PinGolf ace from extra ball?

General
1

I’m curious what the general opinion is for PinGolf formats of handling extra balls (when on location and unable to disable them). Should they be considered an extension of the first ball or a non-counted stroke bonus prior to the second ball.

Basically if someone is short of the ace on the first ball but it’s goal score oriented and plunging the extra ball gets them over the goal score, what number of strokes should they receive on the hole?

I’m thinking it technically shouldn’t be an ace, but that’s the current way our rules go. I’m just curious how others count it and what others think.

And if it shouldn’t be considered an ace, then would you allow an extra ball at the end of the 3 or 5 ball play to count for anything?

2

I like extra balls on for score based pingolf. I always scored an extra ball as an extension of the ball it was awarded on, like a ball save. So extra ball on ball one, get over the score while playing the EB and record a 1.

3

It’s an Ace. Extra ball / same player shoots again means that the player is still on Ball 1 as far as the game is concerned. It’s an earned extension of ball 1; the game just was built in a manner that feeds the ball back to the plunger lane to continue “ball 1.”

2 Likes
4

Good point. Ball count in the game hasn’t changed.

5

This does pose an interesting possibility: a TD could choose to write their pingolf rules such that a player who achieves the goal on ball 1 and has earned an extra ball prior to doing so could be awarded a score of “0” on the hole. I think that would add a nice wrinkle and incentive to game play, especially if it was the last hole of a round and the player was otherwise mathematically eliminated because they were behind by N strokes where N is the stroke maximum on the final hole. A “0” option would still give them a chance to tie and get into a playoff. I think I might try it if I was a pingolf TD some time.

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6

If you earn 2 extra balls prior to achieving the goal on ball 1 would that be a score of “-1”?

7

I had this situation come up in a Pingolf tournament at Modern last month.

On a score based target, my opponent had reached it in 2, but had earned an extra ball.
I argued for him that he should only score a 1 for that hole.

TD denied him.

1 Like
8

Our Pin-Masters rules has a section on extra balls:

“All attempts will be made for extra balls to be disabled for all machines. Should a player earn an extra ball, they will play it as part of the same Pin-Stroke on that particular Pin-Hole.”

1 Like
9

I’ve been thinking about running a classics Pingolf where ‘get the EB’ is an alternative win condition to ‘get the target score’. With most classics (esp EMs) having EB progress be a per-ball thing, it gives an interesting incentive to go for, especially when the game’s rules have EBs separate from the main scoring strategy

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10

I like to think of it as ricocheting off a tree back toward the green. You thought that shot was gone/terrible, but OH LOOK!