Why Every Round Shouldn't Count the Same: Recency Weighting in FGB Studio

There's a quiet assumption baked into almost every golf stat you've ever looked at: that every round in the sample matters equally. Pull up a player's strokes gained average over the last twelve months and you're looking at a number where a round from last week and a round from eleven months ago carry the exact same weight. The math treats them as interchangeable. Your instincts know they're not.

Golfers get hot. Golfers get lost. Swings change, putters heat up and go cold, confidence comes and goes. If your goal is simply to describe a player's year, a flat average is fine. But if your goal is to predict this week — to build a model that tells you something about Thursday — then last month almost always tells you more than last winter. The sharpest predictive models in golf are built on exactly this idea, and it's now built into FGB Studio as Recency Weighting.

The Half-Life: One Idea That Explains Everything

Recency Weighting doesn't throw old rounds away. It turns their volume down — smoothly, predictably, and by an amount you control through a single concept: the half-life.