Can I just do this myself with free golf stats?

Yes. Every input we use is derived from publicly available tournament and shot data. Nothing here is secret, and anyone with a spreadsheet, a few hours and some patience can build a version of it.

The real question is not whether you can. It is whether you want to spend those hours every week, and whether your version would be consistent enough to be worth anything once you had it.

ProPlace is a statistical research product, not a tipster service and not a bookmaker. 18+ | BeGambleAware.org

What doing it yourself actually involves

Here is the unglamorous version of a week. First you pull the field, which changes into Monday and again after the Tuesday withdrawals. Then you pull recent form for every one of those players across enough events that the sample means something, which for most metrics is more starts than people assume.

Then you adjust for strength of field, so that a good week against a thin field does not get read as a good week. That step is the one most home-built processes skip, and it is the one that quietly poisons everything downstream. Our explainer on why the same finish means different things in different fields walks through what happens when you do not do it.

Then you build some view of course fit, which means deciding what this particular venue rewards and which measured skills map onto it. Then you convert prices into implied probability so that your view and the market's view are expressed in the same units and can actually be compared. There is a short guide to turning golf odds into a percentage if that part is unfamiliar.

And then, before play, you write down what you concluded, so that on Sunday night you can score yourself against what you actually thought rather than what you remember thinking. If you want the whole sequence in order, we have written it up as a repeatable pre-tournament method, and the metric underneath most of it is explained in our guide to strokes gained.

Where a do-it-yourself process tends to break

Not on the maths. The maths is arithmetic, and a spreadsheet does arithmetic perfectly well. It breaks on consistency, in three specific places.

The first is coverage. Almost everyone doing this at home evaluates the dozen or so names they already had in mind, then calls it a field assessment. The player you have never heard of, who has quietly gained strokes on approach in four of his last six starts, never enters the process, because he never entered your head.

The second is the losing month. A process is easy to run when it is working. Six weeks into a flat run, the temptation to override it, to add a name because it feels right, or to skip the strength of field adjustment because it keeps rejecting the player you fancy, is very strong. A process you abandon under pressure is not a process.

The third is the record. Writing down your view before play is boring, takes five minutes, and is the single thing that separates research from recollection. Almost nobody does it. Without it, you will remember your good calls vividly and your bad ones vaguely, and you will conclude you are better at this than you are.

What ProPlace does that a spreadsheet does not

Three things, and they map onto the three failures above rather than onto anything clever.

Every player in every field on the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour gets scored, not just the names anyone thought of. The same weighting runs whether the model likes the week or not, because it has no view about whether it is having a good month. And the output is published before play and kept in public afterwards, wins and misses together, on the results archive.

The method itself is set out on the how we pick page, and if you want to see what the finished output looks like before deciding whether it beats your own, a walkthrough of a single player card covers every element on it.

When you should not pay for this

If you enjoy the research itself, do not pay us. The pleasure of building your own model and watching it work is a real thing and buying ours removes it.

If you follow one tour casually and pick a name off the telly on a Thursday morning, do not pay us either. You are not going to use a full field ranking, and paying for one would be paying for a habit you do not have.

And if what you want is to be told what to stake, we do not do that, and no amount of paying us will make us start. The rest of that list is on what ProPlace does not do.

Compare it against your own work

The straightforward test is to do your own research on this week's field, then read a finished card and see where the two disagree and why. A complete card from the current field is on the free card page and costs nothing to read. If it holds up against your own work, the plans are set out on the pricing explainer. If it does not, keep your spreadsheet.

Doug Dinwiddie. Founder of ProPlace. Former DP World Tour caddie.

ProPlace is a statistical research product, not a tipster service and not a bookmaker. 18+ | BeGambleAware.org