What is True Skill?
How good the player is, regardless of this course: a difficulty-adjusted rating from two seasons of round scores, weighted toward the last year and shrunk toward the field for thin samples, ranked against the rest of this week's field.
Built from published round scores, so it exists for anyone with recent tour rounds. A player with no rounds in the last two seasons gets a below-median default and a LOW DATA flag.
How it's calculated
This is part of the course-fit model — the one place on OTIS where published numbers are combined into a score of our own, rather than restated. The components are shown separately so a total can always be taken apart into skill, venue fit and recent form. It is labelled as a model wherever it appears.
How to read it
Higher is better. It is the part of the model that does not depend on the course at all.
What it doesn't say
This is a modelled number, not a published one, and it is a ranking device rather than a prediction. It says a player's game matches what a venue has rewarded historically — nothing about injuries, weather on the day, or form that has not shown up in the data yet. Small gaps between adjacent players are noise, and venues with little hosting history produce weaker-supported scores than long-standing hosts.
OTIS tracks this stat across 15 PGA Tour seasons — see it for every player, or read how the numbers are sourced in the methodology.