Pardle

The pin sheet at TPC Twin Cities changes every day, but the set of positions the tournament uses barely does. Cross-reference eight years of pin coordinates and you find the same six or seven spots on each green come around again and again. That stability is a gift: it lets us ask whether a specific pin location plays consistently harder or easier than its raw birdie rate suggests — once you strip out the round it was used in.

Why raw birdie rates lie

Two identical pins can produce very different birdie numbers for reasons that have nothing to do with the pin. Wind on a Thursday morning can wipe half a stroke off a par-3. A forward-tee setup on a Saturday can turn a 305-yard par-4 into a wedge fest. If a particular pin position happened to get used mostly in easy conditions, it looks easier than it is; if it landed mostly on brutal days, it looks harder.

So we fit a model per hole:birdie rate = a + b_y·yards + b_h·headwindwhere headwind is the wind's speed projected onto the hole's actual play direction (positive = into the player's face on the approach). Each hole's play bearing is the real compass direction from fairway landing to green, pulled from OpenStreetMap way geometry — so a 15mph south wind is correctly identified as a headwind on a hole playing south and a tailwind on a hole playing north. Then we ask, for every historical pin: did this position birdie more or less often than the yardage and directional wind that day would predict? That residual is the number worth looking at.

What the coefficients say about the course

Before we even get to the pins, the model tells us something useful about how TPC Twin Cities plays. Directional wind is the dominant round-level factor at this course.

Hole 6 and hole 12 are the most wind-sensitive on the property: each loses about ~4pp of birdie rate for every 5 mph of headwind on the approach. Hole 18 loses ~3pp per 5 mph headwind. Yardage still matters: the biggest per-hole yardage coefficient (hole 16, −2pp per +10 yards) is meaningful but rarely dominant. If you want to bet birdie-heavy round scores this week, the wind forecast — and specifically which way the wind is coming from — is the first thing to read.

Pins that play harder than they look

These are positions where the field has under-performed even after accounting for length and wind. If you see one of these on Thursday's sheet, birdie sweats are worse propositions than the yardage would suggest.

The signal on hole 12 front-right is the most statistically solid one on this list — 908 putts of exposure across seven pin positions. Twelve is a par-5, so the raw 49% birdie rate looks fine on the leaderboard; the read here is that relative to the other par-5 pins on the same green in comparable conditions, this one costs the field nearly eight percentage points. Hole 18 middle-right tells the same story: birdie rate looks reasonable in isolation, but sat next to what the yardage and directional wind on those days should have produced, it's the biggest under-performer on the closing green.

Pins that play easier than they look

Hole 12 has the biggest same-green swing on the property: the front-center flag plays +6.1pp aboveexpectation and the front-right flag −7.9ppbelow — a 14pp swing in birdie probabilitybetween two pins a wedge apart on the same par-5 green, in comparable conditions.

Hole 18 tells the same story on the closing green: front-left flag +5.9pp, middle-right flag −6.6pp — a 12pp swing between two pins on 18. The effect is real even though H18 itself is only moderately wind-sensitive once you use the actual play direction; some pins on that green are just genuinely harder than the yardage would predict.

Hole 2 is a smaller-scale example of the same pattern: the back-left flag plays +5.5pp above expectation, the back-right −3.5pp below. A 9pp swing between two flags on the back shelf of the same green — a real edge, if smaller than 12 or 18.

How to actually use this

When the tournament's daily pin sheet drops, spot-check the holes above. The strongest edges are:

• Hole 12 front-center flag → lean birdie-heavy
• Hole 12 front-right flag → fade eagle/birdie parlays
• Hole 18 front-left flag → real birdie chance
• Hole 18 middle-right flag → treat as bogey-neutral
• Hole 2 back-left → soft; back-right → hard

For everything else, the course heat-map surface has the full pin-by-pin picture, filterable by year and by round.

