The green jacket was barely on Woods’ shoulders when the focus shifted from Augusta to what lies ahead, specifically the win marks of Sam Snead (all-time PGA Tour titles) and Jack Nicklaus (professional major victories). Woods’ tried his best downplay those questions. “You know, I really haven’t thought about that yet,” Woods said on that historic Sunday. “I’m sure that I’ll probably think of it going down the road. Maybe, maybe not. But right now, it’s a little soon.”

Except that Nicklaus himself stoked the flames mere hours later. “I’ve been saying—everybody kept asking me, ‘What about Tiger? Can he win another major?’ I kept saying, ‘I think so. I think he will,’ ” Nicklaus told the Golf Channel. “You know, the next two majors are at Bethpage, where he’s won, and Pebble Beach, where he’s won. You know, he’s got me shaking in my boots, guys.”

A day later, the PGA Tour released a video highlighting Woods’ pursuit of Snead’s record 82 tour wins. So much for keeping that horse in the barn.

But, since it is out and roaming, when will Woods break Snead’s mark? And is Jack’s number, long thought safe following Tiger’s downfall, now in jeopardy?

While speculating rampantly is appetizing—let us be the gazillionth person to remind you that Tiger has won at Bethpage and Pebble—it also rings hollow. Especially when math can do the job for us.

Dr. Lucius Riccio, a statistical contributor to Golf Digest for 30 years and one of the inventors of the USGA Slope System, has developed a model for predicting tournament outcomes. We asked Dr. Lou to fire up his simulation and see if, and when, Woods will hurdle these marks. (Which, even by the fickle and challenging nature of golf forecasting, is easier said than done.)

What makes Woods such a fascinating study—past, present, future—is also hell on projections. There’s no definitive baseline, not on a player who achieved absurd highs and suffered severe lows. How much weight is put on his recent performance—the Masters win, yes, but also last season’s runner-up at Bellerive, charge at Carnoustie and win at East Lake—compared to the better part of a decade when Woods was a non-factor? There’s the battle between his age, and what that’s historically meant in the game, and how his fused back, a surgery made for improving Woods’ quality of life rather than his golf game, will hold up. To say nothing of outside forces, like the growing list of formidable opponents, many of which Woods has influenced.

In short, elements that make gazing into a crystal ball quite cloudy.

Yet Riccio, who is a senior lecturer at Columbia University, managed to account for these variables, altering his weekly-prediction model into a long-range forecast. What type of picture does it paint for Tiger and his prospects?

First, on 82. The 15-time major winner has been adamant he won’t be playing as much going forward, and with just six outings this season, he’s been a man of his word. A healthy Woods will play in the remaining three majors, and likely the three FedEx Cup Playoff events. After that, the Memorial (a tournament Woods has won five times that’s two weeks after the PGA and two weeks before the U.S. Open) and new WGC event in Memphis (the week after the Open Championship) would be his next conceivable appearances. Anything else would be a surprise, meaning Woods has six-to-eight starts left in 2019. (Though Woods has already committed to the inaugural ZOZO Championship in the fall, that will technically be next season.)

With that slate on tap, Riccio gives Woods a 19-percent chance he’ll win another event this season and tie Snead’s mark.

That percentage may seem high with Woods’ limited schedule. Conversely, Tiger does have two wins in his last seven official starts and eight top-10s in his last 14 appearances. A performance backed up by analytics, Woods ranking seventh in strokes gained this season, fifth in 2018. Even for the non-recency biased, production that’s hard to ignore.

But records are made to be broken, not tied. What are the chances of Woods capturing tour victory No. 83?

According to Riccio, stout, to the tune of 57 percent within the next two years.

“And an 82-percent chance within three years,” Riccio says. “It’s higher if the timeframe is stretched to five years, but predictions out that far are somewhat dubious.”

Under the guise of a “full” (12-15 event) season, Riccio has Tiger averaging 1.5 wins per campaign for the next three years, with his production staying relatively steady over this span. Riccio’s model is so optimistic that it has Woods twice as likely to win multiple tournaments than be shut out:

The forecast extends to the end of 2022, what baseball stat-heads would describe as the end of Woods’ 46-year season. After that, Riccio says the model’s forecast becomes what ambiguous. Not just because of Woods’ age, but, as alluded above, it’s hard to predict that far into the future. Nevertheless, it seems Snead and his record will soon be vanquished.

But Snead has never been the real target, with Jack and his 18 majors the true white whale. What are the odds Woods reels that sucker in?

