Golf strategy hinges on balancing two risks: your tee shot and your approach. A safe tee shot with a 7-iron leaves you farther from the green; a aggressive one gets you closer but risks out-of-bounds. The key is finding the ratio that maximizes distance while keeping you on the green.
When we think about golf tee to green, there's really two main things you're trying to do. You're really just trying to manage the amount of risk that you take off the tee and the amount of risk you're taking on approach. So what do I mean by that? Well, you can minimize the amount of risk you take off the tee by hitting, let's say, 7-iron off every hole, but you maximize the risk you'd have on every approach shot since you probably wouldn't hit that many greens. So what you're trying to do to play a high level is you're actually trying to optimize that ratio. You're trying to hit it maximally far, and you're trying to hit it on the green as often as possible. So if you hit it out of bounds, well, you're not hitting it on the green. So it's managing those two relationships between how much risk you're taking off the tee and how easy it is for you to hit the green based on those tee shots.
