Is putting too easy? too hard? Just right?

[DavidSauls]

We have alot of things holding us back. Staying the same makes no sense.change is good bro

Highly speculative. What evidence is there that anything's holding us back? That we'd be somewhere else, but for those things.

Staying the same makes sense if it means continued remarkable growth in almost all aspects of the game.

Change might be good, of course, but it's far from certain.

 

[DavidSauls]

Can anybody provide any statistics to show that putting on a narrower basket is harder?

It would have to be, wouldn't it? But the question would be, how much narrower? Bulls-eye? Narrower than that?

One of my local courses has old baskets that are noticeably narrower than standard baskets, though not nearly to the degree bulls-yes are. I like them and sort of wish baskets were that size, or even slightly smaller, but not extremely thin.

I think the statistics you need are not whether narrower baskets make putting harder, but how much? Enough to have a significant effect, and be worth the effort? Too much, so that they take away the longer runs?

It's interesting to me that proposals are almost always to make them narrower, and not make the vertical window shorter. Personally, I think a basket with about 2/3 the height of the target area would be tougher than a narrow basket.

 

[BrotherDave]

I think we should keep the baskets the same but surround them on all sides with rings of fire they have to pass through. Melting their 20 year old Aviar might give Johnny Pro more pause plus it would look exxxxxxxtreme!

:\

 

[mizunodave]

Small basket scenario:

Player one, upshot to 20 feet.
Player two, upshot to 50 feet.
Player two misses leaving a drop in for par.
Player one also misses because the basket is so small leaving a drop in for par.
No scoring separation to show that player one played the hole significantly better.

That's how I see this going and it isn't an improvement.

 

[corin_brown]

Great thread. Lots of thoughtful posts and research.

Personally I like the concept of a narrower basket. The only problem is the anecdotal evidence that a hard, super accurate putt can bounce out after having smacked the center pole. But I think that's a problem that can probably be ironed out with further design and testing. Maybe more chains, I'm guessing.

I also remember seeing someone suggest smaller baskets would discourage pros from running long putts and encourage many more lay-ups, especially on tricky greens with perilous rollaway dangers etc.

My solution to this would be to install narrower baskets on some holes, with flatter, more open and more boring greens while retaining the traditional baskets on the trickier, riskier greens. Doing this would encourage players to run putts in riskier spots more often while increasing the putting difficulty on lamer, more boring greens.

I know that I will probably get trolled for saying this, but we should modify the greens to be more of a factor into how hard a putt is.

This is an interesting suggestion. An undulating DG green in the woods with rocks, trees, boulders, hills, ledges, water etc. surrounding the basket can be way trickier to approach and hole out on than a DG green in the middle of a flat, open grassy field.

We have to take DG to a new level.

Why?

Personally, I think a basket with about 2/3 the height of the target area would be tougher than a narrow basket.

This is the first time I've seen this suggested. It's so simple, I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of it.

Making the catching area shorter instead of narrower would at least solve the anecdotal problem of The Marksmen and Bull's-Eye or any other extremely narrow basket spitting out putts that hit the center pole so hard they bounce out and miss.

Small basket scenario:

Player one, upshot to 20 feet.
Player two, upshot to 50 feet.
Player two misses leaving a drop in for par.
Player one also misses because the basket is so small leaving a drop in for par.
No scoring separation to show that player one played the hole significantly better..

Wait. Why did player one play the hole significantly better again?

His approach was 60% closer, I guess. But he also missed a putt that was 60% closer.

This scenario makes it seem like both players would make these seperate putts at the same %. That would make player one, who seems to have a better approach game (at least on this hole) than player two, a poorer putter than player two. In this case, it's entirely plausible and fair that they would make the same score on this hole because while player one has a better approach game, player two is a better putter.

 

[DavidSauls]

This is the first time I've seen this suggested. It's so simple, I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of it.

Making the catching area shorter instead of narrower would at least solve the anecdotal problem of The Marksmen and Bull's-Eye or any other extremely narrow basket spitting out putts that hit the center pole so hard they bounce out and miss.

To be fair, it's not my idea. It's come up in other threads, though it gets drowned out by the narrow-the-baskets movement.

I'm not sure, but I feel like I'm more inaccurate vertically than horizontally. I make putts that barely creep over the rip, or hit high in the chains, or all sorts of places in between.

Someone somewhere also suggested a simple temporary retrofit---a sort of hard cap that fits over the top and covers the top foot (or whatever) of chains. Which makes me think that perhaps someone would come up with a device to temporarily narrow chains on an existing basket, too. Then, advocates could demonstrate the merits of either concept with test tournaments and casual rounds, without the expense and controversy of completely retrofitting courses.

 

[DavidSauls]

This is an interesting suggestion. An undulating DG green in the woods with rocks, trees, boulders, hills, ledges, water etc. surrounding the basket can be way trickier to approach and hole out on than a DG green in the middle of a flat, open grassy field.

This reminds me that we're all influenced by our experiences.

The courses that I play most are full of dangerous greens----rollaway hazards, elevation changes ranging from mild to dramatic, trees to straddle-putt around, and nearby OB to avoid. Open, level greens are the exception.