A refresher on the upcoming major venues:

2019: Bethpage Black, Pebble Beach, Royal Portrush
2020: Augusta National, TPC Harding Park, Winged Foot, Royal St. George’s
2021: Augusta National, Kiawah Island, Torrey Pines, St. Andrews
2022: Augusta National, Trump Bedminster, The Country Club, Royal Liverpool

Woods historians will note he’s won 11 majors at these 13 venues: five Masters (which, contrary to popular belief, is played at Augusta every year), three U.S. Opens (2000 Pebble, 2002 Bethpage, 2008 Torrey Pines) and three Opens (St. Andrews twice, 2006 Liverpool). That doesn’t include his seven Buick/Farmers Insurance Open victories at Torrey, or his 2005 WGC-American Express Championship at TPC Harding Park. Ostensibly, it’s an itinerary that favours Woods.

However, conducive this schedule may seem, it’s worth restating some of these triumphs were almost two decades ago. And even the most zealous of Tiger backers would concede tying Jack is ambitious. Taking the 2019 Masters into account, that means Woods will win have four majors in four years after going a decade without one.

But these are mere human observations. What say the computers?

According to Riccio, Woods has a 13-percent chance of tying Nicklaus by the end of 2022. Mentioned above, Woods will be 46 years old at the end of that season, the same age Nicklaus was when he won his 18th major at the 1986 Masters. Only Julius Boros has won a major older than 46 (48 years, 4 months, 18 days at the 1968 PGA), although a handful of players have come close.

For those who deem that percentage too high, know that Woods has 24-percent chance of not winning another major in this span. Yet the prediction does like Tiger to win at least one (76 percent), and at least two majors victories isn’t far behind (36.5 percent). Tiger passing Jack in this span is a bridge too far, according to the model, with just a 3.2 percent chance.

“I estimate his expected value of major wins is about one every two years,” Riccio says.

As for where, if Woods continues to rack up majors, expect them to be of the green jacket or claret jug variety.

Riccio gives Woods a 20-percent chance of winning another Masters in this span and 15-percent chance at the Open Championship. Those odds drop to 10 percent for the PGA and only 8 percent at the U.S. Open. Riccio cites Tiger’s occasionally wayward accuracy as a possible issue at the PGA and U.S. Open.

Of course, as Woods proved at East Lake and Augusta National, he has a penchant for proving the odds wrong. A point Riccio happily concedes.

“He might just look at these numbers and say, ‘The hell with these, I’m winning the next three and that’s that,’ ” Riccio says.

The post Analysing the likelihood that Tiger Woods breaks the win records of Jack Nicklaus and Sam Snead appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

But when you want to change the possibilities for distance and ball speed in a game where the rules seemingly have you hemmed in at every turn, you’ve got to think not merely outside the box, you’ve got to think with a new brain. Probably a new box, too.

So Callaway’s engineers taught a super-computer to design a faster driver than they’d ever seen before.

Of course, the face is not merely unlike anything that has been seen before—it literally could not have been humanly imagined.

“We needed a completely different design process, essentially one that took us, the human engineers, out of the loop a little bit and replaced us with a computer that could analyze the contributions of different parameters of the face at maybe a deeper level than human engineers had been capable of,” said Alan Hocknell, Callaway’s senior vice president of research and development, in talking about the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in designing the new face. “In order to do that though we had to create the circumstance where we could teach the computer to learn how to design a driver face by itself.”

We’re not going to get too far into the weeds on what machine learning is, but suffice it to say it’s where a computer technically gets smarter not only than human engineers, but in ways human engineers would never have considered. According to Hocknell, the process for designing the Epic Flash produced 15,000 iterations when a traditional driver design process might only yield eight or 10. It required a supercomputer running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for four weeks straight. For perspective, had the same calculations been tried on a typical laptop, it would have taken 34 years.

The result Callaway says is unique face flexing where most impacts occur and better energy transfer than was possible before. Or, as Hocknell puts it, “Your best shots just got a whole lot better. This face is kind of delivering double-plus ball speed in the area where the highest percentage of impacts occur.”

The back of the Epic Flash face features an almost schizophrenic series of swirls and ridges with thick and thin areas varying in atypical ways. Under magnification it looks like a moguls run at the winter Olympics. Where most driver faces feature a thick section in the middle that gets thinner as it reaches the perimeter, the face on Epic Flash has some of its thinnest sections in the middle. It created more face deflection than any Callaway face before, a boost to the spring-like effect, what’s known in the rules as coefficient of restitution (COR).

