PRE-Tournament Game Planning/Enhancing Your Yardage Book

[Golfingdad]

I like to be prepared.  Or at least attempt to be.  I get fired up whenever I have a tournament coming up and I research as much as I can in the days and weeks leading up to it.  I have one coming up in early December, for example, at a course I've played once before, and I have a yardage book - the professionally done ones you find at many resort courses on glossy paper with a little bit of room (not a lot) to add some notes.

Notes are essential to me because if I have ideas about strategy in my head, they're frequently abandoned as soon as my name is called on the first tee and the nerves kick in.  From that point, I blink a couple of times and the round is over and I have no idea what just happened.

So, how do you prepare your yardage book before a competition?  For example, do you write down which club you plan on hitting off each tee?  Obviously, that is difficult, because you don't have a clue what the weather will be like or where, exactly, the tees will be set up.  Perhaps you mark the landing area in each fairway you are looking to end up in and work backwards from that point once you get to the tee?  What else?

I'm basically interested in hearing any ideas that can help me be as prepared as possible before a tournament starts.  Feel free to share pictures too if you have them! 

Thanks!

[saevel25]

 

So, how do you prepare your yardage book before a competition?  For example, do you write down which club you plan on hitting off each tee?  Obviously, that is difficult, because you don't have a clue what the weather will be like or where, exactly, the tees will be set up.  Perhaps you mark the landing area in each fairway you are looking to end up in and work backwards from that point once you get to the tee?  What else?

I recommend buying LSW. They have a great section on identifying trouble areas on the course 

I would try to plan out an entire round. Maybe tee shots if you know a hole has a lot of hazards for your driver. So maybe put down, 3-wood unless you are feeling really good with the driver. You can always use google earth, or there are a few free online GIS sites that allow you to draw polygons and such.

I like looking at start lines. Maybe a hole dog legs and you need to know how much a corner you can cut off. 

[DrvFrShow]

I have one tomorrow. Looking outside it'll be interesting. It's been raining the past two days. Fairways will be wet. Rough will be nasty. I know I'm not hitting anything longer than an 8 iron out of the rough already. I just need to make sure I advance the ball. The greens will be soft and bumpy. They were aerated about three weeks ago. It's going to be a bit soggy.

I know the course, so I know pretty much what I can hit off the tee. The weather forecast is for calm winds. Driver off only 9 tees. 4 iron off five tees. And we'll see how the short game and putting goes.

[HonestyPolicy]

There are probably many ways to plan correctly. That said here's how I plan it and it seems to work for me;

• Play a practice round, a must for any serious tournament player
• Find the widest part of the fairway on each hole. How far from the tee is it and how confident do I feel about reaching the green from there. Dependent upon my comfort with the clubs that get me there, make decisions and adjustments about where I do want to be and what clubs get me there.
• Decide what holes I will accept bogie and what holes I will go for birdie and what score that'll get me and if that score is competitive for the day I'm playing (most are multi-day tournaments). Adjust as necessary (be more aggressive or less, less being the rare occasion) to be competitive for that day.
• Make notes about the greens. Pretend I'm the greens-keeper and try to figure where the most difficult hole positions on the greens might be. I carry a rubber tub plug (about $3 at any hardware store) to approximate the hole and if no one is behind me I lay that down and try putting to it from 4 different directions to see how the green rolls to it. I'll let people play through to be able to do this.
• If I happen to be playing well I'll go drop a ball in the rough, or in a sand trap, or where ever there seems to be trouble to assure I have some experience with it. I never know what guy is going to show up the day of the tournament, the good guy or the bad guy, so I want both of them to have some experience before the tournament.
• Play a second practice round if I can. Now I can use my experience and the strategy I've created with my notes from the first time to see how much better (or worse, hopefully not) I do. I find I play 3-5 strokes better the second time on average so if I can get a second practice round under my belt it really helps my attitude the day of the tourney. Honestly it is not always easy to find the time to get the second round in and many times I can not. I do seem to play tournaments better when I find the time for a second round.
• I don't expect to win. All I can do is prepare and play the best I can with what I brought to the course that day. Being competitive (what ever that means to you) is all you can hope for. I figure if I can position myself for opportunity, that's all I can do, the rest is up to the golf gods and the rub of the greens.

