Let’s start with this situation — you’re 7 yards from the cup, but you have to carry some fringe/rough to get to the green. Luckily for you, there’s a high percentage shot in play! A Lob Wedge flicked ever so gently forward, on a flat surface, travels 7 yards. If a bump-and-run is not an option, I love to line up my lob wedge and use my thumbs to flick the ball as gently as I can at the hole, and 7 yards seems to be the perfect distance for this. Now, if you have wind and/or slope, adjust your aim ever so slightly to find the bottom of the cup.

Or, if you don’t have a LW, you can use a SW too (but, I’d say the magic distance for the gentle flick of a SW is around 11 yards).

In addition, you can apply roll or backspin to either add or take away 2-3 yards on these shots, and it’s great having that flexibility!

Now that you’ve added that shot to your game, let’s talk more about the bump-and-run! If you’re in a situation where you’re back on the fringe far enough where you can’t putt (tip — pay attention to what club the game gives you — if you’re handed a wedge, you almost certainly can’t putt), it’s bump-and-run time!

So, what club do you use? My go-to club is the 5-hybrid (I play with a hybrid set). But, I also adjust my club based on how much fringe I have to carry. I’ll bump-and-run anywhere from 10 yards out up to 30 yards out.

Here’s what you do — ignore the wind, but take note of the slope. Since we’re going to keep the ball low and rolling, you still have to know how much slope to play. The great thing is that these shots come out low and quick, so you don’t need to play very much break at all, especially from 10-15 yards. So, pull the trackball back very slowly (usually straight back, but sometimes left or right for slope) until the club is about level with your calf (never less than this, but sometimes slightly more). Then, push the trackball forward with not much force, and watch the ball jump out onto the green and roll into the cup!

This is definitely a shot that takes a lot of practice, so hit the chipping green in the practice facility. Always make sure you pull back enough so you don’t duff it, but adjust the speed of your follow-through to account for distance.

Once you get comfortable with a 5-iron or 5-hybrid, you can add more clubs for this shot. I’ll go down to a 2 or 3 hybrid if I really need to keep the ball on the ground. It can still happen sometimes where your ball bounces over the hole if you’re really close to the cup, so use as low a loft as you can control to keep the ball on the ground!

Also notice how you don’t have to be very gentle with these shots if there’s no danger in going long, because the hole will suck up a ball traveling pretty fast, as long as it’s on-line!

With enough practice and these tips, you’re sure to knock a couple more strokes off your score!

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!

“For any shot under 50/50 (50% A or C and 50% 1 or 3) it will cut off distance. Anything over it will add distance.”

So, keep that in mind when you are applying curve to a shot!  If you are adding just a little curve, expect some distance to be cut off.  But, if you are playing close to a C3 or A1, you’ll definitely add distance!

I needed a name for this shot, and when I realized the shape of the shot when going out to the right is like a ‘J’, it was pretty easy. So how do you pull it off?

It’s tricky, and you won’t use it very often, but you should have it in your arsenal. First, figure out how far to the right you need the ball to end up (for this shot, you should need the ball to end up about a half-rotation right of target). So, pull the trackball back just slightly left of B, but no more than halfway between A and B. This tells the game you want it to end up right of target.

Then, shoot the ball forward out to 3! This tells the ball to begin its angle way out to the right. So, when you pull it off, you’ll see the ball take off out to the right, but it will soon straighten out and end up coming in straight ahead to your target (hence the ‘J’ shape)!

Usually, you can get the ball to a right target more easily by rotating right and hitting some form of C2 or B3, but the J shot is for situations where you’re threading trees or find yourself behind some obstacle and have an offset look at the pin or target.

Of course, the same theories apply to the backwards J shot too, where you need to hit it out left instead!

Be careful shooting the outside J with a right-to-left wind, because the ball will have a much harder time coming back against the wind! Also be wary of pulling back too far left of B, or else you might just see the shot behave like an A3 instead.

Here are several situations when you might see the pros shoot this shot:
1) You’re offset so you don’t want it to come back to straight
2) There’s a big break on the green
3) There’s a strong crosswind to the left and you need to “undercut” it so that it will ride the wind back left more than actually cut back toward the hole.
4) You have a shorter shot with a strong crosswind to the right. Here you might turn left once and shoot the outside J so that it fights the wind a little bit. It might make a 12 mph wind act more like a 6 mph wind which helps you have more control of the shot once it hits the green.

It’s not an easy shot to master, but give it a try sometime and see what happens!

