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Congrats to Dannyboy on sinking this monster putt — will it be beaten?
If you’re like me, you’ve had to put up with playing on a machine where the ball “pulls” to one side or the other. So, if the ball pulls left, a normal shot straight forward will get pulled left by the flaw in the dirty trackball or rollers. And then, to compensate, you have to think before EVERY SHOT to hit the ball forward slightly right of where you’d normally aim.
This also goes for pulling back also, as in this example, the ball would pull right on the pullback. So, your mentality is to pull back slightly left of where you normally would, and shoot forward slightly right of where you normally would.
This is a pain in the ass, but in my area, the trackballs don’t get a lot of attention from the vendors. I try to avoid these machines, but I’d rather play a round using a slightly messed up trackball than play no round at all!
In extreme cases, it’s easy to tell which way it’s pulling just by rolling back and forward before you begin. But for less noticeable cases, or when you’re playing a different machine for the first time, use this test!
On the first tee, pull up the Options and go to Equipment Setup. Go to the Buy Balls screen. Now, position the cursor in the middle, dead gap between the first and second panes surrounding the golf ball details. If you’re hovering over one of the three panes, you’ll see it highlighted, but when you move the cursor to the narrow line in between the panes, nothing will be highlighted.
Now, move the cursor to the top of this dead area, and slowly pull the trackball straight back. If the cursor trails off to the right or the left, you’ll know the trackball has a pull. Do the same thing from the bottom, rolling the ball straight forward slowly, and you’ll usually see the pull in the opposite direction going forward.
This test can also be used to determine how accurate you are when pulling straight back or pushing straight forward! So, if you’re having accuracy problems when shaping shots, go here and make sure your shots back to B or forward to 2 are indeed going where you want.
This was another great tip given to me by Juan Schwartz that you should be able to use to test the trackball on any machine you’ll be using — good luck!
Well this is coming a little late — this tourney was a month ago, but I still wanted to give my perspective of the first every Golden Tee tourney I’ve witnessed!
My buddy Matt and I rolled into St. Charles around noon on Saturday. I was concerned about parking and even getting into the bar, but Side Pockets is HUGE! It was one of the coolest sports bars I’ve been in. They took a whole section of the place and hooked up 30 or 40 Golden Tee machines there, and there was still room to move around amongst everyone! The players agreed it was a sweet setup. They also had two machines hooked up to a projector so you could watch the action on the big screen!
I was kind of awestruck for the first hour there. I saw Bernz right away, and then I met Dannyboy, and he pointed me to SeanO, the marketing director at IT who’s been helping support my site! From there I met a TON of players whose names I knew but whose faces I did not — Gopherfan, McCook, Rodney, Skipper, Moy, Miser, Mouth, and lots of other players, even Duffer Dan and Sobe!
After watching the action for a couple hours, Matt and I had to go out and play some GT for ourselves! We hit up a couple different bars during the evening, and then we came back to Side Pockets at night. When tourney play started to wind down, we got the chance to play with the pros! I played rounds with Dannyboy, Skipper, McCook and Rodney, staying till 1:30 in the morning!
Matt and I made it back over to Side Pockets around 11:00 the next day to watch some more action. We stayed till about 1:00 and then hit the road for Peoria! So, we didn’t get to stay to see the winner, but we saw some incredible matches, especially Haas winning an extra-holes round over Feijo that was just incredible.
So, you’d think we’d be burnt out on Golden Tee after that long weekend right? No way! It just made us want to get out and practice all the things we saw from the pros! Here are several things I noticed the pros doing that I don’t do:
1) Very smooth hits on the trackball. You never hear a palm crashing into the console! I also used to bruise my hand on the screen after a follow-through on a power shot, but these guys bend their elbows and have smooth follow-throughs that never make contact with the screen! I’ve since practiced that method and have improved a lot in that area!
2) Pull-backs on almost ALL shots. Some pros don’t do this, but most do. I’d see a shot where I’d just thumb it forward, but these guys have such precise control of their pullbacks that they can pull back on about any shot and still get it to end up right by the hole! I’m sticking to thumbs for now, but it’s easy to see the advantage these guys have there!
3) Deception! Since you’re head-to-head against a guy, you’ll see all kinds of crazy follow-throughs so that your opponent will have no idea how much angle you put on the shot! Of course, that’s bad for observers, but works great for them!
