Surfaces, lies, and shot flags
These describe where each shot started and finished, plus a handful of shot-type flags: putt, gimme, penalty, holed out, and foliage contact. They come from a mix of GSPro and GSCaddie's own logic.
What GSCaddie tracks
| What | Type | Where from | How GSCaddie uses it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting surface | text (tee, fairway, rough, sand, green) | GSPro | The lie you played from. Used for strokes gained baseline selection and fairways/greens tracking. |
| Ending surface | text | GSPro | Where the ball came to rest. Drives fairways hit, greens in regulation, and the lie for the next shot's strokes gained. |
| First bounce material | text | Launch monitor | What the ball first landed on during flight. |
| Putt | yes/no | Computed | Any stroke that was a putt or gimme, including putts the simulator conceded automatically. Putts are counted separately and excluded from carry, dispersion, and per-shot strokes gained. |
| Holed out | yes/no | Launch monitor | Marks the stroke that holed the ball. Confirms a hole actually finished and counts milestones like holes in one. |
| Penalty | yes/no | Launch monitor | Marks a stroke that took a penalty (water, out of bounds). |
| Hit leaves | yes/no | Launch monitor | Marks a shot that clipped foliage in flight. |
Good to know
Starting and ending surface are the backbone of most round metrics. Fairways hit looks at a tee shot's ending surface, greens in regulation counts how many strokes it took to reach the green, and strokes gained uses the surface to pick the right expected-strokes baseline.
A putt the simulator concedes automatically is assigned to the putter so it does not appear as an iron or wedge shot in your averages.
The holed-out and putt flags together tell GSCaddie when a hole is genuinely finished, which prevents a half-played hole from counting as a birdie or eagle.
Why an imported shot can show an empty surface
GSPro only records the lie while you are actually playing. Rounds imported from your GSPro Portal history (rounds played before you installed GSCaddie) never had that local lie captured, so their surfaces are blank.
On the shots table those shots show "n/a" in the surface column instead of a label, with the note:
Surface isn't recorded for rounds imported from before GSCaddie.
This is expected, not a bug. Metrics that need a lie (greens in regulation, scrambling, full strokes gained) cannot be computed for those rounds, so GSCaddie falls back to the portal's own round-level numbers instead. See derived round metrics.