the speed, etc.

Use an intermediate target. I don't usually do this in a round, but it helps when you have a ton of attempts at the same line. I didn't do this until the last 20 or so and I started honing in a lot more at the end.

All in all, I think that just going out cold, first try, 100 putts is probably a decent line, maybe slightly in the putters favor. With the above adjustments, I think it's pretty solidly +ev.

I would estimate that a true fair line is around 80 or so for me now.

Cool. Good details in that report. (not really sure how it's relevant to the discussion going on here though )

One of the reasons I think it's a tough prop is something you mentioned, even after you knew exactly what the putt did, you could only hit 17-20% of your putts in a way so they had a chance to fall in.

Definitely need at least 10 balls, if you've got a shagger no reason not to have as many good balls as you can your hands on at the ready.

Will be interested to hear your thoughts and mindset when doing this for cash. Especially if you go down to the wire as you did today.

Oh, one last thing, the putt is supposed to be 100 feet. You did this trial from only 99.

BO

Lol, I'm not even positive my paces were exactly 3ft so I bumped it back a few feet anyhow.

Oh, and the cash isn't big enough to make any difference. We make $100 bets all the time.

The cash may not effect you but your pride may kick in and if your at putt #97 without a make the pressure could be a factor.

Definitely drop about 50 balls down and try and get a groove going. My thought when doing my exercise was keep it high. There's always a chance of the ball going in if its on the high side. Once its below the hole you've got no chance.

This was the genesis of the straight vs break discussion.

At the same speed, does a putt hit low, and thus less up the slope, maintain more speed and break less due to not having to climb as much hill. And does a putt hit high at the same speed, lose speed faster and break more due to having to climb more hill.

And do those lines cross at a certain point (note that the point is not the balls endpoint)?

Firstly, everyone please stop using the word converge in this thread. The only proper use of the word converge in relation to rolling putts is that the forces are acting on the ball to redirect its path until it it travelling straight down the slope on which it's travelling...at which point it has converged to the slope's direction.

In the straight downhill putts, the lines "converge" with the slope, resulting in a path parallel to the initial direction.

Now that I've made my peace with that....

Arod, if you look at Figure 14 in the paper, if the speed is correct, it actually shows that the window for launch angles becomes MUCH WIDER. You lose flexibility in the speed on a breaking putt and you gain flexibility in the launch angle. I think you should revisit Figure 14 and rethink you stance on what I quoted.


So really the debate is a matter of knowing what's more probable...

1.) Getting the speed in that magical window (followed by successfully launching into that much wider window)

or

2.) Getting the launch angle correct with more flexibility in the speed.


I think it's 1. NXT thinks it's 2. There is nothing more to the debate at this point. All the Ship/NXT stuff is fluffy dick-waving. We figured the problem out already. We just need a way to answer it with certainty.

Clearly by looking at Figure 14, it is the most physics-laymen-friendly answer we can have for why the launch angle window opens so greatly on breaking putts. If there is other physics at work here, I haven't thought about it.

With regards to 1 and 2, that is why I took the diagram you made from the make distributions in the paper, and overlayed what a range of actual putts would look like. The main point here being that the there are makes on breaking putts that lie outside of your shot cone, and thus they are not utilized. See from 10 feet I don't think a golfer misses my more than 4* on either side of their "ideal line". To utilize all of the makes in the diagram, a player would have to miss their initial line by almost 10*. Missing a 10 footer by 10* on each side of your line would mean you can't it through a 3.5 foot upright from 10 feet away. Nobody is that bad.



And then I tried to take it a step further, and overlay both those make distribution over a normal distribution of putting strokes.



Now it's certainly not a perfect drawing(not to scale and each distribution isnt in the exact right place), but I think it illustrates the point that a straight putts make distribution will always concentrate more around that center point than a breaking putts. And you would have to weight each area based on how far away it is from the center of the distribution, bc again as you move further away from that center point the less likely an event becomes.

In essence, even if a breaking putt does have more total combination(which I don't even think is the case), so many of those combinations would lie so far from the center of the putters distribution that they become almost completely worthless. And all of the makes the fall outside of the putters distribution are completely worthless.

I forgot today was Saturday, it's going to likely take until Monday for me to post what I wanted too. Our nanny has the weekends off and I've already taken on enough family time for this.

I did go the the club this morning and got some great video to illustrate some things.

NXT, if you had 100 attempts at a 10 foot putt, how many do you hit so hard that even a dead center putt doesn't go in? I don't think your distribution is very accurate. I think if you plotted some sort of density over your red rectangle, you'd find that a vast majority of that distribution is going to be centered around the hole (not to mention with both plotted on the same graph, it's not properly centered for the breaking putts, making it look like there are waaaay more putts that are hit too hard).

I also have to admit that I don't really know what I'm looking at with the blue and red distributions you'd drawn up. I get the red part, but the blue isn't clicking with me. I don't think you can just plot them together like that in the manner you did. If that is supposed to be an image of what you had boxed up in the red rectangle (and rotated 90deg counterclockwise), it's not at all an accurate portrayal of distribution because the graph you pulled it from isn't distribution of putts...it's just the combinations of speed and direction that work from a given distance, which we've already agreed does not equal the actual probability of making putts because the distribution of putts is not completely random over that area.


