Yardage Book Card Maker
Build a printable pocket yardage book for your home course, with tee-shot targets worked out from your own carry distances.
Course details
| Hole | Par | Yards | SI | Carry off tee | Layup to | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Carry off tee is the yardage that clears the trouble you actually have to clear — the corner of the dogleg, the fairway bunker, the ditch. Layup to is how far from the green you want to be left, so the card can tell you what to hit off the tee instead of making you do the subtraction standing over the ball.
Odd indexes out, even indexes back — and that is a guarantee, not a habit
The blank card you start with puts every odd stroke index on the front nine and every even one on the back. A player with a handicap of h receives a stroke on every hole indexed h or lower, so the question the card has to answer is how those strokes divide between the two nines. With odds out and evens back the answer is forced. Among the numbers 1 to h there are ceil(h/2) odd and floor(h/2) even, which differ by at most one. Checked at every handicap on this card, the worst front-to-back imbalance is exactly 1 — and no arrangement of the holes themselves can change it.
| Handicap | Strokes on the front | On the back | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 6 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 9 | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| 12 | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| 15 | 8 | 7 | 1 |
| 18 | 9 | 9 | 0 |
An even handicap always splits exactly; an odd one always leaves the spare stroke on the front nine. A nine-handicapper gets 5 out and 4 back, every time, on every course laid out this way.
A shuffled card averages 3.25, and can reach 9
Shuffling the indexes at random instead, across 20,000 cards, gives a mean worst imbalance of 3.25 and a worst case of 9. Nine is the whole of it — a nine-handicapper receiving every one of their strokes on the front nine and playing the back off scratch. Only 1.0% of shuffled cards stumble into the same guarantee. So the convention is doing real work, and it is a stronger property than “spread evenly” suggests: not a tendency, a bound.
| Allocation | Worst imbalance | Guaranteed? |
|---|---|---|
| Odd out, even back | 1 | yes, for every handicap |
| Random, average | 3.25 | no |
| Random, worst seen | 9 | no |
What the convention does not do is track difficulty
Stroke index 1 is meant to be the hardest hole. On this sample card the link between index and length is loose: ranking the holes by how far they run past a typical length for their par, and comparing with the printed indexes, gives a rank correlation of 0.43. Real enough to see, nowhere near a match.
| Par 5 | Yards | Stroke index |
|---|---|---|
| Hole 4 | 520 | 1 |
| Hole 9 | 505 | 13 |
| Hole 13 | 530 | 2 |
| Hole 18 | 515 | 14 |
The four par 5s sit within 25 yards of each other and carry indexes spanning 13 places: two of them are the hardest holes on the course and two are among the easiest, on a difference of fifteen yards. The four par 3s take indexes 15, 16, 17, 18, the four highest — that part is deliberate, since a stroke given on a par 3 turns it into a par 4 for that player and is usually the least useful place to spend one. So the two rules are pulling against each other, and on a real card the odd/even rule wins. It has to: it is the one that keeps a match honest over eighteen holes, where difficulty ordering is a judgement call about holes a committee has watched people play.
How to use
- Enter each hole's layout and hazard distances.
- Add your own carry numbers for each club.
- Mark the target line and the trouble to avoid.
- Print it small enough to fit a back pocket.
Frequently asked questions
What is a yardage book for?
Recording distances and targets so you decide before you stand over the ball, rather than while standing over it. Tour players carry them because pre-planned decisions are better than improvised ones, and the same holds at any level.
What should I record?
Distances to carry hazards and to reach trouble, not just distance to the middle of the green. The most useful number on a tee shot is often the distance at which the fairway ends, since that determines which club is safe rather than which is longest.
Why base it on my own carry distances?
Because a target that requires a carry you do not have is not a target. A book built from tour distances or from your best-ever strike produces plans that fail. Honest carry numbers turn a yardage book from a wish into a strategy.
Should I record green slopes?
If you play the course often, yes — noting the general tilt and where the low points are pays back quickly, since green reading benefits enormously from prior knowledge. Detailed slope mapping is more than most players need.
Is a yardage book allowed in competition?
Generally yes for distance information, though the rules restrict some detailed green-reading materials in professional and elite amateur play, and local rules can restrict devices. For ordinary club golf a yardage book is entirely normal.
Does a rangefinder make this obsolete?
No, they answer different questions. A rangefinder tells you the distance to something you can see; a yardage book tells you where you should be aiming and what happens if you miss. The plan is the part a device does not supply.
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