laladiesman
Amateur Golfer
Posts: 267
TGCT Name: David Paul
Tour: Platinum
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Post by laladiesman on Apr 15, 2020 21:20:31 GMT -5
Interested to know how the community leans towards pin positions. I notice the majority of course increase the difficulty as you play 1-4. But I prefer to mix them up based on difficulty and reserve just a couple of the toughest and tucked ones for 3 and 4.
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Post by Oscar C on Apr 15, 2020 21:55:08 GMT -5
The holes sole difficulty shouldnt rest on where the pin is. Hazards befoe considering pin location and risk should play a part also.
They dont have to be done in order of difficulty at all. Remembering that not all societies use all 4 pins for courses that have 4.
When designing a course you can get into the pattern of making the easier pins all pin 1 or 2 but what i find happens is the pins are then always in a similar spot on each hole during the round.
For example, pin 1 middle safe on hole 1, then front on hole 2, slightly right but still safe on hole 3 and then before you know it all of them are easy. Same then goes for pin 4 being too hard.
Make it a fair fun challenge but be consistent based on what you want the course to play like.
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laladiesman
Amateur Golfer
Posts: 267
TGCT Name: David Paul
Tour: Platinum
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Post by laladiesman on Apr 15, 2020 22:20:50 GMT -5
Agree. An example is my par 5’s. Getting to the pin on two of them under reg will depend on pin placement as the greens are large and pin locations can change the length alone by 40 yards or so. So I put pin1 on the back of one in a flatter area but it’s 630. The other pin1 is up front but tough to get anywhere near with a 3 wood and it plays 580 or so. They are both around 605 or so on the scorecard.
What I really would love is the option to use different tee boxes with different pin positions. Changing lengths, angles and testing club selection. I don’t care what you do to the weather teeing off the same tee box four rounds in a row becomes a breeze. Even if the hole is challenging.
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Post by lessthanbread on Apr 15, 2020 23:50:09 GMT -5
I like to keep general difficulty in mind when setting pins, meaning for the entire 18 holes, pin 4 will be the most difficult overall, but not necessarily on every single hole. My main consideration when setting pins is variety of placement on the greens and types of shots played into each pin. Keep it interesting and keep the golfer thinking
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Post by coruler2 on Apr 16, 2020 0:28:23 GMT -5
I mix mine up where all 4 play about even over the 18 holes
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Post by Royce on Apr 16, 2020 7:04:47 GMT -5
I use real life tournament pin locations, which generally follow a 6 easy/6 medium/6 difficult concept.
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Post by yeltzman on Apr 16, 2020 7:45:45 GMT -5
No idea if this guide will help you or not,shows where the PGA placed the pins for the final round of the PGA,just a good guide i think how close to edges of greens etc.Like royce says should be a good mix of scoring and tough ones.Again its down to cyber golf or real golf....
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Post by 15eicheltower9 on Apr 16, 2020 7:50:08 GMT -5
I set mine 100 percent randomly. I'll switch them during playtesting if I notice a stretch of similar locations in a group of holes (i.e: 3 front right pins in 4 holes). Other than that its just wherever.
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Post by Violinguy69 on Apr 16, 2020 12:05:14 GMT -5
I use real life tournament pin locations, which generally follow a 6 easy/6 medium/6 difficult concept. This is the best way to do it. Pin 4 CANNOT be the most difficult location on all 18 holes. On the real PGA, there are a lot of "easy" hole locations for round 4 because the tourney wants players to make birdies for more exciting golf at the end. I believe the tour rotates them by the hardest 6 to the most difficult 6 holes, and chooses difficult hole locations per each round.
I rotate mine as I build the course. Hole 1 is 1, 2, 3, 4 from easiest to hardest. Hole 2 is 2, 3, 4, 1. Etc. There is little as frustrating as playing a course with all of the #4 pins in the back of the greens. Or all of the #1 pins in the front.
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Post by csugolfer60 on Apr 16, 2020 12:56:05 GMT -5
I use 72 difficult hole locations.
Just for info (only because I have some inside knowledge of this), the tour does not follow any sort of 6 easy/6 medium/6 hard rotation, or any other rotation generally.
The "loose" guidelines they tend to follow are to make sure that you don't have a series of pins in the same spot, side, or depth. For example, you probably want to try and avoid 5 back pins in a row, or 5 left pins in a row, etc. But even that's not a hard and fast rule.
My personal take is - find the 4 toughest hole locations on each green and put your 4 pins down in those locations. Then, go through round 1 pins and try and vary them amongst those 4, so that there aren't any recurring patterns if possible. For example, try to avoid having the player hit a high draw into three tucked left pins in a row.
Since you've identified your toughest 4 pins on each hole, that becomes your "PGA" version, and then you can ease the difficulty on each of those 4 for each level of difficulty.
