Everyone watching a tournament has heard a commentator call a pin "tucked" and say it is worth a shot. Nobody says how much of a shot. Here is the number, measured by re-simulating 30 PGA Tour courses six times each, once per pin position, with everything else held where that course normally sits.
Because each course is compared against itself, course difficulty cancels out. What is left is the pin.
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A tucked pin costs 0.83 strokes per round
That is the gap between a round where every pin is in the middle of the green and one where every pin is tucked. No real tournament sets all eighteen either way, so read it as 0.046 strokes per hole, applied to however many tucked pins a setup actually uses.
The birdie rate is where you feel it: 20.12% with center pins against 16.42% with tucked ones, a drop of 3.7 percentage points. Average proximity goes from 26.8 feet to 33.6 feet, which is 6.8 feet of extra putt on every green in regulation.
Every pin position, ranked
| Pin position | Birdie or better | Average proximity | Strokes per hole vs a center pin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Center | 20.12% | 26.8 ft | baseline |
| Front | 19.86% | 27.2 ft | +0.003 |
| Left | 19.17% | 28.3 ft | +0.012 |
| Right | 18.81% | 28.9 ft | +0.016 |
| Back | 18.33% | 29.8 ft | +0.022 |
| Tucked | 16.42% | 33.6 ft | +0.046 |
The ordering is the interesting part, and front against back is the surprise. A front pin is close to free. A back pin costs several times as much, and leaves players roughly 2.6 feet further from the hole. Long is the miss nobody wants, so players aim away from it, come up short, and putt from distance all day.
Which courses punish it most
| Course | Cost of a tucked pin, strokes per round |
|---|---|
| TPC Twin Cities | +1.15 |
| East Lake Golf Club | +1.06 |
| Detroit Golf Club | +1.04 |
| TPC River Highlands | +1.01 |
| Sedgefield Country Club | +1.00 |
| The Philadelphia Cricket Club (Wissahickon Course) | +0.97 |
| TPC Southwind | +0.96 |
| Trump National Doral - Blue Monster Course | +0.92 |
And the venues where it barely matters:
| Course | Cost of a tucked pin, strokes per round |
|---|---|
| Arnold Palmer's Bay Hill Club & Lodge | +0.70 |
| The Riviera Country Club | +0.69 |
| Innisbrook Resort (Copperhead Course) | +0.67 |
| The Cliffs at Walnut Cove | +0.64 |
| Augusta National Golf Club | +0.58 |
What this does not measure
It is the cost after you hit the green, not the cost of missing it. The model treats a pin as a shift in how close you finish and holds the green-in-regulation rate fixed, so greens hit came out identical to four decimal places across all six positions. A real tucked pin also pushes players into bailing out and short-siding themselves, and none of that is in this number. Read 0.83 strokes as a floor rather than the full cost.
"Tucked" is one tour-wide effect, not a pin sheet. We measure how much each pin position moves approach proximity at every course we track, then use the median across all of them. A single course's own figure mostly reflects which holes happened to get which pins, so on its own it can rank a tucked pin as easier than a center one. The tour-wide figure does not have that problem, but it cannot see a venue whose tucked pins are unusually severe.
The course ranking measures sensitivity, not setup. Every course gets the same tucked-pin shift. What differs is how much each course turns those extra feet into dropped shots, which depends on how many greens get hit there and how hard the putting is. A course near the bottom is not one with gentle pins; it is one where a longer first putt costs less.
Conditions are each course's own typical weather, not a shared baseline, which is right for comparing a course to itself and wrong for comparing two courses to each other.
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