Tangent’s AI Caddie Makes Golf Course Strategy An Obsession

For the recreational golfer who cares about their performance, the game often poses a daunting, seemingly paradoxical, question:

How can you get better when you have less time to play?

So many of us are forced to cut back on golf because other life responsibilities get in the way. We get married, have kids, focus on our career pursuits—or maybe it’s all of the above.

Conventional wisdom suggests your golfing life will inevitably suffer under these conditions. Practicing and playing less golf? That isn’t a recipe for even sustaining your handicap, let alone improving it.

This may be one way to look at it, but Tangent Golf wants to flip the problem on its head to give you a new perspective.

With less practice than you’ve ever had, it’s time to become the most efficient you’ve ever been.

Chip away at the margins—all of the wasted movement and wayward energy you carried around back when you did have the time.

How will you do it? It’s a nuanced question that deserves a nuanced answer.

For Tangent, the core of that answer is an app designed for sensorless shot tracking, an AI caddie offering personalized advice, detailed player profiles to give you a full report on who you are as a golfer and practice integration that recommends the drills you need to get better quickly.

The promise? You can unlock more of your game right now.

Two paths crossing at the right time

The Tangent Golf story came together from two separate tracks that merged into one.

On the first track is Dallas Webster, a military brat who picked up golf at the age of 16. Growing up to be an electrical engineer for Texas Instruments, Webster was carrying a solid 6-handicap by the time he had his first son in 2013.

Despite being a new dad with less time on his hands, Webster wanted to know how he could get better at golf.

“I kind of took that mathematical approach about how do I play better and play less?” he said.

To do so, he delved into the world of analytics in golf. As he read Mark Broadie’s famous book Every Shot Counts that describes the inner workings of Strokes Gained, Webster learned how to apply those principles to his own game. Call it the “Moneyball of golf” or just call it common sense by the numbers.

That’s when he got into competitive golf on what was then the Golf Channel Am Tour, improving to a plus-1 handicap.

Webster had created a spreadsheet that was a Strokes Gained analysis based on where all of his shots were. In 2015, nothing existed in terms of shot-tracking apps so it was all manual.

A year later, Webster and a friend developed the PocketPAR app, the first Strokes Gained solution golf app that soon had map tracking.

Although it’s taken on different forms since then—including a partnership with V1 Sports—Webster has continued to be obsessed with creating shot-tracking apps. In 2022, he went off on his own again to found PAR Golf, which would be rebranded to Tangent in 2024.

On the other track is fellow co-founder Tom Joanides, known as T.J.

His background could not be much more different than Webster’s. He is a high-handicap golfer from Southern California who has spent much of his career as an attorney.

But about 17 years ago, Joanides had a revelation that would send him down the path of partnering with Webster.

“I had this vision as I was falling asleep. I got up and wrote it down. I was brand-new to golf at the time and I just couldn’t shake this dream about what this looks like in the end.”

This vision was much of what Tangent has become today. Even as he attended law school, creating a product that could track your golf shots and provide advice was something of a recurring daydream.

All of that was simply a fantasy by 2018 when Joanides started to have significant health issues so severe he had to hit pause on his law career.

“I took my kids to the putting green one day and I was really lost in the world. But it hit me in that moment that if I could find something to do in golf and make a living out of it, I would be happy.”

Saying it and doing it are two completely different things.

Joanides “naively” started a company called Wide Range Golf in 2019, following the dream he first had more than a decade earlier.

Where the stories connect is at the 2020 PGA Merchandise Show when Webster and Joanides were introduced to each other. One man had the golf, engineering and app development background; the other was short on those experiences but long on determination.

“I feel like I saw the end of this movie already,” Joanides said. “I just had this unshakeable vision.”

Webster and Joanides largely went their separate ways following that PGA Show but they reconnected in 2023 as the timing for a new venture finally lined up.

In short order, they realized there was something special brewing.

What separates Tangent from other apps

Over the last 30 years, the average golf handicap has improved only by about two strokes.

We all recognize how hard this game is, but only two strokes? Even with the massive advances in equipment and technology? That doesn’t pass the smell test.

To Webster and Joanides, the defining reason for that lack of improvement is that the golf industry is skewed heavily towards fundamentally changing the player—a task much more difficult than any of us would like to admit—rather than fundamentally changing the player’s perspective.

“When we look at the overall golf industry, it’s so focused on swing and technique,” Webster said. “But how do you marry practice and play and actually lead to game improvement? We think the future of golf is a more connected data feedback approach rather than changing who you are as a golfer.” 

Fixing that nasty slice? Hard. Fixing your course management? It’s easy if you have the right tools.

This theory manifests as an app that automatically tracks your shots based on GPS data from your phone. Your phone (or Apple Watch) can help with GPS yardages and provide real-time advice from an AI Caddie that has dispersion theories (with principles like you see with Scott Fawcett’s D.E.C.A.D.E. approach) and the golfer’s own tendencies baked into the equation.

It’s a “choose your own adventure” in terms of how much you want to incorporate technology into your round. You can play while looking at your phone/Apple Watch for advice and yardages—or you can leave your phone in your pocket/cart/golf bag and it will gather your data on its own.

The only thing that is mandatory to get the most out of the app is to input your scores for each hole (which can be done after the round). It is also helpful to spend a couple of minutes after your round confirming your shots to make sure everything is right.

