How We Match Drivers to Your Swing
Every result here comes from a fixed set of rules, applied the same way to everybody. This page is those rules.
Eight questions · About 1 minute · "Not sure" is a fine answer
The scale everything starts from
The finder asks how far your drives actually carry, and that answer sets the shaft flex. The table is the whole scale.
Carry, not counting roll. If you are between two brackets the lower one is the safer choice, because a shaft slightly too soft costs you far less than one slightly too stiff.
Age does not set your flex. It is only a fallback when you do not know your carry: aged 55 to 64 we use regular flex, 65 and over senior, and senior if you would rather not say.
Your ball flight sets the loft band, and your usual miss decides whether the head should help fight a slice.
| Carry distance | Flex used |
|---|---|
| Under 180 yards | Ladies flex |
| 180 to 210 yards | Senior flex |
| 210 to 240 yards | Regular flex |
| 240 to 270 yards | Stiff |
| Over 270 yards | Stiff |
What gets removed, and what only gets marked down
Filter what is unusable. Rank what is merely suboptimal.
Removed entirely
- Anything that is not one playable driver: complete sets, iron sets, shafts on their own (including shafts with a driver-tip adapter), heads without a shaft, headcovers, training aids, mini drivers, and vintage persimmon or hickory clubs.
- Anything damaged or sold for parts.
- Auctions. The price on an auction is not the price you pay, and the listing may be gone by the time you look.
- Listings where the seller's own title contradicts the flex in the structured data. One of the two is wrong and we cannot tell which, so we drop the club. It costs us about one listing in fifty.
- The wrong handedness, which makes a club unusable rather than badly fitted.
- Anything above the top of your budget.
- For male golfers: models made for women, and ladies flex.
Still shown, but ranked lower
- A flex one or two steps away from yours.
- A loft outside your band.
- A head with no slice help, when you slice. It is not penalised; it misses the points a slice-fighting head earns.
- A model from before 2010.
None of these makes a driver unplayable, so none of them is a reason to hide it from you.
How fit is scored
Each listing gets a score, and the list is ordered by it. Flex carries the most weight because it is the most common mismatch in this segment.
Tie-break. Where two listings score the same, the cheaper one, shipping included, is shown first. If a seller has not quoted shipping, we count the typical shipping cost of the other listings.
When stock is thin. If fewer than 6 usable listings come back in your exact flex, the search widens one step stiffer rather than showing you a nearly empty page, and every card says which flex it actually is.
Where the listings come from
Everything you see is a live used listing on eBay, refreshed hourly. Nothing here is our stock, and we never hold a club or handle a sale. If a listing sells, it leaves these pages on the next refresh.
| Signal | How it scores |
|---|---|
| Shaft flex | 10 points for an exact match, 6 one step away, 3 two steps away, nothing beyond that. |
| Loft | 5 points inside your band, losing 1 point for every degree outside it, never below zero. |
| Slice help | 2 points when you slice and the head is built to fight it. 2 points off a slice-fighting head if you hook the ball badly. No effect otherwise. |
| Budget | 3 points for a price in your range, or up to 10% below it, then fewer the further below. Nothing extra for being expensive. |
| Age of model | 2 points off for a model family that predates 2010. |
How we count what is for sale
On each brand page we take a sample of the used drivers listed on eBay in senior flex for that brand, and sort the model names into groups. Up to 400 listings, or all of them where a brand has fewer than that.
- Senior flex only. It is the band these pages are about, and it is the band our model rules were built to read.
- The sample only sees listings where the seller filled in the flex field. The ranked results also include listings where we read the flex out of the title, so the sample is a narrower view than the clubs on the page. We are working on closing that gap.
- Every figure is a share of that sample, not a share of the market and not a share of sales. We do not know what sells, only what is listed.
- The sample is taken fresh every time the pages rebuild, which is hourly, so a figure will move by a point or two between visits. Read the shape, not the decimal, which is why we round to whole numbers.
- The groups are fixed rules applied identically to every listing, the same way the ranking is. Nothing is hand-picked per brand.
Some listings we cannot place. A seller who writes "Callaway Paradym driver" has named the family but not which Paradym, and the difference between the variants is the whole point. Those are left out of the groups rather than guessed at.
What this cannot do
It is not a fitting. A fitter with a launch monitor measures what your club is actually doing at impact, and we cannot see any of that. We work from what you can tell us, which is a coarser input.
We also do not model shaft length, grip size or lie angle, and we cannot judge the condition of a club beyond what the seller has written.
What the rules can do is apply the same logic to every golfer and show their working on every result, and at this end of the market that is usually enough. The expensive mistake is not being half a flex out. It is buying a stiff shaft when you needed a senior one.
How we make money, and what it cannot change
How we make money
- We earn a commission when you buy through a link, paid by eBay as a percentage of the sale.
- We take nothing from manufacturers or retailers for placement.
- A percentage of the sale means more money on a dearer club.
What it cannot change
- No brand can pay to appear or to rank higher.
- Price enters the ranking in one place only: the 3 points for a price in your range. There is no reward for being expensive beyond that.
- Where two clubs fit equally well, the cheaper one, shipping included, goes first. That is the opposite of what our commission would prefer, which is the point.
- The returns labels are information, not ranking. "30-day returns" marks a Top Rated Plus listing, which eBay requires to offer free returns for at least 30 days. "Returns accepted" means the seller takes returns: the listing says for how long and who pays return postage.
Golf swings change. Your gear can too.
Find used drivers matched to the way you play today.
Find my driverEight questions · About 1 minute · "Not sure" is a fine answer