You need something like the following:




So that shows the window of an approximate AND ARBITRARY THAT I HAVE JUST NOW MADE UP distribution of speeds for an attempted 10 foot putt. You admit that if the speed is correct, the window for missing left/right is so wide that a golfer would be almost physically incapable of missing their line so bad that they're missing out on being able to use the whole window (which logically follows that it means if they get the speed right, it's a guaranteed make). So the probability of making the breaking putt is determined almost solely on the probability of getting the speed right on a known line that works.

We would need to see the distribution of launch angles as well. Then we can combine the appropriate probabilities together to get the ACTUAL probability of the overall putt, for each type of putt.

Now, the actual distribution from data (which I admittedly don't have) might be a much flatter bell curve where the misses are more evenly spread out across the entire range. Maybe only 2% of the putts end up close to the target speed...this along the lines of the the same sort of thing you guys were talking about earlier when explaining to ship the "most likely" stuff...I know you know this NXT, I'm just stating it all to be clear to everyone.

Hell, it might not even be an even distribution. It might be skewed to the left, to be a heavier distribution toward the target speed, where there are very few misses that are short and most of the misses that are very long are far and few between. If you looked at this distribution solely from a minimum and maximum view, it would not accurately reflect the distribution and it would in fact be very misleading. Just stating the mins and maxes don't solve this problem.

Here's a quick look at what I mean:




So anyway, as straight putts get longer, the left to right window becomes smaller and smaller, while the speeds maintain most of their "make windows" (granting that flat putts have a much wider speed window than breaking putts in general). The problem is not knowing the distribution of launch angles OR speeds for putts. Again, my intuition tells me that the combination of getting speed right on breaking putts (which we've agreed has a very high probability of "being on the correct line" as the nature of "having the right speed") is greater than the combination of hitting the speed window AND the direction window of a flat putt of the same length. Obviously, I don't know at what length the breaking putt would take the lead, but I really think it's going to once I get the correct data to be able to crunch some numbers.




The real point is, we don't know. Where can I find stats? Do you think Pelz would send me some basic data if I emailed him?

Just looked at fig. 14 and yes, my intuition was correct, even though I'm a 26-handicap and never tee'd it up at the John Deere Classic. If you miss your intended line high OR low, it requires a faster speed to find the hole. You can tell this by the fact that in fig.14(a) looking at the left plot (4-footer), the ideal speed increases as you get too far away from 30 degree launch angle in either direction.

What we can glean from this chart is that there is a clear intended line+speed combo that will yield better results than any other combo on this particular putt. Of course, everybody itt understands that on a subconscious level. I still don't believe this combo yields any more expected-putts-made than the best line+speed target on a straight, flat putt. It does not stand to reason, nor do trial and error data support it.

oh my god you're missing it by a lot, man. In figure 10, it shows that a flat 10 footer can be missed by 1 degree launch angle left or right. At the right speed, you can miss a 10 foot breaking putt by as much as 3 or 4 degrees. That's a big miss.


It's not about being a good golfer. Save that stuff for the other guys. I'm not saying you're dumb, or anything. I'm saying you're mistaken.

I went through the last 4 pages and can't find fig.10. Can you re-post it for me?

I'm not wrong about anything I just said, though.

All we need is a study from the same people showing a straight 4-footer (or 10-footer) to match against the cones they've shown in fig14. (This might be fig.10.... hopefully it is).

The cones in fig.14 have a defined area. Cones for similar-length (but straight) putts will have a defined make area, as well.

We then look for the "best line+speed combo" (considering expected misses and their likelihood of going in) to yield some expected-putts-made number for the best combo, given the chart.

I doubt this number would be higher than the best expected-putts-made combo found on the straight chart. Because, again, it does not stand to reason, nor does it stand to trial and error data.

Page 11 has Figure 10 on it. The center clump of dots are the combinations of putts that go in according to speed and angle


Please check out Figure 14 one more time so I don't have to doctor up something in MS Paint to show you what is easily seen. Even NXT agrees with what I'm saying about the wider make-window for speeds of correct putt speed.

Let me know if you still don't see what I'm saying. I'll draw a little red oval around the spot I'm talking about that shows all the different launch angles that a 10 foot breaking putt on average speed greens will fall into the hole when hit at around 2.4 m/s.



Also, to be fair, if you haven't read the paper, you really shouldn't be coming to any conclusions strong enough to say "Everything I said is right" when someone says you might be wrong.

Please point out what I have said in post 760 that is "wrong", dude. Literally nothing I just posted is wrong. Do you not see the chart? I don't know what you are projecting here but you are projecting some serious bull****. Please stop. I'm going to check out your link right now.

OK I just looked at figure 10. What we need to do is find the "center of gravity" (so to speak) in that plot. It looks to be at coordinates: ~2.6m/s,0.0deg.

So when a putter aims for this direction and speed, it looks like a larger percentage of his misses will fall into the hole than any other line+speed combo. We just need to figure out what that number (expected-putts-made) would be, based on variances in his line+speed (expected misses).

We need to do the same for the breaking putt (identify the best combo) then determine the expected-putts-made for that combo and compare it to that of the straight putt of the same distance. I highly doubt it will be a larger number. Because it doesn't stand to reason, nor to trial and error data.

And I mean...we can arbitrarily pick expected line and speed variances for this hypothetical golfer, based on some skill level (bogey golfer?). This isn't that hard to do if we have time. Then throw up a bell curve for his distribution based on his skill, and see how many putts he makes. Do the same for the breaker and case closed. (Since it's the same golfer we use the same line and speed variances).