How Arccos’ newest app update unveiled a glaring wedge mistake

If you have been keeping up with this series, you probably know I’ve been using Arccos pretty religiously this year. But with the new app update they recently pushed out, it’s made a bigger impact on my game. The new club comparison features have helped me make some club decisions that have impacted the bag, and the deeper insights into more specific areas of the game have made a genuine difference in my thought process on course. (To take a look at my last update, you can click here.)

First off, the new app interface is fantastic. Everything is very intuitive and the “deeper” levels of the data you can access are much easier to navigate too, which makes the learning come faster.

What I’ve really loved about the app update though is it’s ability to guide the player in different ways. There’s a quick-glance look for every feature that gives you a high-level view of what’s going on, but there’s also deeper insights and different pathways to figure out what’s truly going on. Some of the deeper-level insights are what has really started to help turn my game around. For instance — my short-game miss.

I know I miss a lot of shots short inside 120 yards. But I had no idea I was also missing the majority of them left. After getting out on course to pay attention to this, I came to the realization that the short-left miss was caused from trying to hit a ball hard with a club that was never going to be enough. If I had 105 yards, for example, I have traditionally tried to smash a lob wedge rather than just pitch a sand wedge. When I try to swing hard, I also close the face and that closure hits the ball left. In a weird way, knowing that I was always short didn’t seem to trigger a strong enough reaction to clubbing up, but knowing that trying to overpower a club was also the reason I was pulling left was? Welcome to my brain.

Luckily, we’ve been getting better. The funny part is I am now missing short mostly because I play at sloped, front-to-back greens and you want to keep the ball short, but also because I’ll take the right club, get scared that it’s going to go too far, and then hit it too soft. Bad cycle, but we’re working on breaking it. Good news? We’ve solved the left issue!

Driver problems, or driving problems?

It’s also helped me realize that although I am typically gaining strokes with my driver, I still seem to have one really bad swing a round that causes some sort of penalty. There’s a mixture of things at play here, but the general idea is to avoid those penalties so I started looking into some of the rounds where it ended up hurting the most and realized that a lot of the time it was coming from holes where I didn’t need to take driver in the first place.

This is unfortunately something I am faced with a lot. I don’t play a ton of really long golf courses and with the comfort I have in my driver at the moment I get aggravated when that option is taken out of my hands. That tends to lead to moments where I hit driver wanting to be aggressive and end up in trouble merely because I hit the shot I wanted but the hole runs out where I was aimed, or I end up blocked out by something I wasn’t able to fully cut.

I think the key here really was that I was completely missing the point of the Strokes Gained Off-The-Tee stat. It’s assumed that its mostly the driver at fault for the stat, and while that may be true for shorter players or players playing longer courses, I tend to only hit about seven or eight drivers a round (now) out of the 14 chances there typically are. Grasping that reality has helped me a ton. I’ve got a bit more understanding of when I should or shouldn’t actually hit driver and what the risks are with that decision as well as what may happen with the approach play, which is currently teetering on very good performance.

I actually played an 18-hole stretch using the 3rd drill that Arccos suggests in the image above. I played the front 9 with my normal “driver always” strategy, and then the back 9 with a bit more intention. Not necessarily benching the driver, but making sure I was hitting the right shot with the right club to set up a good approach. There was an eight-stroke difference (!) in the scores. I’ll leave it at that.

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My tinkering now has a supervisor

I get asked all the time how my job impacts my personal game and the answer is delicate. I love my job. I don’t want to do anything else and having access to the clubs we do and the frequency of testing that happens is really fun. But yes, it does kill the game a touch. Over the years I’ve learned how to separate the moments. The rules now are that if I am going out to really test something, I’m not actually keeping score. I’m just getting a feel for the new club, or ball, or other piece of gear. Most of the time I am testing out gear I am testing it to figure out who the right customer is. If I happen to be that customer or I really like a product that I tested, then it enters a different stage of testing.

If something tickles me, I’ve always been pretty aggressive about how I test. The good part of having so much access to product is that I’m able to really dial in my bag. If I don’t like something I don’t have to make it work, I just move on to the next thing and try that. There are some things in the bag that are a fairly quick process. For example, I’ve been doing a ton of wedge testing lately and I’ve had some options in the bag for nine holes before I realized they weren’t for me and moved onto the next test. Usually that means a lost stroke or a failed attempt at some sort of shot, but that pressure-cooker-style testing is what I want.

The driver testing this year has been a different story though. I’d call it a real slow burn. Figuring out what driver I am going to be bringing to BryanGolf’s Player’s Cup in September is the goal and it’s been more like a nice overnight smoked brisket than a quick run through Culver’s for a Butter Burger. I’ve well documented my early season struggles with the driver, but now it’s hard for me to choose between my two favorites of the year. Luckily the new Arccos update has a much more robust club comparison feature, and I’ve been treating it like the site supervisor for my personal bag testing. I need to play more rounds with the latest driver combination (a GTS3 with Mitsubishi’s new 1k Pro Orange RIP) but things are looking good, and it’s helping to give me confidence in certain areas of the bag, like my driver.

The Arccos app update also now includes a bunch of different Ai suggestions and prompts including the Ai Verdict when comparing clubs. Looks like right now the Qi4D is still taking the lead spot in the bag, but there’s still time. You can see how close the two of them actually are to each other, so there’s definitely more data that needs to be captured.

Goals for next month are definitely going to be to continue to work on the distance control under 120 yards, improve the short game (particularly short shots from the rough) and make sure to tighten up the decision making on the tee and see if we can stay away from those penalties.

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That’s it for this month’s update. The game’s in a good spot and we’re getting closer and closer to Player’s Cup at Reunion Resort this fall. That’s the target. That’s the weekend that matters. Until then, it’s all work we put in to make sure we show up as best as possible for my team. And then after Player’s Cup we start a whole new season of tinkering. Arccos and I may have have a plan for that too. Stay tuned.