As someone who ran a lot of pingolf at one point (we had a pingolf league format, 3 9 hole qualifying sessions and then a finals session) the points for finishing based on strokes is an awesome idea to balance the scoring for finals positions without changing the spirit of the format. I would absolutely implement this if I ran pingolf again. Unfortunately, the format has been killed by IFPA since leagues have to meet 6 times or more (it’s way too much work to set up 7 9 hole courses to any standard I’m comfortable with, 4 was already a stretch), and even individual pingolf IFPA events have died off in favor of all regular match play due to the relative ease in which a match play event can be run from an organizational standpoint, and the tendency for those events to have higher turnouts due to more WPPRs on offer for the time commitments necessary.
Kicking up this thread because we recently ran a PinGolf Finals in the style in which @bkerins originally suggested.
Qualifying had 9 games available. You played 6 games of PinGolf, and we counted best 5. Top 4 moved on. PGM of qualifying for the top 4 was 0.72 → Match Play Events
For Finals, the top 4 played PinGolf, but instead of adding up all strokes as a grand total (aka actual golf Stroke Play), we evaluated the stroke total after each match to assign Match Play points (aka actual golf Match Play) to give out 3/2/1/0 scoring and award half-points where there were any ties on a given hole (just like in real golf where you’d split a point if you tied).
Players were made aware of how scoring was going to work heading into Finals, and overall strokes were still tracked because I knew we’d still have to track for the PGM calculation. We updated a Google Sheet live so people would have a view of where they stood after each game.
Personally I liked this style of finals better and I think we’ll run it again this way next time.
Quick sidebar → Arena Stats for PinGolf is awesome. This will help us evaluate whether we have the right targets or not for future events. Many thanks @haugstrup!
We’ll be running Bowen’s suggestion at South Sound Pingolf Championship August 18-20th.
Finals will be 4 game rounds on an EM-ESS-LSS-Modern. 7-5-3-1 scoring with ties averaged as suggested.
Excited to see the results!
Tried it out and I think it felt good for the most part.
Two issues made me want to consider whether or not to use it again in the future though.
Because it’s not implemented into matchplay tracking it both for streaming purposes and just in general is a challenge. This is more a testament to how amazingly useful next.matchplay is than anything else. I don’t think I want to run a tournament that isn’t using it or neverdrains in the future.
The other issue we had happen multiple times is someone locking themselves and another person out from advancing. Case in point: final game of 4 games and the scores are 13-13-11-11. One 11 takes first outright so they go to 18, the other 11 takes second to go to 16. The two players at 13 points now cannot advance if they tie since they will then take 2 points. In both semifinal rounds this happened where the player going 1st out of those two got the target, which meant the final player could only knock them out by achieving the target score.
I think if I run another pingolf event I will just stick to total score for advancement in the finals.