@BaxterMSP do you have that video from Saturday of @Lazstradamus taking out his putter to see if his bogey putt was within the leather, and then missing the hole completely?
@NineTo5Golf do they not make you putt out in the Soule Park Men’s League? Maybe that’s why @Lazstradamus’s handicap seems to travel so poorly.
Which hole? Three occasions…
Don’t drag me into this one… I got my invite with low gross/net at San Antonio (not Stableford scoring).
I definitely got exposed in the wind chasing birdies when my usual “good play” is to just par ‘em to death.
Also
It’s just fun remembering.
2021 NIT qualifiers are already being announced? Guess we’ll need @Tron to release an official event calendar ASAP so weekends can be blocked off.
The FOMO has everyone trying to host an event to get invited to Jax next year.
Well it won’t be that way in 2021, and further, it doesn’t take four guys to make tee times and print some t-shirts.
Just play better you guys, and hope that whoever beats you for an NIT spot has a scheduling conflict.
Yeah, they aren’t going to invite all the hosts, just the winners. that’s why I’ll set up an event, and tell everyone the wrong day, winner by default…that NIT spot shall be mine!
I said the quiet part out loud again, didn’t I?
This is accurate. While the scoring setup does favor better players, it is not a formality that eagles will be made. There were 4 I think all weekend. Further, on a traditional setup it may be favorable to better players making more birdies. However, with the ridiculous pins we had to play (not complaining, I think it’s fun change of pace) it makes bogey a more common result. This brings the field together. Also, the wind and pins combined hampers a good players differentiating ability to be precise. The wind puts people in bad spots and the green complexes as well. High handicaps are typically putting themselves in bad spots already so there isn’t as much of a penalty to them for the course setup.
Edit: I don’t want this to be construed as complaining about the event. With almost 100
players it seems like the easiest way to get people through the course (also with limited time, the double pick up rule is 
). Only comment on that I’ll make is if you’re going to play quota there’s no need for flight winners to advance. You can have flights to have a team competition but top 8 points should go to finals. Mike got fucked while playing sick golf and being 1/5 people to be + on quota but being In Chick-fil-A’s flight. There were 11 people at -4 or better and two people -10 or worse were in finals…
Best shot I saw all week: Choke up cut three wood that started 40 yards left of the pin and never looked like it was going to do anything but hit the dead center of the green. Comfy two putt birdie for The Chef!
I was chatting with the tournament committee (aka @Tron), and the update I’d make to the format is having round three of qualifying be a funnel pin, birdie bonanza. We were concerned pre tourney that the finals would be all low cappers, so we may have over corrected and made the pins pretty hard most of the week without considering the windy conditions. I think that 3rd round should be when the low cappers fire at easy pins and try to track down the bogey golfers.
Jax Beach is definitely not rated properly when the wind is blowing, but that’s why I love it…It’s chaos out there when you get gusted!
Also, if you made an eagle this week, DM me. You get some pro shop credit for that (we forgot to announce that prize)!
And yes, The Czar will be giving himself pro shop credit for a classy eagle on 17 Saturday morning!
Saw it. It was real and spectacular.
I had walked over to hand him something and got to see the shot. Unreal, but I have come to expect these types of shots from @Joezwickl
@Mwilhelm10’s big bird on 13 saturday morning was one of the purest things I’ve ever witnessed. 300 yard drive up the right, perfect angle for a baby cut 5 wood (I think?) to 12 feet past the hole, and then an absolute center cut beauty that hit the hole at dying pace. There had been no doubts as to his abilities to that point, but it was the type of hole where you step back and think, “dat boi gud.”
When the high capper triples he doesn’t lose any points though.
Reading recaps of heroic eagle feats from @Joezwickl has me wondering who that imposter was that I played with on Friday morning
This is the kind of “scoring” stuff I don’t typically care much about, because it’s handicapping, and we all know real golf is played without handicaps. 
(I’m only being a bit serious there…).
Higher handicappers are generally favored in Stableford games (I’ll get into reasons later) and are more so when the points escalate non-linearly.
They’re favored for three reasons. Or two, depending on how you count them.
The first is easy: there are often more of them. This one’s so obvious we’ll mostly skip it. Also I have no idea what the distribution of handicaps at the NIT was. You might count this as half of a reason.
Second, they’re favored simply because their odds of shooting below their index by enough to earn more points is more likely than a low handicapper doing so. The old “Odds of an Exceptional Tournament Score” chart showed, for example, that the odds of a 5.9 or less handicapper shooting a differential that is 5 to 5.9 below his index is 1:379. For a 13.0-21.9 that’s 1:174, and for 22.0 to 30.9 it’s 1:72. The 13.0-21.9 shoots 7.0 to 7.9 below his index roughly once every 552 rounds, and 6.0 to 6.9 below one in 323 rounds (still lower than the 1:379).
The third reason is that this advantage (the other half-reason) is that many stableford games aren’t played linearly, and the higher handicapper has more variance in their hole-by-hole scores, and the “bad” scores (the net bogeys and doubles) don’t add up fast, the net birdies and eagles do. In other words, a scratch golfer will often have a ton of pars, while the higher handicapper will have fewer pars but more net birdies and bogeys. If the system is 1-2-3, the 1-3 holes of the higher handicapper cancel the 2-2 holes of the scratch golfer, but if it’s 1-2-4 or something, that’s a few more “1-4” pairs of holes for the higher handicapper on some 2-2 pairs for the scratch golfer.
As for the NIT, and the quota game, the tendency is to think that it favors the lower handicappers because higher handicappers make a lot of doubles+ and thus don’t get points, but consider linear stableford versus linear quota: they end up the same. A scratch golfer who makes 18 pars (or a bogey for every birdie) earns 36 points in both games (in quota, finishing at 0). A bogey golfer (18 handicapper) who makes 9 doubles and 9 pars (or net bogeys and net birdies) finishes with the same count: 0 in quota, 36 in stableford.
So that leaves the second reason as the primary advantage in either game - the higher variance in a higher handicapper’s game.
(This is all just the math perspective. It says nothing of course conditions, etc. Sometimes, for example, higher handicappers fare better in bad wind because their balls don’t travel as far in the air and don’t get knocked offline as much. A 130-yard thinned 7I goes about 127 yards into a stiff breeze, while a 170-yard 7I might go 140 or 150 or 160 into a breeze. You guys also had ridiculous hole locations from what I gather, etc. The margins above are pretty small, and if you factor the distribution of handicaps, you could arrive at all sorts of conclusions about which groups were favored slightly.)
Much appreciated @jwfickett and let’s be honest. Your big bird dance was wayyyy better than the shot. Those flaps had you 6 feet in the air.
It was the first moment of the day when I truly felt alive
Lot of USGA resentment in those hole locations