“Ultimately, when you look at COR the whole objective is to minimize the amount of energy lost to the ball during impact,” said Evan Gibbs, Callaway’s director of research and development for woods. “The way that you do that is to have the face deform more, which means the ball deforms less and you get a more efficient transfer of energy.”

Epic Flash, along with its low-spin counterpart Epic Flash Sub Zero, deforms significantly more at impact than past Callaway drivers, according to Gibbs. It’s a function of the new face design working specifically within the jailbreak structure, first debuted in the Epic driver two years ago. In both Epic and its followup Rogue, thin titanium bars join the crown and sole to stiffen those regions and concentrate more potential flexing in the face. Epic Flash takes advantage of that structure in ways traditional variable thickness faces could not.

“What jailbreak did was it stiffened a part of the head to make another part more flexible—that was very counterintuitive at the time,” Gibbs said. “With Epic Flash, we wanted to see a similar effect just by the face design. We wanted to figure out how to stiffen some parts of the face that we might not have done in the past in order to make other parts of the face more flexible.”

The face insert’s intricate geometry is achieved by forging and heat treating the titanium for improved flexibility and speed. Laser scanners and the USGA’s pendulum tester for ball speed are used multiple times in the manufacturing process, including an average of five pendulum tests for every head.

Mis-hits also are benefiting from other improvements in the new design. Epic Flash features an updated version of its triaxial carbon composite material used in the crown. The saved weight from the lighter material is redistributed in the head for more forgiveness on off-center hits and more consistent speed, spin and launch conditions across the face. The Epic Flash has about a six percent higher moment of inertia, or resistance to twisting on off-centre hits, than the original Epic.

The other beneficiary of the saved weight is a sliding weight track in the rear perimeter that tweaks draw and fade bias. The Epic Flash uses a 16-gram weight, while the Epic Flash Sub Zero features a 12-gram weight.

The Epic Flash technology extends to a line of fairway woods, as well. Again, the face was shaped through the input of artificial intelligence. Informed by the learnings of the driver face design, the Epic Flash fairway wood face is distinctly geared to the needs of a club that is used to hit shots off the ground, not just off a tee. A thicker ring near the perimeter is surrounded by thinner sections both in the center and beyond the perimeter of the ring in the fairway wood’s varying face thickness design.

“It had this different goal in mind for ball speed not just from the center but for impact locations relatively low on the face and therefore it came out slightly different,” Hocknell said, noting that the high-strength Carpenter 455 steel also posed different requirements to maximise face flexing compared to titanium on the driver.

Like last year’s Rogue fairway woods, the Epic Flash fairway woods feature the jailbreak structure to concentrate more flexing in the face. A lighter, eight-way adjustable hosel increases fitting options while keeping the centre of gravity low.

The Epic Flash family of metalwoods will be in U.S. stores Feb. 1 and available in the following – Driver: Epic Flash (9, 10.5 and 12); Epic Flash Sub Zero (9, 10.5). Fairway woods: Epic Flash (3+, 3, 5, Heavenwood, 7, 9, 11) ; Epic Flash Sub Zero (3+, 3, 5).

Ed’s note: Middle East pricing and release dates are still to be confirmed.

The post Callaway Epic Flash drivers fundamentally change face technology through artificial intelligence appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Of course, they are ultimately legal and conforming to the rules of golf. But only after an intricate and complex manufacturing process that involves multiple conformance tests, cloud computing, robotic arms and a mysterious resin injected through two tiny holes in the club face.

That process, say TaylorMade officials, not only makes the faces conform to the USGA’s test for spring-like effect, it also is an exhaustive effort to make every single M5 and M6 driver in every golf shop, tour stop and online warehouse closer to the edge of the rules than was possible before, not just for any previous TaylorMade driver but for any other driver on the market today.

“The idea was that we would take each and every head and go beyond the legal limit,” said Brian Bazzell, vice president of product creation at TaylorMade.

“We try to make every single one as consistent as possible. It’s really about the opportunity to affect the clubhead at the very last second. That’s the important thing here. I don’t care what you do at the middle of the development of this product, it’s really what you can do at the very last second to get this into a tighter tolerance.”

The theory is simple: It’s easier to make a driver face flex over the limit and then bring it back to a conforming state than to try to get right to the edge without going over. TaylorMade’s engineers believe the industry has been hamstrung by manufacturing tolerances based on the complex rules that govern how much face flexibility is allowed. Because traditional manufacturing methods for driver faces result in a range of flexibility measurements, manufacturers have to be conservative to make sure their drivers don’t end up being non-conforming. Depending on how conservative they are, according to TaylorMade, they may end up well short of the conforming limit with a certain percentage of their finished heads.