“I do believe we have the smartest AI caddie in golf,” Webster said. “The only one close to us from a shot-tracking perspective is Arccos but their data is much less than what we do. Other apps try to do the dispersion stuff but don’t have the shot tracking.”

Golfers have heard of AI caddies before but that doesn’t mean they are all equally as effective. In Tangent’s case, the algorithm they use is brimming with shot data, dispersion information and a smart caddie that understands how to incorporate it with real-time strategy.

By default, the app uses the center of the fairway or green (depending on the type of shot) to calculate your dispersion and provide advice for where to aim. However, users have the ability to set intended targets for each individual shot so the AI caddie can learn about their intention as well.

The advice given is not always what you would anticipate. One example of that is with Joanides himself: although it looks odd, the app sometimes has him aim 15 yards past the green in certain scenarios because he typically comes up well short of the green.

“You are training this AI caddie to give you advice but it’s also training you,” Joanides said. “When it tells you to aim over here and you think, ‘Oh, I never would have done that,’ all of a sudden you are looking at the game differently.” 

Golfers who use the app for six months and are playing at around four times a month are improving five to six shots in that time span. Some have come to use the AI caddie religiously.

And it’s not just for high-handicappers. Webster thought better golfers may not get as much use out of it but he proved himself wrong. He doesn’t always listen to the smart caddie—it’s just a suggestion, after all—but taking that suggestion is often more helpful than ignoring it.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t going to help me. I already know how to navigate the course,'” he said. “But in the first couple of months using the app, I started to realize the holes where I had my worse scores were the holes where I didn’t do what the app was telling me.

“Even better golfers tend to make decisions that are emotional. The app isn’t emotional.”

Digging deeper into the numbers

Webster stars in The Good Miss Golf YouTube channel that takes viewers through his rounds, often showing the Tangent app alongside his rounds to explain the smart caddie advice.

This is a great representation of how the AI caddie understands a player. Webster has more than 500 rounds logged in the app, so that’s a lot of shot data. All of it is being used to make straightforward recommendations.

One example Webster gave me really proves this concept of the emotional golfer versus the analytical golfer.

He was recently on a long par-3 with OB on one side and a lake on the other side. The app told him to lay up with a 5-iron and pitch onto the green.

Laying up on a par-3? Golfers just don’t want to do this because we all have egos.

But if you crunch the numbers, going for the green with a 3-wood—one that has a 60-yard dispersion—is not the right play given the risk.

If your goal is to lower your score, you have to take your typical shot dispersion into account.

“In reality, a bogey is a really good score on that hole,” Webster said. “You can take the bogey and move on but it’s hard for golfers to do that.”

In that way, the app is a reality check for golfers who get themselves into trouble by biting off more than they can chew.

“It forces you to be intentional,” Joanides said. “And just the fact that you think about it and make a choice, that is already helping you.”

Translating the data into instructional improvement

One message Tangent wants to get across is that mechanics and instruction still have a meaningful place in golf. Of course, it can be helpful to take lessons and improve your swing.

However, the course management aspect is working with what you already have. There is no training necessary.

“We always say, ‘Use our app to cut off the wasted strokes and then dial it in from there,'” Joanides said.

The golf industry is often wrapped up in pushing golfers to make a perfect swing, but it’s a game of strategy. You play it—and that means decisions are involved. Why wouldn’t you optimize those decisions?

Once you do, Tangent recommends drills and instruction based on your shot data so that you can identify physical technique changes that will help you even more.

“We give you a post-round report that isn’t just dumping data on you,” Webster said. “We’re walking you through the story. We’re explaining some of the low-hanging fruit of things that could get cleaned up to help you.”

Tangent can identify the weaknesses in your game, which leads to a specific path of improvement.

Let’s say you struggle with approach play and the Strokes Gained numbers in the app show that. Maybe within that category it’s clear you struggle with distance control. And that is going to lead to the recommendation of iron drills where controlling the face at impact is paramount.

Then you practice those drills and can assess whether that approach skill is improving based on the Strokes Gained numbers.

Should you try out Tangent?

In a perfect world, Tangent users will learn all the course management tools they can and then depend less on the app over time.

Webster and Joanides are well aware that not every golfer wants to be staring at their phone or Apple Watch during the round. The smart caddie doesn’t have to be used every shot—or even at all.

For some people, the purpose of golf is to be out in nature with their friends. The app isn’t meant to be a distraction from that (and it definitely is not meant to slow down play, which Webster loathes). This is why Tangent is designed to track as much, or as little, as a user wants.

Want to input whether you miss putts left or right? Go ahead. Want to input how many irons you hit thin instead of fat? That’s an option.

It’s not a requirement, however. Golfers can use the app in the way they want.

Right now, there are around 80,000 users on the app, which has a 4.7 rating on Apple. Those users have played almost 200,000 rounds.

The free version of Tangent offers access to scorecard, GPS and a “Friends” feature to be a part of the community. In order to get shot tracking and the AI caddie, you must subscribe to the Basic plan ($14.99 per month/$79.99 per year) or the Pro plan ($24.99 per month/$119.99 per year). The Pro plan includes the AI coach and a Strokes Gained breakdown. There is a free trial of seven days with either subscription.

(Tangent is happy to offer MGS readers a promo code of MGS20 for 20 percent off.)

Will you be interested in trying it? What features would you like to see in the app?

Let us know below in the comments.

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