Pingolf

Pingolf tournaments allow you to create scorecards for a number of "holes." Typically a "hole" is a single game played, and the scorecard records how many "strokes" each player used on each hole. The winner of the tournament is the player with the fewest amount of total strokes after all holes have been played.

Assigning arenas and target scores

Assigning an arena to each golf hole and optionally a target score can make it easier to input scores and it'll make the tournament easier to navigate in general since players won't have to remember which golf hole corresponds to which arena.

Doing the assignment is a bit cumbersome due to technical limitations but the process is as follows:

• Start the tournament

• Go to the Stats tab

• Switch to the Arena stats sub-tab

• For each golf hole do the following:

  • Click the header that says "Hole #1"

  • This opens the info panel for this golf hole

  • Click Add arena to assign an arena

  • Click Set target score to set the target score

  • Note: You must assign an arena in order for the target score brackets to show up

Determining pingolf target scores

Deciding on target scores for pingolf tournaments can be difficult. Below, experienced tournament director Dave Stewart shares some of his tips.

A successful pingolf tournament is all about time spent at machines, not "what score is achievable." It takes just one long-playing machine to cause the entire tournament to backlog. The approach I recommend that works really well is the following:

Get three or more players who represent the skill of the competing players to play each game for exactly three minutes, uninterrupted, using as many balls as they need. Preferably the games are all set to five-ball play. Don't use two three-ball games on any machine that builds state as the game proceeds, because you lose all that state if you have to start a second three-ball game. That messes up target score calculations and will likely lead to a machine that creates a backlog.

At the three-minute mark, record their score and number of balls. If their game ended in under three minutes, then record their time used to play all balls. Take the average score recorded by those three players, round it to a score with lots of zeros, and make that the target. For example, 13,465,100 could be rounded to 13,000,000. With this cutoff, you can do about one tee-off every five minutes (or a pair every 10 minutes, or a three-player every 15 minutes, or four-player every 20 minutes).

If you want to do four-player every 15 minutes, then cut off about 20% of that score. For example, make it 10,000,000.

If you want to do two-player every 15 minutes, then add about 20% of that score. For example, make it 15,000,000.

You can then estimate the length of your tournament, based on how long it takes for everyone to tee-off, plus nine times the tee-off-time-delta for the last tee-off group to finish. You can accelerate a tournament by having one group tee-off per hole and rotating holes. If you have 27 players and nine holes, that means three players start per hole.

Configuration options

See also: Common configuration options.

Duration

Determines the number of holes played in the tournament.

Stroke limit

The maximum number of strokes a player can have on each hole.

Par score

If a par score is set, the Scorecards tab will display each player's over/under par score. This lets players see relative standings while the tournament is progressing.

Holes counted

Set this number to a number lower than the Duration to let players drop one or more worst results.

Tiebreaker

Determines whether to apply an automatic tiebreaker. If enabled, ties will be broken by most number of holes-in-one followed by number of holes-in-two. If players are still tied at that point, they will remain tied.