4) Slow pullbacks. Since the game only reads your pullback up to the top of your backswing, why pull back any further? I still pull back kind of fast, but I think that helps me create the angle I want. These guys have great control of the slow pullback.
5) Sick putting and chipping skills! You almost never see a missed putt, and even most chips from around the green go right in! Again, almost ALL of these guys putt with their thumbs, which I don’t do. I’m proud to say I’m a very good palm putter, so I’m not going to make the switch at this point. Still, you can see how these guys don’t give up any strokes around the green!
6) New methods of attacking holes! Everyone has their plan of attack give the hole conditions, but I saw several things I never knew about before. Some of these guys save their secrets for these big tourneys and then bust them out in competition, and you could see how much that paid off!
7) Rituals! Whether it be wearing a glove or wiping your hands on your shirt after every shot, these guys made sure they weren’t going to get a bad hit on the trackball!
To sum it all up, it’s easy to see why these guys are the best. Practice and masterful command of the trackball lead to great scores, scores I don’t know if I’ll ever reach! Right away I was upset that I didn’t enter the tourney, even if I was going to get waxed, because it was so much fun!
Hopefully I’ll get to participate in a tourney experience soon, and I’ll let you know how I fare!
If you’re fairly new to the game, or even if you aren’t, you can come across acronyms in Golden Tee forums that you have no clue about. I took the liberty of asking about some of them and came up with the following small list. If you know any more, feel free to add a comment to help out the thread!
CTTP — Closest to the Pin
HIO — Hole in One
HNW or HIW — Hole ‘n Win
GIR — Green in Regulation
WSI — Warning, Score Inside
NSFW — Not Safe for Work
DNF — Did not finish
DE — Double eagle
SL — Stroke limit
This section is meant to capture all the quirky or unexpected things you’ve come across while playing the 2008 Golden Tee courses. I’ll also add the quirks that apply to specific holes to my course breakdowns, so that you can know what to expect when checking out each hole!
1) On Summit #7, if it’s icy and you go long past the green on the ice, it’s OB.
2) On Misty #13, there’s a wall on the fringe preventing bump-and-run chips or other shots from rolling up onto the green.
3) On Misty #18, you can get caught underneath a rock in front of the green where you’ll stroke limit.
4) You can hit “invisileaves” on the following courses and holes:
Eagle #17
Bayou #’s 5,8,9,10
Misty #18
Cypress — #2, #4, #5, and a handful of other places
5) On Eagle Crest hole #5, if you drive the green and barely touch the fringe on the bottom close to the sand, and then if you try to putt, it will bounce backward into the sand.
6) On Misty Springs hole #7, if you hit the leaves on the right with a 3-wood on your second shot, it goes right through!
7) Summit #15 – It’s possible to hit into the water (with water sound effect and splash on screen) when it’s ice around the green. However, there’s no penalty. I’m talking about the edges of the ponds around the green. Get too close and you’ll go wet. This would fall into the glitch category.
8) On Summit #13, you can actually hit your drive – on the fly – in between the virtual 2 inch opening between the Bags machine and the house where it will rattle around, give you an Unplayable Lie and drop you on the back rough to essentially give you a 2 stroke penalty.
9) There was once a hole-in-one where the ball sat on the top of the hole and didn’t fall. It was pretty cool…kinda like in real life when the ball is stuck between the pin and the hole, but it wasn’t touching the pin…
10) You can get inside any outhouse and just be stuck for stroke limit.
11) On Eagles #10, there’s an unplayable lie black strip on the left side rough.
12) There are some angled rocks on Summit where if you roll right under them, you can hit through them (they don’t come up as transparent).
13) Just got this one in from Skipper:
Glacier #10, guy went in water, drop was on the sand(?) in front/below of the big wood wall in front of the green. He had to hit back to the fairway (170+yds) to try to get back to the green.
For other glitches in the game, check out this link: http://www2.itsgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5765&sid=f0dd7224a3ab89e767b0c56788c9316e
Or, if you find any other strange quirks that aren’t necessarily glitches, feel free to post comments here — thanks!
The other picture section was getting quite large, so here’s another collection of quirky pics!
First, let’s watch a little slideshow of Dannyboy sinking! Watch his shoes and feet disappear into the ground!
