The strategy guide
Daily Holes is one timed tap repeated about thirty-five times. That sounds like a game of reflexes and it is not — the players at the top of the board are not tapping better than you, they are choosing better. Here is what they know.
1. The pure band is narrower than it looks
The meter sweeps up and back down. Stopping it inside the pure band gives you a clean strike: the full carry, the full rollout and the tightest spread. The band sits near the top of the sweep but not at the top — roughly between 82 and 87 on the meter's own scale. Above it is the overswing, which costs you both distance and accuracy.
That geometry is the whole timing game. Aiming for the very top means half your misses land in the overswing. Aiming just below the band means your misses are merely short. The good players are not aiming at the top of the meter at all.
There is a tick at the bottom and the top of every sweep. It is a beat to place your tap inside, not a tell — the needle already shows you where the band is.
2. Rollout is the whole game
Every surface has a rollout multiplier, and the spread between them is enormous. This is the single most useful table in the game, because it explains nearly every score you did not understand:
| Surface | Rollout | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| The bridge | 5.20 | By far the fastest thing on the course. It is how you cross a burn with the wrong club. |
| Cart path | 3.00 | Roughly double the fairway. Worth aiming at on a long straight hole. |
| Green | 2.10 | Why running the ball in from the front beats flying it at the pin. |
| Fairway | 1.45 | The baseline. Everything else is measured against this. |
| Tee | 1.25 | Slightly slower than fairway, which is why a tee shot is all carry. |
| Rough | 0.30 | Less than a quarter of the fairway. The rough does not just cost accuracy, it stops the ball dead. |
| Portal green | 0.18 | Kills a rolling ball. Judge it as a carry to the middle. |
| Deep rough | 0.14 | A tenth of the fairway. Nothing runs out of here. |
| Bunker | 0.07 | Effectively nothing. Where your ball lands is where it stays. |
| Water | 0.00 | A stroke and a drop. |
Read the fairway and rough rows together. A shot that finishes in the rough has not lost you a few yards — it has lost you four fifths of its run. That is why a shorter, straighter club very often finishes further up the hole than a driver that leaks into the long stuff.
3. What a bad lie actually costs
Once you are there, the lie taxes the next shot twice: it shortens your carry, and it widens the spread around your line.
| Lie | Carry | Spread | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fairway | 100% | normal | The reference. |
| Tee | 100% | normal | Same as fairway — the tee gives you nothing extra. |
| The bridge | 94% | 1.45× | You can play off it, but not well. |
| Cart path | 92% | 1.55× | Good to land on, mediocre to play from. |
| Rough | 84% | 1.75× | The common miss, and more expensive than it looks. |
| Bunker | 70% | 1.90× | Also capped at 160 yards however hard you swing. |
| Deep rough | 62% | 2.45× | Two and a half times the spread. Treat it as a recovery. |
The bunker line is the one to remember: it caps your carry at 160 yards no matter what club you pick or how pure the strike. A bunker 200 yards from the green is a guaranteed two more shots, which makes bunkers far more expensive than their gentle appearance suggests.
4. The clubs
Seven clubs, each with a carry and a rollout of its own before the surface multiplier is applied. Longer clubs also have a wider spread and a faster meter, so the driver is harder to strike purely as well as longer.
| Club | Carry | Roll | Total on fairway |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driver | 278 yd | 26 yd | ≈ 316 yd |
| 3 Wood | 243 yd | 20 yd | ≈ 272 yd |
| 5 Wood | 221 yd | 16 yd | ≈ 244 yd |
| 4 Iron | 199 yd | 13 yd | ≈ 218 yd |
| 6 Iron | 179 yd | 10 yd | ≈ 194 yd |
| 8 Iron | 156 yd | 7 yd | ≈ 166 yd |
| Pitching wedge | 131 yd | 5 yd | ≈ 138 yd |
The gaps are wide on purpose. There is no half-swing, so club choice is the coarse control and the meter is the fine one — which is why laying up to a number you like is a real strategy rather than an admission of defeat.
5. The green is a scoring system, not a stroke
There is no putting to time. Finish inside the gold ring and it is one putt, inside the pale ring two, anywhere else three. So every approach is a shot at the gold ring, and the rings shrink as the green steepens — a tilted green punishes a long approach twice over.
Because a green rolls out at 2.10, running the ball in from the front is almost always better than flying it at the flag. Pitch short, let it release, and the rollout carries you towards the pin instead of past it.
6. Managing the hazards
Each hazard has its own answer and they are covered one at a time in the obstacle guides. Three principles carry across all of them.
- Think about where the ball stops, not where it lands. Most hazard trouble is rollout trouble — a shot that pitches safely and runs on in.
- A dropped shot is worse than a lost twenty yards. Water costs a stroke and the position. Laying up costs only the position.
- Take the brave line when your timing is good, not when you are behind. The burn especially rewards the long carry, but only if you are striking it purely that round.
7. It is the same nine for everybody
Every course is generated from the date, so everyone in the world plays the same nine holes on the same day, with the same wind and the same hazards in the same places. There is no bad luck to blame and no good draw to hope for — which means the difference between your round and the round above you on the board is entirely decisions and timing.
It also means a mistake is shared. When a hole plays impossibly, it played impossibly for everyone, and the leaderboard will show it.