saltiresfan:
The camera position isn't the biggest problem at Kiawah; it's the putts not breaking as the read shows. False breaks etc are a total nightmare.
I used to love playing Kiawah but once I worked out how to putt I realised that I can't stand it. Total lottery.
I will agree with everyone that the views especially for example on the back pin on 15 are definitely ideal.
However, I have discovered a way around this. It is a little putting tip/thing that I came up with while playing on Kiawah and having a bad day. Now while I will admit that I am no god at this game, I think I have come up with something that will really help EVERYONE including these 55- avg TL gods at reading putts having to do with false break.
Now first (this one is an old tip mainly for newer players) make sure you are reading iffy putts moving your wedge around because it shows the break everywhere, not just where the lines are. This will show you everything so that you know everything about the break of the putt.
Here comes the new part that I came up with. I noticed in my round at Kiawah that all of the "false break" putts were putts on bad angles, usually with some uphill/downhill movement. So it got me thinking, and I tested my hypothesis in a few practice rounds, mainly on Olympic because there are a lot of consistently sloped but hard sloping greens. I came to the realization that the green grid is showing you the slope of the green on the angle of the boxes, not necessarily on the angle of the camera.
This is why the odd camera angles create weird breaks. While the camera angle is off, the grid stays in line. The closer to direct the camera angle is, the ball would be closer to the line on the grid that connects with the hole. However, this is usually off, so the line of the putt is not usually in line with the grid. So what I did was I visualized the green as a 3D object with the beads showing low points. So if the putt is shown by the grid to be straight downhill, I visualize it as a plane sloping down toward me from the back view. Now if the camera angle was right on, the ball right next to the line I was talking about earlier, it would in fact be a straight downhill putt. But if the ball (from the back view) is to the left of the center line, the magic line we'll call it, it would not be a straight downhill to the hole, but rather straight downhill to a point to the left of the hole. Therefore, if the green is visualized as such, it can be deduced that the putt will in fact be a left to right putt, since the ball needs to be heading where its combination of the vector of velocity and gravity pulling it toward the lowest point, down the sharpest slope, will bring its path over the location of the hole. Visualize on the computer screen. Even though it is vertical, it can still serve the same purpose. Pretend the hole is at the bottom of the screen, right in the center. Now visualize if you had a ball, and you dropped it from the top center of the screen. It would go in. If you took the ball and moved it to the left corner of the screen and dropped it, it would miss by the half width of the screen. While this is an extreme case with infinite downslope and moving the ball over where it is almost 45 degrees off from straight up, the same concept is applied, just it is much easier to visualize. If you would want that ball to get to the bottom center of the screen from the top left corner, you would need to put some force on it to the right while dropping it. This is the same as a putt shown as downhill left to right from the behind view. This is because onced moved over, the downhill straight shown putt becomes a downhill left to right. So then if the ball is moved over to the right side of the screen, it becomes a downhill right to left putt. And all of this can just be applied vice-versa to uphill putts (ball on left side of the screen, more right to left; ball on right side of screen, more left to right).
However in this game in most cases, the up/downhill slope isn't that much, and the camera angle isn't off by a crazy amount, so the amount the ball is influenced by this effect is smaller, but still enough to make a putt even as short as 4 feet miss. Once I started taking this into account I started to make many, many more putts, especially from the 6-15 foot range. Also, this effect is not usually enough to reverse a significant (1/2 cup per 5 ft) break, but can reduce/accentuate it by a noticeable amount (which takes lots of practice to be able to judge). However, it does quite often minimize/eliminate/reverse very small breaks. For example today I had a putt from behind and right of the hole of about 12 feet on RSG 17 downhill 2 inches where the dots showed for about 3/4-1 cup of break left to right. However the camera angle was off and the ball was on the right side of this magic line by a significant amount. So I ended up with the judgement that it was in fact a dead straight putt. So I played it dead straight (btw the wind was straight behind me at 11 mph, an insignificant factor to the line) and dinged it, and it went dead straight, right in the middle of the hole. So this whole crazy rant I went on isn't complete bs lol. But it really does take lots of practice, I've been working on my judgement on it for probably 3 months (not including my hiatus) and it still needs a bit of refinement. But, those crazy unpredictable downhill sidehill 8 footers with weird camera angles do seem to be going in a lot lol!
Now after finishing my crazy whatever you want to call this, I've realized that this probably has more purpose in game tips, but I guess it's kind of relevant...after all Kiawah with awful camera angles is pretty much the #1 place this is needed lol...