Where’s the hole?
There it is!
Congrats Dannyboy on reaching exactly 10,000 GSPs!
Trojan Man managed to get his ball to levitate on the weeds!
Check out Dannyboy’s moose hat!
Yikes — this is an expensive game!
Check out this city in Virginia — nice:
Check out the ball UNDER the green in these two pics!
Check out Matt standing on top of the flagstick!
And here he is stuck inside the tractor — he did manage to get his next shot out of there, somehow!
Skipper got caught here on Misty #18 — oops!
The goal of this site is to help you learn enough to beat your buddies at Golden Tee, so why not make things interesting? Following are some ideas for games you can play to always make every shot interesting!
First of all, there are specific accomplishments that you can designate money-worthy and pick a dollar value to apply to each:
– Closest to the pin (all holes, green in regulation only, or just par 3s)
– Longest drive, or drive that ends up closest to the pin
– Hole-in-ones
– Double eagles
– Great shot points
– All hole-outs outside a set distance
Secondly, you can play for like $1 per stroke, with or without handicap applied (you can apply a max also, so things don’t get out of hand).
Another game some guys play is the “full meal deal”:
Pay the winner $1 per stroke of his victory
GSP are worth $1 per 5000
Closest to the hole on par 3s and #18 are worth $1
Another game is 1-1-3:
$1 per stroke up the ladder (pay everyone per stroke that finishes above you). Max $5 on strokes as we don’t care to get rich off friends.
$1 GSP’s.
$3 Hole-n-One and Double Eagles.
Here are the rules to the “Bomb Game”, which, as you can see, may need to be adjusted according to your skill level:
1. Eagle Bombs – If any player is playing eagle golf after 3 or more holes – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game. This may only be collected on once per game. (Exception: -8 thru 4 or -10 thru 5 does not count on Glacier…you must be -6 thru 3 or -12 thru 6 on this course…only exception would be -9 thru 4 or -11 thru 5)
2. Any Par 4 Ace – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game.
3. Any -30 or better – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game.
4. Back-to-back hole-outs (both must be 80 yards or more) – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game.
5. Two players hole-out the same hole – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game. If only two players each player buys 1.
6. Speed Limit Bombs – Two players combined score is -55 or better. – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game. If only two players each player buys 1.
7. 75K Bombs – Any player obtains 75,000 GSP’s in a round – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game.
8. 9K Bombs – Any player obtains 9,000 GTP’s in a round – All other players share the cost of bombs for as many players as there are in the game.
9. Sign Bombs – Any player who hits a yardage sign should buy bombs for all the players in the group. (This one is very optional and must be agreed upon before the game starts.)
10. School Bombs – Any player who loses by 10 or more strokes in a given game should buy bombs for all players that scored 10 or better than the individual. (This one is also optional.)
With 4 players, teams are also a lot of fun! You can pay out low ball, low total, and least putts per team, per hole, for all kinds of action.
You can even integrate poker into Golden Tee:
1 card for any GSP (except DE putt points), par 3 KP (must make the putt or the card carries to the next par 3), eagle.
3 cards for any HIO or DE (if you miss Bayou 8 when it’s there you deserve to be behind by 3 cards).
You can also throw in losing a random card for water and bogey/worse.
Another game is the water cup. If you hit a ball in the water, you put a buck in the cup. The next person to get GSPs gets what is in the cup. If the cup is empty and you get GSps, better luck next time. You must end on GSPs. No splitting the pot at the end. Someone has to take it clean and clear. Money in the cup carries over to the next round.
Two final ideas are bogey bucks (you get a bogey, you pay everyone else a buck), and long putt bucks (you make a putt over 65 feet, everyone pays you a buck).
So pick out what works best for your group and skill levels, and bring the fun to a whole new level!
This post is dedicated to the fun creatures that the Golden Tee folks have thrown into the game for your viewing pleasure if your ball happens to end up some place far from where you need to be! Borrowed from an original post on the ITS Golden Tee Forum, here is where you’ll find all the creatures you may come across in the woods or elsewhere, and what kind of fun sounds they make if you decide to blast them with your golf ball!
This post has since grown to include all kinds of fun pics! I hear SkipperRipper has also found the Golden Tee machine on Bayou Bay, and that you can encounter a caribou on a mountain top somewhere on Summit Lakes. If you hit him, you’ll hear jingle bell sounds like a reindeer with bells!
