Fault detection
Fault detection is the engine behind the Insights screen. It is rule-based and D-plane aware. There is no LLM anywhere in the path. GSCaddie groups your shots by club, computes per-club averages and spreads, compares them to benchmarks, and surfaces the patterns it finds, ranked so root causes show above symptoms.
How it works
- Filter. Gimmes, auto-putts, and phantom rows are dropped before anything is measured.
- Group by club. Shots are bucketed by club name. Each club is judged on its own data.
- Run the rules. Each rule compares a per-club average or spread to a benchmark, and either stays quiet or emits a fault with a severity score.
- Rank. Each fault is ranked by its severity and how root-cause versus symptom it is, so a path fault surfaces above a downstream spin fault it likely caused.
What it looks for
Detection is organized into six areas.
| Area | What it checks | Needs Portal data? |
|---|---|---|
| Path | Whether the club travels too far out-to-in or in-to-out on average, and how consistent the path is | Yes |
| Attack angle | Whether you are hitting too far down or up on the ball, per club category | Yes |
| Face angle | Whether the face is open or closed at impact, and whether it is consistent. Only runs when your setup provides real face data. | Yes |
| Ball-flight outcomes | Slice or hook tendency, pull or push bias | No |
| Strike quality | Smash factor and spin rates versus benchmarks for each club type | No (smash factor also needs Portal for club speed) |
| Dispersion | How spread out your carry distances are | No |
| Strike consistency | How OFTEN a swing comes out badly, as distinct from how good your average strike is | No (fat vs thin needs Portal) |
Ball-flight outcome and dispersion checks run entirely on launch monitor data. Path, attack angle, and face checks need club-delivery data from a GSPro Portal sync.
Strike consistency vs strike quality
These sound alike and are not. Strike quality is your average: smash factor against the benchmark for that club. Strike consistency is how often a swing comes out badly. You can have a perfectly respectable average and still chunk one shot in seven, and those two need different conversations.
The consistency check counts full swings that finish well short of your own median carry for that club. Partial swings are excluded first, because a deliberate half wedge looks identical to a chunk if you only measure carry.
Where your launch monitor reports club speed, GSCaddie can go further and tell fat from thin, because a fat strike loses ball speed and a thin one does not. Where it can't, the finding stays as "inconsistent strike" rather than guessing. That matters: the fix for thin is close to the opposite of the fix for fat, so a wrong label sends you to a drill that makes it worse.
Two families: delivery and outcome
Everything in the table above is delivery-scoped. It asks what the club was doing, per club, across every shot you have hit with it, and it works just as well on the range as on a course.
There is a second, separate family that is outcome-scoped: it asks where the ball finished relative to the pin. That one covers short, long, left, and right bias on approach shots, is measured per club, and needs course rounds with recoverable pin positions. It exists because the two questions genuinely have different answers. A player with a textbook swing path can still miss every green short, and no amount of path, face, or spin data will ever show that.
The outcome rules are paired with drills too, though the fix is usually a yardage-book correction rather than a swing change: a carry-number audit for finishing short or long, an aim audit for a one-sided miss. They are described in full on the Insights screen.
Minimum shots
A club needs around ten shots before detection fires for it. Spread and consistency checks need a few more. Below those minimums the club is left alone, so you will not see fault cards for clubs you barely use. The Insights screen shows how many of your clubs currently have enough data.
Severity
Each detected fault gets a severity level: high, medium, or low. Higher means the pattern is more pronounced. Faults are ranked so the most impactful issues appear first.
Strengths
The same pass also looks for things you do well, above the benchmark. Strengths include things like a positive driver attack angle, tour-caliber driver spin, strong smash factor, a repeatable swing path, and consistent carry distances.
For where all of this is displayed, see the Insights screen. For the drills paired to each fault, see drills.