Round 1 read — the Thursday setup

The R1 pin sheet dropped Wednesday afternoon, and the Thursday forecast is a steady southerly, 5-7 mph all day. Plugged into the same regression above, here's what today's set-up says vs. a typical R1 at TPC Twin Cities.

Playing easier today

• H12 (par-5) — the day's biggest edge, ~+8pp above normal. The R1 flag sits on the back-left cluster (+5.5pp on its historical record), and the south wind is a strong tailwind on 12 — every 5 mph of tailwind lifts birdie rate ~+4pp on this hole. Both effects stack.
• H5 (par-4) — ~+5pp above normal. Today's flag lands on a smaller-sample cluster the regression rates as consistently over-performing (~+6pp intrinsic). Wind is essentially crosswind on the approach, so this is a pin-driven edge.
• H15 (par-4) — ~+4pp above normal. The tee shot runs nearly due-north, which turns today's south wind into a straight tailwind off the tee — the hole plays shorter. Neutral pin, but the wind boost is real.
• H2 and H18 — mild + (each ~+2pp). Strong tailwinds on long holes, roughly neutral pins.

Playing harder today

• H16 — the day's biggest defensive setup. Back tee at 411 yards + south wind is a direct headwind on the approach. Neutral pin, but the yardage-and-wind stack alone puts the hole ~6–8pp harder than a typical R1. (The regression's raw estimate is bigger than that but is inflated by anomalous drivable-hole setups in the historical record.)
• H7 — ~−4pp below normal. South wind hits the approach directly, and H7 is one of the property's most yardage-sensitive holes.
• H6 — ~−3pp below normal. The R1 pin sits on a smaller-sample cluster with a mildly negative residual, and the tailwind bonus isn't enough to flip it. Not the par-5 birdie opportunity it looks like on the leaderboard.
• H13 — ~−5pp below normal. This is the article's flagged middle-right harder pin (−4.3pp intrinsic), plus today's south wind hits the tee shot as a moderate headwind. Both effects stack. Solid fade the birdie sweat here.

Net-net across the round: once H13's flagged harder pin is factored in, the easier and defensive holes roughly cancel. Sum of the per-hole birdie-rate deltas comes in near zero — the four eased holes lift ~+21pp and the four defensive ones drag ~−21pp, so today's setup is basicallya neutral R1 relative to the historical averagerather than a round-wide easy day.

That doesn't mean the flagged holes don't matter. The H12 birdie edge (+~8pp) and the H13 + H16 defensiveness (~−5 and ~−8pp respectively, after correcting H16 down for the drivable-hole distortion in the historical baseline) are the strongest single-hole signals of the day — worth playing on their own even when the round-total is roughly a coin flip. Player-specific matchups on those four holes are where the real edge sits.

One caveat: the H16 penalty above is the model's raw output — a more honest estimate, stripping the anomalous drivable-hole setups from the yardage baseline, is closer to −6 to −8pp harder than normal.

The limits

Six years is a shortish sample. Each pin cluster has somewhere between 300 and 900 putts of exposure — enough to move a betting decision, not enough to be a season-defining edge. The model treats wind as a round average (speed and direction), which flatters the coefficients on gusty days when the wind veers. It doesn't know about pin proximity to hazards, green speed, or firmness. And it can't yet see 2026: this year's yardage and weather aren't in the archive until the tournament book publishes, so the residuals above are locked to 2019–2025 data.

Each round's wind is projected onto the hole's real compass bearing (pulled from OpenStreetMap way geometry — the approach-leg direction on par-4s, the fairway-to-green direction on par-5s). One bearing per hole is a simplification of what a second-shot decision on a par-5 actually looks like, and public-data bearings are approximate on the doglegs — so treat any single residual as a ±2pp estimate rather than a point value.

Treat it as a tiebreaker between two flags you're already pricing, not a system on its own. But when the pin sheet shows H12 front-center or H18 front-left on any morning, that's a nudge worth taking.