Also, there’s an outhouse on Misty Springs hole #7 — it’s a par 5 where you can shortcut through the woods, and the landing area in the middle of the woods has the outhouse. If you blast a ball into it, you’ll hear a guy say “In a minute”! Classic! Enjoy the following pics!
First off, you have deer, bears that growl and wolves that howl. Here a pic Hoosier1 sent me of him getting up close and personal with a wolf:
And here’s one WhoDat sent me of Jimmy Mac laying one next to a buck. The shot ends up morphing Jimmy Mac and the buck into Jimmy Buck:
What is qshawne doing to this buck? Oh my.
While we’re at it, what is SkipperRipper doing to this poor sheep?
Here he is giving the business back to the statue!
Here’s Dannyboy and his moose hat!
Now let’s check out Dannyboy and this bear — first, the bear took his arm, so now he’s taking it from behind…
Next, Dannyboy swings so hard he knocks the bear’s head off!
Finally, the bear is left with a big hole where he was abused:
Here’s SkipperRipper hanging out by the pool — wouldn’t want to get sunburnt!
Or how about we join the party under the tent!
Nothing like getting run over by a taxi in New York!
Here’s a pic WhoDat posted of a polar bear doing something ala Conan O’Brien:
And here’s Dannyboy getting the business from a curious wolf:
Why in the world is there a garbage can by the green?
And why is Ronnie Ringo aflame?
Long live Hoffa! I’m told you can also find him on Eagle Crest, hole #10, off to the right on an island!
And how did he get a club in this pic? I wonder how far that will hit the ball!
On Misty Springs, you can run into Bigfoot! Try blasting one into this guy and hear him growl! I captured this pic on my cell phone — I ran into him on Misty Springs hole #11 by accidentally hitting a drive into the woods on the right:
Here’s an even better pic of Sasquatch WhoDat sent me of Dougie Fresh right behind him — looks like Bigfoot is actually holding the club!
Mr Moy sent me this pic taken from behind the electronic billboard on Cypress Cove hole #18. It’s the headless golfer with the sagging boobs!
Getting even better, on every course in 2008, there’s a spaceship! In this example, in the woods in the front left of the Jefferson Memorial (hole #4 on Eagle Crest), you can run into aliens and a spaceship — no joke! Blast an alien and hear him mutter sounds like E.T.! Or, crank one into the spaceship to hear it make robotic sounds like R2D2! Check out the picture below — it doesn’t get any better than this…or does it? Special thanks to 0verfiend and motzart for all the cool info here!
Finally, my personal favorite is the guy peeing in the woods! Apparently this guy is a staple in Golden Tee lore. Check out this pic from SkipperRipper from an old version of Golden Tee, and then check out the new pic posted by E7aug9 from Misty Springs hole #16 — these are great!
Ronnie Ringo also found the pisser!
Some more shots that Matt caught:
Here are a couple more shots Dannyboy caught of the pisser. Fore!
And here’s a close-up — no nudity!
AND LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, Click here for a video from Dannyboy of Beaver enjoying the company of a buck!
Thanks for all the Golden Tee pics, and keep them coming if you come across any other funny ones!
I wanted to add a post summarizing my experience with Golden Tee pro Brian Bernhardt, who I met on Jan. 5, 2008. Brian and I met and played at 21 Club in Galesburg, IL, which is a pretty short drive for both of us.
First, Brian gave me a summary of his incredible Golden Tee career, much of which can be found on his site here.
After that, we plowed through all 5 Golden Tee 2008 courses in order, and we played 2 more for good measure before I had to hit the road!
Playing with Brian was incredible. You can tell how he has all the holes memorized, and he hardly has to think before winding up and cranking a shot. He plays super fast, which is very much to his advantage when playing in tournaments so that his competitors can’t get a good read on how much angle or power he put into his shot. Consequently, it was hard for me to follow him at times, although I did my best to mimic most of his shots. As you can guess, near hole-outs for him would be missed greens for me when I tried some of the things he has mastered!
I learned two very big lessons from my session. First, I had no idea that the machine reads only your initial pullback of the trackball, and not any adjustments you try to make after it unless you reset your approach. I have always been in the habit of pulling the ball back once, and then pulling it back several more times until I have the angle I want. Little did I know that it only reads the first pullback and what I was doing had no effect at all! That one realization alone should greatly improve my game.
