Imagine playing in a scramble with three guys who have not read Lowest Score Wins.

You have two playable drives on a short par four. One leaves you 76 yards out, with a bunker short of the green, to a back right pin. The other leaves you on a very slight downslope 25 yards right of the green, with six or seven yards of green beyond the slight upslope. The wind is blowing at 25 MPH, and the greens are quite soft.

You know from having read the book that proximity to the hole matters. You know that, absent something awkward or bizarre, the single biggest predictor for how close your ball finishes to the hole is how close it is to the hole before you hit it. You know that the odds of a shot from 76 yards getting inside of one from 30 yards are slim.

But… they’re not zero. This happened to me recently, and over protestations, I insisted that we play the shorter shot. Yes, it was on a slight downslope to a slightly elevated green. But just a few holes prior two of the four guys in our group had missed the green from 103 yards (the wind was pretty bad that day), and I knew that the PGA Tour median from 75-100 yards is over 15 feet. I was confident in the choice to play the shorter shot, but I was hoping one of us hit a good shot so I wouldn’t have to hear “See? We should have played from back there! Your stats are all wrong!”

I managed to avoid hearing as we hit two balls inside of eight feet, chose the closer one (even though the slightly longer one was uphill), and made it for birdie. But even if we’d all missed the green, we’d still made the right choice. Playing from 76 yards would have still been the wrong choice, even if I’d caved in and someone had holed out!

Here’s another example. You’re playing with a buddy and you reach the 167-yard par-three twelfth. The pin is up front… just over the pond. You’re sticking to your GamePlan and playing to the back middle of the green, as your Shot Zone with your 7-iron is still fairly large, and the water is an awfully dark shade. Your buddy ribs you and calls you a chicken. He chooses a club and manages to pull off a shot to six feet. You two-putt your 35-footer, and he rolls home his birdie.

Who made the better GamePlan choice?

You still did. Play that hole 100 times with those same strategies, and you might average 3.1. He might get a decent number of birdies – maybe ten or eleven – but he’s also making a whole lot of bogeys and doubles. His average score might be 3.5.

If we graphed your scores (blue) and the scores of your buddy (red) as bell curves, it might look a bit like this:

Your buddy got lucky. He happened to hit a 1-in-10 shot when he called it. He hit that little sliver of red to the far left in the graph above.

Though GamePlanning helps you pick the best option for the next shot you have to play, it does not guarantee the best result each and every time. We all know that coins land about 50% heads and tails, but you occasionally get runs where a coin will land tails up five, six even more times in a row. Eventually, flipping it enough times, and the same will be true of heads up, and the results will even out. They’ll revert to the mean.

Give your buddy 99 more balls and he too will revert to the mean, which is higher than your properly GamePlanned shot. Hit fifty shots from 76 yards and fifty shots from 30 yards and the median will almost assuredly be better from 30 than 76.

So, though occasionally you can be shown up by a person who gambles, the proper GamePlan will result in lower scores on average, over time. As we know, the Lowest Score Wins!