TaylorMade’s workaround with the M5 and M6 is to push their heads over the limit and then bring them back by injecting a resin through two small holes in the face that slows down the flexing at precise amounts specific to how far over the limit each individual face is. Each head is tested for conformance to the spring-like effect rule during the manufacturing process, and then an algorithm determines how much resin is required to bring the head back under the speed limit. That amount is then transmitted through cloud-computing back to the robotic arms that inject the resin through the two ports in the face.

“If you’re starting below the limit and making your way up towards it, you have to still be conservative because if you go over, then that head has to be trashed,” said Justin Kleinert, metalwoods product development manager at TaylorMade, noting that traditional driver manufacturing processes only can make faces faster, not slower. “So that makes it hard to get close. When you go past it and pull it back, it’s a lot easier because you know you just have to bring it back to where it needs to go. You can always go backwards, but if you go past it from the other direction you’re done.”

The new faces on the M5 and M6 aren’t merely closer to the limit, they also extend that fast section to a larger region of the face than before. TaylorMade officials say the faces on the M5 and M6 are now as much as 20 per cent thinner than past versions and that the “sweet spot is 100 per cent larger than the original M1 in 2015.”

That larger area means mis-hits toward the heel and toe will now flex similarly to centre hits. “Tour players don’t hit it in that area as much, but the amateur is probably getting a double benefit,” Bazzel said.

The M5 and M6 drivers also include the company’s bulge and roll curvature pattern called TwistFace, which was introduced in last year’s M3 and M4 drivers. With TwistFace, the face is curved slightly open on the high toe and slightly closed on the low heel to help correct those common mis-hits (and the face angles that typically accompany those mis-hits), curving them more closely back to the centre line.

Both the M5 and M6 drivers also continue the carbon composite crown and sole panel technology first debuted with the M1/M2 drivers four years ago. The new crown covers 10 per cent more of the head than in past models.

The M5 driver will be TaylorMade’s most adjustable driver ever. It features a T-shaped track in the sole with the top of the T curving around the sole’s rear perimeter. Two 10-gram weights allow for independent weight placement. Combined with the 12-way adjustable hosel that changes loft by plus/minus two degrees, the M5 boasts more than 21,000 possible settings.

The M5 driver also will be available in a smaller “Tour” version, designed to provide a sleeker aerodynamic profile thanks to its compact, 435 cubic centimetre size.

The M6 driver expands the use of carbon composite in the sole with two large panels that flank a centre weight structure. The lighter weight panels allow 46 grams to be redistributed low and deep for a more forgiving head on off-centre hits—54 per cent more than last year’s M4.

The M6 driver line, which also emphasizes a sleeker aerodynamic shape, again includes the D-Type version. It fights a slice by redistributing more of the saved mass toward a draw bias. One additional key is how the top line is angled to appear more open, encouraging golfers to return the club back to square or even closed at impact to further counteract a slice.

Fairway woods, hybrids The M5 and M6 family includes fairway woods and hybrids that for the first time also incorporate the Twist Face bulge and roll curvature seen in the drivers. Tweaked to better match the mis-hit pattern of fairway woods and hybrids, the curves are greater than on the drivers.

“The inertia of a driver head can be twice as much so a fairway wood wants to rotate more on an off-centre hit,” Bazzell said. “That’s why ultimately we ended up with a bigger twist.”

No less impressive in the fairway wood technology is the M5’s switch to a titanium body and face that combines with the carbon composite sole. This makes for better face deflection while at the same time the lighter weight of titanium provides more discretionary weight for the M5’s adjustable sole weight. It accounts for 65 grams—more than 30 percent of the head’s total weight—in a central steel weight that can rotate freely between a draw and fade bias, yet at the same time it sits low in the sole for smooth turf interaction and to lower the centre of gravity to help shots launch higher with less spin. The 12-way adjustable hosel creates better fitting options.

The larger M6 fairway woods and hybrids include a cut-through sole slot for better face flexing, particularly for impacts lower on the face. The slot is covered with a thermoplastic urethane strip that sits more flush with the sole to improve turf interaction. The M6 fairway wood also features a weight-saving carbon composite crown and will be available in a slice-fighting D-Type option, as well. Both the fairway woods and the all-steel hybrids feature a high-strength C300 steel face insert.

All of the M5 and M6 metalwoods will be in stores Feb. 1, except for the M5 Tour, which will be in stores March 1.

Ed’s note: UAE prices/release dates not yet available

The post TaylorMade M5, M6 drivers stretch limits of speed—and manufacturing appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.