Going along with that lesson was the habit of overcompensating for trackballs that don’t come straight back. For instance, if a trackball gets dirty, a pullback you think is straight may actually tail off to the left or right at the end. I figured the machine read that last movement before the ball quit spinning, but it really only reads the pullback until your golfer’s swing is fully cocked, ignoring what happens afterward. How about that!
Secondly, I learned a lot about distance when hitting out of the rough. I was aware that curve shots lose a lot of distance when applied from the rough, but I didn’t realize how far straight these 180 degree shots can go! I never really had these shots in my repertoire, but now I use them quite a bit — an A3 or C1-type shot is a great way to maintain distance while also fighting wind or slope by coming in at an angle! Also beware of how far woods travel in relation to high-lofted irons — I missed quite a few greens long before I realized the impact this kind of shot has.
Brian pulls back almost ALL his shots to come in at the optimal angle to the pin. I’m nowhere near I need to be with this experience, and I still thumb several shots without pulling them back. Still, I could see how incredibly close to the pin he can get by mastering the angle of approach.
And just for good measure, he got an ace while playing a Hole-N-Win. As usual, I’m sure, he holed out a couple more times, and he racked up incredible Great Shot Points for always being right by the hole.
I will have my course write-ups adjusted for the extra tips on specific holes I learned as well. It was a great experience for me, and I hope a lot more visitors to this site can use the Golden Tee Player Locator to find a pro in their area to show them some things!
Golden Tee Live 2008 sure has its share of tee boxes! You can find yourself on any one of several boxes during the course of a round, and many times the boxes are not even close to each other. Often you’ll be coming into the green with a completely different angle as your playing partner! Par 4s can offer different looks into the fairway, and Par 3s can pit you on opposite sides of the green for your approach! There’s even a Par 3 on 2008 Golden Tee Live where you can have anywhere from a 17-yard approach shot, that you can PUTT, to an approach that’s close to 300 yards! Now that’s variety.
Also, you may notice that you can even be placed in different areas within the same tee box! So, you may be moved forward, backward, left, or right of where you were within the tee box in your previous round! When you couple these factors with the wind and pin placement constantly changing, you’ll never play the same round of Golden Tee twice!
Thanks to Dannyboy for submitting this pic — can anyone beat this? Click the image for full size. Get ready for a 7-putt, HA!
You may hear this term every now and then, and it’s a good gauge to measure exactly how well you shot on a particular round of Golden Tee. Because many of the par 4s are reachable in 1 and many of the par 5s are reachable in 2, the term GT Par was born. So, if a par 4 is reachable in 1, we say it has a GT par of 2 (the drive and the putt). If a par 5 is reachable in 2, it has a GT par of 3 (the drive, the approach, and the putt). All par 3s should have a GT Par of 2. It’s really the best a player can shoot on that hole without holing out a long shot. So, if you calculate the GT Par on the front 9 to be 25 (-11) and you shoot a –10, you really only missed one shot without holing out on any holes. If someone shot –12, that person most likely made NO mistakes and actually holed out a long shot somewhere. I can only dream of being that good.
If you’re going to be playing at least a couple times a month, I highly recommend signing up for the Golden Tee Gold Card. Why do you need it? Well, technically, you don’t. You can still swipe a credit card (the SAME one each time!), and the system will pull up your user information and statistics. Your Gold Card is basically an extra ID for your player. You can’t pay with it, so a credit card does just as good. But dammit, you sure look cool when you swipe that thing!
However, eventually, your credit card will change, and you need to keep your stats throughout your lifetime. That’s why you get a Gold Card, and just replace it if needed. Assuming you’ve signed up for an account on goldentee.com (why wouldn’t you?), then you can log into that site, click the link for Account, log into your account with your Pin, and then click the link for ‘Reorder Card’. That’s it!
Just a heads-up tip here in Golden Tee — under the Options menu, there’s a “Skip Golfer” option. If your buddy has to buy another round for your group, or if he has to hit the head because of said consumption, you don’t have to wait for him to get back — you can just skip him and let him catch up when he returns! Make sure your buddy gives you permission to skip him though, because he’ll miss out on observing and possibly learning from your shots!
