SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE TOURNEY:
Participation:
We started with 26 signups, with 23 players starting the tourney (from 13 different time zones!). We lost 2 after round 1, another 5 after round 2, and 5 more after round 3, finishing with 11 players playing all 4 rounds. 58% dropped out along the way after signup. Is it normal to only get about 42% completion for a tourney?
I can see that it would help to offer some other kind of prizes: e.g. Hans' suggestion of a random award amongst the finishers.
What else could we have done to encourage people to stick with it?
And, any ideas you can share on how to recruit more players in the first place?
Player Pairings:
Thank you everyone for your patience with the Time Availability Grid, and with the notion of trying to play in leaderboard pairings for the last couple of rounds. I think it worked well enough to want to try that approach again.
With the grid, I would modify it so that we were gathering everyone's playing hours in actual times, not the 'open to interpretation' "mornings, evenings etc", and ideally in their local time, using a calculation of their time zone to make everyone's show in relation to GMT (or UTC).
Scoring:
Hans' achievement is phenomenal. To shoot par or better on every round is hard to imagine: just pure class! He would still have won by 6 shots even if all the rest of us had put forward our best round at each course against his. Perhaps the truest indicator of his mastery of this format is that of his 18 birdies across the 4 rounds, only 5 were on par 3s. And we thought that going for a good GIR would be a trade-off against Closest to the Pin, but he's swept the board on both those prizes as well.
Hyena has already mentioned that he struggled to reproduce his practice scores in the real games, and I definitely found that to be the case for me too. I had 'marker' scores with others that were significantly better (-1 at RSG, -4 at St A's), but when the pressure was on I couldn't score as well.
I found it interesting that bad starts to rounds seemed to help me focus on just grinding, which generally was the best way to score well. I got a huge slice of luck in my Olympic round, when after kicking off with 2 bogeys, I missed the ding right on my 3rd hole tee shot, and was mighty relieved to see it sail gently over the flagstick for a converted 9 ft birdie putt. A bit of luck and early bogeys seemed to force me to settle down. In other rounds, I found it very easy to go off the rails once things went awry.
I think I went into the 2 U.S. courses expecting the toughest challenge, so the pressure was off to some extent. At the British courses, I knew I'd have to get some birdies, which made it harder when things went wrong.
Anyone else want to share thoughts on how to score best in this format?
The Courses:
Any feedback on our choices of courses, and/or tees, wind, green conditions?
If we do this again, would you like to see the other 3 courses used (Kiawah, Bethpage, Congressional), or some variants on what we just did (e.g. more wind, faster greens, or easier setups). I know some folks said that the Standard green speed at St. Andrews actually tripped them up more than anticipated.
Uneven Lies:
Did they get easier for you after the October update?
I found it was possible to blast out of bunkers afterwards. Before I just had to play sideways, and take my medicine. In a sense, I think this 'improvement' weakens the gameplay: bunkers, especially those in majors, are supposed to be tough.
The distance loss on sidehill lies, and up and down too, also got reduced, which, especially playing with Starters, was not such a bad thing.
Olympic was more manageable for an odd reason to me… Essentially, you always got the same side slope on the fairways, so it was possible to take notes and learn from each practice instance, knowing you'd have a similar shot next time.
We may be the players on WGT who've played the most rounds with Uneven Lies over the past couple of months since it was introduced. I hope you will consider giving some feedback into some of the threads that have been started on it, and sharing your experiences.
For myself, I hope they don't water it down too much… I reckon it's ready to go, and about time it was "rolled-out" for some official tourneys.
What Next?
There was some feedback asking for a Knockout or Single Elimination tourney next (partly on the grounds that they'd only have to endure 1 round of torture!). If so, I'd think we'd still do it as Strokeplay knockout, since that's a lot of what's fascinating, to see how much better we're getting at getting close to par.
What do you want to see as the next tourney?