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Post by yeltzman on Apr 16, 2020 13:03:27 GMT -5
I think it all depends on conditions for real life golf etc.......rule 16 (A) subsection 7 of the USGA rule book does mention 6/6/6 of course its only a guide.
Lets be honest lets not confuse cyber golf to real golf,not many courses in real life have 200 yard plus shots to shelves of red and yellow like TGC fictional courses.
For a competition played over several days, the course should be kept in balance daily as to degree of difficulty. In a stroke competition, the first hole of the first round is as important as the last hole of the last round, and so the course should not be set up appreciably more difficult for any round - balanced treatment is the aim. An old concept of making the course progressively harder round after round is fallacious. One form of balanced daily treatment is to select six quite difficult, six which are moderately difficult and six which are relatively easy.
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Post by csugolfer60 on Apr 16, 2020 13:13:33 GMT -5
I think it all depends on conditions for real life golf etc.......rule 16 (A) subsection 7 of the USGA rule book does mention 6/6/6 of course its only a guide. Lets be honest lets not confuse cyber golf to real golf,not many courses in real life have 200 yard plus shots to shelves of red and yellow like TGC fictional courses. For a competition played over several days, the course should be kept in balance daily as to degree of difficulty. In a stroke competition, the first hole of the first round is as important as the last hole of the last round, and so the course should not be set up appreciably more difficult for any round - balanced treatment is the aim. An old concept of making the course progressively harder round after round is fallacious. One form of balanced daily treatment is to select six quite difficult, six which are moderately difficult and six which are relatively easy. You are correct that the USGA does reccomend this as one form of balancing, although our definitions of "quite difficult, moderately difficult, and relatively easy" are probably quite different. When I'm setting up for a PGA-Tour event, I'm usually aiming for a "quite difficult" pin to be impossible to get within 25-30 feet of, where a perfectly played shot will have a chance from that distance for birdie (on a par 4, for example). A moderately difficult would be a hole location that the player can get the ball within 15 feet with a perfectly played shot, and the hole would be on a significant slope, making the putt quite difficult. A relatively easy pin would be the kind where, a perfectly played shot could be played to 12-15 feet and the putt from the ideal line would be relatively flat. For Korn Ferry, CC-Pro and CC-Am, the clubs played into those hole locations would be shorter (9i instead of 5i for example), and the hole would be a bit further away from the edge of the short side to promote a bit more forgiveness.
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laladiesman
Amateur Golfer
Posts: 267
TGCT Name: David Paul
Tour: Platinum
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Post by laladiesman on Apr 16, 2020 21:27:42 GMT -5
I like that 6,6,6 guide. I am not even sure how tough my course is especially the greens. They are slow because some of the tiers are severe but I haven’t found a putt I couldn’t lag to a couple feetfrom above the hole (yet). So it’s fair. Maybe too easy? I also like the little green maps. Have one going now. Great insight from all.
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Post by b101 on Apr 17, 2020 2:15:18 GMT -5
Personally hate the 'pin four must be all tough' mantra that seems to have pervaded TGC at some point. Occasionally, you might find that on one of my courses, but it'll never be by design and even then, you'll have a few scoring holes. The one thing that I often do (particularly with Kaiuma) is make pin 1 the 'highlight the holes' pinset - i.e. pin one position encourages people to play the hole as you intended or bring the big features into play. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's always the perched above the bunker pin, but on your best holes, you want to make them stand out with your best pin position on pin 1 IMO - reason being that most play pin one and only pin one. Beyond that, as others have said, vary them, particularly on par threes. I'm a full-blown planner, so at the end of designing each hole and placing the four pins, I'll go and mark down where I've put the pins on paper, then tweak from there. Ends up looking something like this (below is for Black Salt Valley). With this one, most pins are supposed to be tough, so I wasn't worried about difficulty as much. I'd normally go and add green / amber / red for difficulty level as well then try to balance. From this document, you'll notice arrows, question marks etc. What I'm trying to do is ensure that holes play differently on consecutive days (I don't mind if pins 1 and 3 or 2 and 4 play similarly - you'll have had another round in between). I'll also highlight stretches where you're playing to back or front pins and change if need be. Sometimes it just depends on the hole itself - a back pin on a short par three isn't remotely similar to a back pin on a long four. With the left and rights, bear in mind where you want people aiming off the tee as well; you just want to encourage variety really. Final thing to note is that par threes are boxed off as you don't want two front pins in a round or all par three pins tucked and non-gettable (IMO). Oh and then wind factored into this one as well: based on the wind direction, is that encouraging players to ride the wind, fight it, aim over hazards, away from pins, change accessible areas from tee shots etc. Yeah, I think this matters a lot.
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Post by linkslover on Apr 17, 2020 2:36:09 GMT -5
Generally my pin 1s are easier going up to pin 4s the hardest, but I do swap them round on about a third of the holes on the course.
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