How We Match Drivers to Your Swing
Every result on this site is produced by a fixed set of rules applied the same way to everybody. This page is those rules. Nothing here is a trade secret, and if you think one of these decisions is wrong for you, you will be able to see exactly where it was made.
The scale everything starts from
The finder asks how far your drives actually carry, and that answer sets the shaft flex. This is the whole scale:
- 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
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 is not what sets your flex. We ask for it, but it is only used as a fallback when you tell us you do not know your carry distance, and a rough guide is better than nothing. If you know roughly how far the ball goes, that is what we act on.
Your ball flight sets the loft band, and your usual miss decides whether the head should be draw-biased.
What gets removed, and what only gets marked down
The governing rule is that we filter what is unusable and rank what is merely suboptimal.
Removed entirely, no matter how well the spec fits:
- Anything that is not one playable driver: complete sets, iron sets, shafts on their own, headcovers, training aids.
- 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 rather than assert a possibly false flex we drop the club. It costs us about one listing in fifty.
- The wrong handedness, which makes a club unusable rather than badly fitted.
Marked down but still shown: a flex one step away, a loft outside your band, a neutral head when you slice, 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. The components:
- Shaft flex: 10 points for an exact match, 6 one step away, 3 two steps away, nothing beyond that. Flex carries the most weight because it is the most common mismatch in this segment.
- Loft: 5 points inside your band, losing a point for every degree outside it.
- Draw bias: 2 points if you slice and the head fights it, 2 points off if you do not need it.
- Budget: 3 points for sitting inside the price range you chose.
- Age of model: 2 points off for a model family that predates 2010.
Where two listings score the same, the cheaper one is shown first.
If fewer than six usable listings come back in your exact flex, the search widens by one step 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.
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
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, and no brand can pay to appear or to rank higher.
Note what that means for our incentives: a percentage of the sale is more money on a dearer club. Price enters the ranking in exactly one place, the 3 points above for being inside the range you chose, and there is no reward for being expensive beyond that. Where two clubs fit equally well, the cheaper one is put in front of you. That is the opposite of what our commission would prefer, which is the point.