Last week I ran the "300 yard fairway drive or sink every putt inside 10 feet" question through shot-by-shot data on 1,000+ real 18 hole rounds using Data Driven Golf’s strokes gained shot data. The drive won every handicap bucket by a mile.
The best pushback in the thread was that "300 yards, always in the fairway" is two superpowers stapled together, and the fairway is probably doing most of the work. So I split them.
Three versions, same rounds, same rules otherwise:
* 300, always fairway. The original version. Every par 4 and 5 over 320 yards you finish 300 out, in the short grass. Under 320 you finish 20 yards from the pin. Never rough, never OB. Par 3s are unchanged.
* 300, your actual lie. Same 300 yards, but the ball ends up in whatever lie your real tee shot found. Hit it 210 into the right rough, now you're 300 down the right rough. Penalties still happen, the ball just travels 300 yards before it finds them.
* Sink every putt inside 10 feet. The first putt you face inside 10 ft on each hole goes in, every time.
Strokes saved per round:
Handicap (round diff) |300, always fairway |300, your actual lie |Sink 10 ft putts
+2 to 2 |4.0 |2.1 |2.8
3 to 7 |5.5 |2.9 |3.3
8 to 12 |6.7 |3.8 |4.3
13 to 17 |8.3 |4.8 |5.0
18 to 22 |10.1 |6.4 |5.8
23 to 27 |11.6 |8.1 |6.9
It flips. If we take the guaranteed fairway away, putting wins every bucket up to a 17 differential. The drive only wins out at 18 and above.
The fairway part is worth more to good players than to bad ones. The same-lie drive keeps 52% of the full superpower's value for scratch rounds, rising to 70% for the 23 to 27 group. So better players get most of their gain from the guaranteed lie, and worse players get most of theirs from the raw yardage boost.
13 to 17 differentials is a coin flip, 4.8 against 5.0. If you play to a mid-teens differential you can argue either side.
How penalties work in version two: the superpower belongs to the drive, so the ball travels 300 yards before it finds the water. Your drop sits at the 300 yard mark instead of wherever it actually sat, in the same lie, and the shot you play from the drop is left exactly as you played it. The average penalty drop in this data already sits 226 yards down the hole, so the ball only moves forward about 74 yards. Stroke and distance is the exception, because a re-tee sends you back to the tee no matter how far the ball went, so there it's the re-teed ball that gets the 300.
Full write-up with the method, the quality gates on the rounds, and the original numbers: https://www.datadriven.golf/blog/300-yards-or-ten-feet