Features

Your Game Plan: a colour and a number on every hole

You pick a score you want to break. Your Game Plan turns it into eighteen decisions made before you tee off: which holes you attack, which ones you manage, and which ones you are allowed to walk off with a big number.

What ParPath actually is

ParPath is one screen: your course, hole by hole, with three things on each hole. A color, a target score, and a short note on how to play it.

• Green is attack. Your best scoring chances in this plan.
• Yellow is manage. Solid play gets the target, nothing heroic required.
• Red is survive. The danger holes, where the whole job is not making a mess.

The target is written against the hole's par, so it reads as Par 4, Bogey 5 or Double 6 rather than as an abstract number. That is the entire idea: a round is not one big decision, it is eighteen small ones, and most of them are easier to make on a sofa than on a tee box.

Picking your number

You choose the goal from a ladder that depends on the kind of course you are playing. A standard eighteen offers Break 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 100, 110 and 120. A nine-hole course offers Break 40, 45, 50 and 55. A par 3 course offers 45 through 60, and an executive course offers 60, 70, 80 and 90. The ladder exists because a Break 90 plan on a par 54 course would be nonsense.

What Break 90 actually means

Break 90 means shooting 89 or lower, so the plan is built to 89, not to 90. On a par 72 course that is 17 strokes to spend over 18 holes, and the plan's job is to decide which holes get them. Plans are stored per tee box, so the Break 90 plan from the back tees is a different plan from the same goal at the front.

What ParPath knows about your course

ParPath reads the course before it writes a word. Every hole gives it the basics from the card. A mapped hole gives it a great deal more.

• From the card, on every hole: par, the yardage from the tees you are actually playing, the stroke index (the hole's difficulty ranking, 1 hardest to 18 easiest), and how much the ground rises or falls.
• From the map, where we have one: how the hole bends, how much fairway is waiting where your drive lands, how much room the green gives an approach, and where the water and the bunkers sit.

You may already carry an app that does distances, a scorecard and a handicap. What it does not give you is a number to play each hole to before you are standing on the tee. ParPath turns the same course data into one decision per hole, a colour and a target, and those targets add up to the score you are chasing. The distance still tells you how far. The plan tells you what the hole is worth.

A mapped hole gets a note that names the bunker; an unmapped one talks about the ranking. How much of your course is mapped is the difference between a plan that has seen it and a plan that has read its card.

What the colors ask you to do

Every hole lands on one of three, and each one is an instruction rather than a description.

• Green: play for the number. This is where the round gets made. Hit the shot you have hit before and collect the target.
• Yellow: manage it. The middle of the green is a win. Nothing heroic is required, and nothing heroic is wanted.
• Red: survive it. These are the holes that end rounds. Take the safe line, take the target, walk to the next tee.

Two things are worth knowing before you trust a color.

• Green does not mean easy. It means your best chance in this plan, at this goal. On a Break 110 plan, a Green hole may still be one you are targeting at bogey.
• Colors belong to the plan, not to the course. Change the goal and a hole can change color. The stroke index printed on the card never moves. The color does.

Every plan gets a spread of all three. A plan with fifteen Red holes would be an accurate description of a bad day and useless as a plan. The point of the color is to tell you where to spend attention, and attention you spend everywhere is attention you spend nowhere. If ranking holes by trouble is new, course management covers the golf side of it.

Why the plan always adds up

Add the eighteen targets together and you get the score you asked for. Not near it. It.

ParPath also refuses to park your whole budget on one hole. A plan that quietly allows five over par somewhere is not strategy, it is a forecast of a disaster with a color on it. The same strokes spread across three holes give you three holes where a bogey is a good outcome, and that is a thing you can actually play toward. Blow-up holes are the usual reason a round misses its number, and how to stop blow-up holes covers why.

Notes you can trust

Each hole gets a couple of sentences on how to play it, written under rules you can hold us to. Hazards are described by where they sit, never by a yardage, because one plan serves every tee. No club recommendations, because the plan does not know what is in your bag. The words birdie and eagle do not appear anywhere: this is a plan for a golfer managing a number, not chasing one.

Every note is checked before it reaches you, and anything that overclaims gets rewritten rather than shipped. A note will not call a hole uphill when the rise is too small to matter next to how far your own shots vary, and it will not tell you to make par on a hole the plan has targeted at bogey. The guide to uphill and downhill shots covers where elevation genuinely starts to matter.

What it looks like during the round

The plan is attached to the round when you start it. The header carries the goal, each hole shows its color and target as you reach it, and the note sits with the hole rather than in a separate document you have to remember to open. On the hole map, the same color and target sit on the strip along the top.

On a nine-hole course played twice, the front nine plan is mirrored onto holes 10 through 18, so the second loop is not blank. It is the same nine holes, so it is the same nine plans.

Plans are built for your course, not shipped as a generic template. If you are the first person to open a course we have not planned yet, you may see a simpler version for a moment while the real one is prepared.