Lastly, I have some friends that I love playing golf with and some that I hate playing golf with. I do make it a point to play with both when I prepare for a tournament. The guys I hate playing golf with aren't good players (well some of them are and some of them aren't) but they all challenge my mental toughness. I figure if I can control my attitude around them, I can control it in any situation. 

That's basically how I do it. It seems to work for me although I'm not dominating in any way. I do tend to finish in the top quarter, sometimes better, and every now and then the ball bounces the right way and I pull a win off. I work on my game at 58years old and expect I'll still be working on it at 75. Every year my goal is to improve a weak part of my game and it takes time and effort to do that (oh and disappointment sometimes too) but in the end it seems to work and I get just a little bit better. Part of working on it is being here and learning from all you guys....and thanks for that bye the way........

 

 

 

 

[Golfingdad]

I recommend buying LSW. They have a great section on identifying trouble areas on the course 

Hmmm, never heard of it.

I would try to plan out an entire round. Maybe tee shots if you know a hole has a lot of hazards for your driver. So maybe put down, 3-wood unless you are feeling really good with the driver. You can always use google earth, or there are a few free online GIS sites that allow you to draw polygons and such.

I like looking at start lines. Maybe a hole dog legs and you need to know how much a corner you can cut off. 

Right, this is all of the stuff I am already looking at.  The thing is, you can't really prepare too well for all of this because you don't know yet where the tees will be.  One of the tournaments I played a few years back I just wrote down a club next to each tee box - I'll probably do something like that for this one too.  This way we come to the tee, I see that the blue tees are actually on the blue tee box, check the book and see I wrote "3W" and I have my starting point.  Obviously, I'll remember that I wasn't considering weather when I wrote that so if the wind is blowing in my face I trust I'll remember to think about it before playing blind.

It helps in this case that I've played there before because it's a target golf kind of course and, further, practice rounds are not feasible because greens fees are >$300.   The downside, I've found, with relying at all on GIS websites if you've never been to the course is that it doesn't help at all with elevation and visuals.

Secondly, a website I really like is bluegolf.com.  It uses google maps or something similar and it has an easy "click-click" tool for measuring yardages.  It has a limited number of courses, but I feel like its a gold mine if it has the one I'm looking for.  Here's an example of one you've talked about before: https://course.bluegolf.com/bluegolf/course/course/yankeetrace/aerial.htm

And here's my upcoming tournament course, if you're curious: https://course.bluegolf.com/bluegolf/course/course/pelicanhillgcoceanno/aerial.htm (The course website also has a fun animated "flyover" feature that helps a little bit - although they really exxaggerate the contours on those things)

[iacas]

So to be clear… no practice round is possible, JUST a yardage book?

[Golfingdad]

So to be clear… no practice round is possible, JUST a yardage book?

Correct.  I've played it once (two years ago), so I have a cursory knowledge of the course - at least to the extent that there won't be any surprises with elevated tees or blind shots or stuff like that.

Otherwise, I have the yardage book, google maps and equivalents, and the "flyover" animation I linked up above to try and get any extra info written down that will help beforehand.

[iacas]

I'd just plot what clubs you can hit given your Shot Zones, and which side of the fairway leaves better angles in.

Not much more you can do there. Familiarize yourself with where to miss around the greens and shift your Shot Zones ever so slightly in that direction… but otherwise, the nice thing about the LSW GamePlanning method is that it's pretty simple, really.

[Golfingdad]

I just got confirmation from the tournament director that I'm moving up a division, and with that comes a jump in tees.  This is good, because it means that I'll automatically be hitting driver on a lot more holes since the course just went from <6600 to almost 7k.  Fewer chances to have to make a decision means fewer chances to potentially be indecisive.