UK vs USA Game Play

[wacker]

I live in the UK, and it's very rare we play a medal format. We tend to find it quite unforgiving, one bad hole at the beginning of the round and your day could be over. We almost solely play Stableford, because for obvious reasons it is far more forgiving. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying one is right and one is wrong, I just find it odd that we enjoy different formats on either side of the pond 

[StuM]

I think it is “what we grew up with” is what we gravitate to,

[dennyjones]

I can't get my playing partners to play anything but stroke play.  1 time we played foursome, foreball, and stroke play.  That was the last day.   They only want to play stroke play.

[Shindig]

I definitely prefer medal play, but then again, as @StuM points out, it's what I grew up with (or, in my case, began playing golf with -- I took up the sport in my early 20s).

Interestingly, the unforgiveness level of it is something I really like.  A friend of mine (a much better player than I am) won her club championship a few years ago.  At her club, this is contested as match play, and something she didn't like was that her opponent could get a triple bogey on a hole she birdied and only drop a hole in the match.  On the other hand, that's something I'm sure some people appreciate (especially the opponent who triple bogeyed that hole, I am sure).

My club has a handful of tournaments it calls majors, and one is our Match Play tournament, which was my first big win (wow, over a decade ago).  Of course, I won whatever flight I was in, not the top flight.  Organizing and playing a large match play tournament, outside of the professional or top amateur ranks, is difficult.  I think our medal play play-in was one day, 18 holes, but then we had to self-schedule with some reasonable deadlines, measured in weeks for each round.  I think a flight with 16 people advancing to match play took a few months to resolve.  Nice to watch as the summer unfolded I suppose. 

By contrast, our club championship is medal play, three rounds on three consecutive days (with a cut after two).  I won this (well, my flight within it) twice, and the second time, I managed to keep to a great gameplan:  out of 53 par attempts, I had putter in hand for 52 of them.  I think I began that tournament with a handicap of ~13 and having two full rounds (and most of a third) where I at least had a putt for par on every hole (excluding the single birdie across the three days).   Some of those par attempts were 40+ feet away, but having a putter in hand could limit the damage.

A format that works well with both stableford and medal play is skins, either as the main event or as a side event;  even if you have a terrible first hole, you could potentially pick up skins at the remaining holes.  I was playing a tournament a month or so ago and a friend of mine, after a few holes, was clearly out of contention for the medal play portion, but he was in the skins game.  He very plainly was playing for the skins in a match-play style manner, attempting shots he'd never consider if he were trying to post a low total score for the day (I think he shot 108 or something).