If I often played courses with easier greens, it might change my outlook on changing the baskets a bit.

 

[scarpfish]

Give Mcbeth a full time non-disc golf job and he is good , not great. Give your local pro a full time disc golf job and he becomes great.

And there's a correlation between smaller baskets and more money coming into the sport?

Smaller baskets , even if just for NTs, is a huge start to validate our sport.

Ahh, so that's what this is about.

It will only showcase the talent of the pros while making ams and local pros appreciate what they see on YouTube.

Ahh, apparently one end game is that the rest of us are supposed to be relegated to watching instead of playing, on Youtube no less.

Ask your local pro if he thinks if he was able to play full time could he challenge Mcbeth. 90% would say yes. And that's a problem. No other sport works that way. Just my opinion.

But, you still haven't made the correlation into how making the game more challenging is going to enable such people to play disc golf full time.

More exposure isn't gonna grow our sport, we need to increase the difficulty level

Yeah, all more exposure has done has put 3,000+ courses in the ground and got a number of new manufacturers and other companies up and running. Eff that. Until we have pros making six figures and the rest of us eating at sports bars watching the big disc golf events on the tube (which will likely be our phones), then we just haven't arrived.

 

[Jay Dub]

Go back to using Mach I baskets. They spit out any putt that had any force to them. Make putting more of a touch shot. Going at the basket hard makes putting easier.

And agreeing with scarpfish, the pro tour is not growing the sport. :wall:

 

[Steve West]

It would have to be [harder to hit a narrower target], wouldn't it?

Maybe not. Here are three hypotheses:

The sweet spot on the target is within the narrower width anyway, so whatever happens to the left and right of that doesn't matter.

The outer chains do as much to push slightly off-center putts out as to slow down and catch the dead-center putts.

A narrower target helps the players focus more on the sweet spot.​

It's interesting to me that proposals are almost always to make them narrower, and not make the vertical window shorter. Personally, I think a basket with about 2/3 the height of the target area would be tougher than a narrow basket.

Fourth hypothesis:

The call is always for narrower, not shorter, baskets because the players instinctively know it won't be any harder to hit the narrower target.​

 

[iacas]

It shouldn't be expected, since most of the time, pros miss from 60'.

At what rate? Where's their true 50/50 distance?

The 60 foot putt into a bull's-eye will be more impressive, but a 60' lay-up won't be. If you make the risk of missing a comeback putt too great, players won't run the basket from distance nearly as often.

I posted above about the "excitement" or "impressive" parts of golf and disc golf. The exciting part should be truly parking a disc by the basket, OR holing a loooong putt. Right now that "long putt" distance is close to 60', and "parking it" is anything inside of about 20' for the game's best. Why not shrink that to 10' or so for a "gimme" and make a 40' putt a "long putt" that will be just as exciting?

(1) At what short distance will a putt be uncertain enough to avoid, and (2) at what distance will a long putt, if missed, end up at that uncertain distance, and (2) will those odds exceed the chance of making the long putt.

There's a bit more to it than that, though.

Except for bad roll-aways, how often does a good disc golfer three-putt? Almost never. They have no fear of running putts on reasonably flat terrain because even if they have 20' coming back it's basically a gimme.

Would you rather have excitement at 60' but boredom at 20', or boredom at 60' but excitement at 20'?

There's more to excitement than putting. A pro "parking" a disc at 20' is not exciting, but basically results in two throws (total) these days.

While my 2 second art showed linear graphs and the URL you linked showed quadratic graphs, I was concerned with qualitative similarity of both graphs always increasing to the right.

The disc golf chart will not increase at nearly the rate that the golf chart does, though. It may never get as high as the golf chart, because from 8' golf is 1.5 strokes for pros, while from 8' disc golf is nearly 1.0 strokes. The disc golf chart should start off very very flat, and then rise from there.

They may cross at some point, but in golf I limited the putting to 100 footers, and that's 2.45 for golf. I don't think that even in disc golf you'd see 2.45 from 100 feet.

If there's a danger of missing the comebacker---because we've made putting tough enough to put 15 footers in doubt---then they'd be foolish to run at the basket, take a 2% chance of a make for a 30% chance of a 3-putt (or whatever the odds turn out to be).

Ideally we'd have actual data so we wouldn't have to resort to making up stats.

And yeah, that's where some of the drama comes from - do you run a putt in an attempt to make it, leaving yourself a chance of missing the come-backer? It may depend on the situation. Two down with two to go? Maybe you run it. One up with two to play? Who knows… Maybe you leave the hole one up, tied, or even one down?

Small basket scenario:

Player one, upshot to 20 feet.
Player two, upshot to 50 feet.
Player two misses leaving a drop in for par.
Player one also misses because the basket is so small leaving a drop in for par.
No scoring separation to show that player one played the hole significantly better.

Ah, made up anecdotal "evidence" combined with an incredibly small sample size.

If P2 is as good a putter as P1, he'll win out in the end. If P2 is only slightly worse a putter than P1, he'll still win out in the end if he's better approaching/driving.