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!

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

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.

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!

Crawdad back 9. Toughest 9 ever!!! (at least for the 6 times I ever played that course)

I think Shadow Swamp would be in the race for hardest courses….along with Crawdad and maybe Heartland?

i played Shadow on my machine more than any other course so to me it wasnt near as hard as Crawdad. i think people saw Shadow as so hard because it was hard to shoot below a 23 or 24 when on the other courses at the time you could throw up a 29 or 28.

I think in terms of scoring Rattlesnake was always hard for me because of all the gamble holes!!! Man it was fun or it would just drive you insane. I always thought Sapphire was a pretty tough one also.

Perhaps Shadow seemed that way because par was lower….I haven’t played it in awhile myself.

Rattlesnake could be a bitch if things were open and you weren’t hitting them.

i tell you, we should talk about the toughest 16,17, and 18’s of one course. Seems like Blue Horizon was that big left 10% with the lava all around it on 17, and 18 was the one with the sand in front of it and lava on the back????

i think i stroked out on that 17 more than any including Heather Pointe 17!!!

I remember acing #17 on HP on my birthday in 2005, playing a money game with Junior, Al, and Frosty. Thems was good times.

Crawdad is probably the greatest course ever designed…along with Rattlesnake.

It would be extremely difficult to have those courses now without the “hammer”.

Heartland Creek was another one with a high level of difficulty.

I remember Heartland being easy (again, for the 6 times maybe). What’s Shadow Swamp?

Ahh, Blue Horizon. I aced #18 in a qualifier for a tourney. I’ll remember that one ’til I forget it.

Shadow Swamp was an addon course in the “”Extra”" DVD that came out on the 05 courses.

Good ace there Squeezie, did you herm it in from over the water or did it just fly too far, hit a rock and bounce in the hole like your normal aces?

Heartland was where i failed to learn how to hit the B3 shot with any type of consistency. Also Tommy Tuesday hole was on it right??

Heartland was not very easy Danny.

Shadow Swamp was basically Eagle Crest with some water.

It was a screaming cut 2i bs that found the .1″ of the front right green pin placement that allowed it to stay on the green, and slithered in for a nice $30.

Golden tee complete, year by year toughest courses(IMO)… And, when I mean toughest, I mean toughest to get GT par, not the best score.
Ranked from toughest to easiest…

2001:
Mystic Hills
Suerte Del Sol
Crimson Rock
Rolling Acres(9 hole course)
Royal Bannockburn(9 hole course)

2002:
Rattlesnake Ridge
Castleshire
Maple Acres
Pine Meadow
BaySide

2003:
Crawdad Swamp
Kings Canyon
Buckhorn
Kiwi Springs
Bluestone

2004:
Heartland Creek
Eagles Peak
Sword’s Pointe(tie)
Tropical Falls(tie)
Blue Horizon

2005:
Balmoral Greens
Sapphire Springs
Ridgewood
Painted Gorge
Oak Hollow

2006 LIVE!
Cumberland
Heather Pointe
Kangaroo Trail
Coral Vista
Whispering Valley

2007 LIVE!:
Moose Landing
Rustic Bridge
Glacier Ranch
Indigo Mound
Palm Springs

–Sonu

‘02 and ‘03 were the best years as far as all 5 courses. IMO

Matt, I was just going to type the same thing.

I think 2002 wins.

I would agree with that statement as well.

Although Crawdad still might be the best course ever designed.

Challenging, but not stupid.

The thing I hated about 02 courses were the green hills/ridges. Especially when you got stuck halfway up!! You had to at least 2 putt, if you got lucky…

I wish they would bring back tiered greens. They were fun.

Of course there would have to be some tweaks.

Has anyone ever played a full cycle on a Complete in one sitting?

0,
Almost. When I was down in Kansas over Thanksgiving, I had a day to play GT while my wife hung out with friends. Sadly, the two locations that said they had 2008 Lives, had nothing. So I played Complete for like 5 hours. The machine wouldn’t take 5s, 10s, or 20s . A couple of the courses would always freeze up on hole 1 (Heartland and Kings), so I didn’t get to play those, but I think I played just about everything else.

Sonu’s listings are pretty much spot-on I’d say. I had a tougher time with Sapphire than I did with Balmoral, but that’s pretty much a crapshoot. I’d also swap Coral and the ‘Roo, but that’s debateable as well. I also agree with Matt and Tony, ‘02 and ‘03 were some kickass courses!

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!