 

[Bardu]

 

[DavidSauls]

At what rate? Where's their true 50/50 distance?

Steve West posted a little while back that, with some actual statistical evidence, it's between 25 and 30 feet.

I don't know if that's true---I'd have guessed 35-40 feet. I'm also not sure if he was talking about 1000-rated pros, or the very top pros.

 

[DavidSauls]

I posted above about the "excitement" or "impressive" parts of golf and disc golf. The exciting part should be truly parking a disc by the basket, OR holing a loooong putt. Right now that "long putt" distance is close to 60', and "parking it" is anything inside of about 20' for the game's best. Why not shrink that to 10' or so for a "gimme" and make a 40' putt a "long putt" that will be just as exciting?


There's a bit more to it than that, though.

Except for bad roll-aways, how often does a good disc golfer three-putt? Almost never. They have no fear of running putts on reasonably flat terrain because even if they have 20' coming back it's basically a gimme.

They're rarely going to 3-putt, anyway.

They don't now because when they run long putts, they're confident that their misses will still leave them in comfortable comeback range.

Take away that comfortable comeback range, and they won't 3-putt, they'll just be more wary of going for long putts.

*

It seems there are 4 zones: (1) Gimme zone, where putts are almost automatic, (2) Good percentage zone, where the most of the scoring separation occurs, (3) low percentage zone, where players can steal a stroke with a good putt, but are unlikely to lose one with a miss because it'll land in zone 1, and (4) desperation zone, where the wise move is just to lay up, because the odds that a miss lands in zones 2 or 3 and results in a 3-putt are greater than the odds of make the putt from zone 4. (This is where the player trailing by a few strokes late in the match gambles).

Changing the percentages changes the distances, so it changes the distances for the borders of all of these zones. We still end up with them.

Reducing Zone 1 is the benefit of making the target more difficult. Zone 1 is boring.

Bringing Zone 3 closer is less dramatic. Much less for spectators---though I'm in the camp that theoretical spectators don't matter. I'm not sure it's as much fun for players, either.

Bringing Zone 4 closer is boring.

Putting more premium on precision drives and long approaches---hitting smaller Zone 1s and 2s---is a benefit.

These seem to me to be the pros and cons of more difficult targets, and it's a matter of whether the pros outweigh the cons, and by enough to justify a change. And in weighing that, we have to ask what the goal is---spectator disc golf, or participation disc golf. Would it really be more fun for everyday players?

My opinion is that it depends on how much more difficult. I'd love to see baskets a bit smaller than the current ones, but not dramatically.

My wish is that the advocates would run more test events, and see how it affects scoring, scoring spread, strategy, and player enjoyment. The trick is that it's easier to do this with smaller events---in fact, I think the PDGA would love it if people did---than for events with top players.

But it's all theory until someone moves from the keyboard to the course, and tries it.

 

[biscoe]

My wish is that the advocates would run more test events, and see how it affects scoring, scoring spread, strategy, and player enjoyment. The trick is that it's easier to do this with smaller events---in fact, I think the PDGA would love it if people did---than for events with top players.

But it's all theory until someone moves from the keyboard to the course, and tries it.

Kirk Yoo (proponent of smaller basket) ran a PDGA event in SC a week or 2 ago on the Marksman baskets. End result of that was he had all the baskets up for sale within a day or two due to their inability to catch "good" putts.

While I do not agree that baskets need to be harder (I too play on a lot of challenging greens and I too believe the result is just more laying up) I do agree that making them smaller vertically is likely the way to go. For one thing it would be easy to do with nothing but a drill.

 

[DavidSauls]

Were those uncaught putts "good" in the eyes of the players---accustomed to wider baskets---or Kirk's observations?

Of course, even if the former, player preferences will play a big part in any changes. There's a limit to how much you can do if the players don't want it. (If the top pros want it but few others do, the trick is doing it in a big enough event that the top pros will show up).

 

[DavidSauls]

But kudos to Kirk for actually trying it.

 

[biscoe]

Were those uncaught putts "good" in the eyes of the players---accustomed to wider baskets---or Kirk's observations?

Of course, even if the former, player preferences will play a big part in any changes. There's a limit to how much you can do if the players don't want it. (If the top pros want it but few others do, the trick is doing it in a big enough event that the top pros will show up).

Judging from FB I would say both- no real reason Kirk's opinion is more valid than that of the other players anyway.

I think I'll go out right now and drill a few more holes in one of my basket poles- what the hell. If it seems like it works maybe I'll use a shorter basket for a hole or 2 at the VTI where there is no real money involved and there will be lots of high end players. The problem with doing it for an event or 2 is that there is not enough sample to see whether it actually changes player behavior. They aren't just going to start laying up outside of 30 feet the first few times out.

 

[DavidSauls]

I only think Kirk's opinion is more valid if he's TD, not player, so he's watching with some detachment.

Players whine about baskets, no matter what they catch.

 

[Karl]

If you shorten the height of the chains it will just advocate 'speed putting' more so (even more so hitting a "target" instead of tossing a disc into a basket)...as the 'window' for a lofted putt will be a wee smaller. Is that what we think will improve the game??