RECAP: PLAAY-Dot-CON Stats and Scores for Golf, Bowling
We all love stats in this hobby, so before we officially put the wraps on our 2021 convention, I thought I'd share scores and thoughts from our two "individual-performance" events, the PLAAY Gamer Open Golf tournament with HISTORY MAKER GOLF and the Rock N Bowl event with BOWL-O-RAMA.
The golf event was held Friday morning on this year's convention course, the Seven Wonders World Golf Tour. It included an online contingent. Online golfers are marked with an asterisk--I'm assuming that there were more folks who played online but who didn't post their scores because of the difficulty of the course!
All golfers had a choice of six golfer profiles. I regret that I didn't ask everyone to list the profile they chose, so a good number of the in-person convention golfers don't have their profile listed.
The Iron Sharpshooter seemed to be the profile best-suited for this course. I tried to construct the course so as to reward each of the profiles on the same ratio of holes. The Hazards Pharaoh, for example, should have excelled on the three Pyramids of Egypt. But as our in-person event wound down, the top of the leaderboard was crowded with Iron Sharpshooters.
As you can see by the graphic, we had a three-way tie at the top of the leaderboard, at eight under par for the tournament. John McGuiness earned his score in the online component. At the in-person event, we had a sudden death playoff, with Silas Williams scoring a birdie on the first sudden death hole to earn the title over Luke McEvoy.
Overall, the course presented a challenge, but not so much of a challenge as you might think upon first glance at the cards. The average score of about three over par for the tournament, just over 73 for each round. The overall average scoring for the first round was almost identical to the second round. Everything under par is bolded, and the best scores are highlighted in bold green. James Cast had the best round of the day, shooting a 6 under par 66 in the first round. He had trouble in the second round, his second round score (79) is inflated by his needing to get more and more aggressive to try to get back in the thick of things after the shots stopped falling.
The bowling event was really NOT a tournament, it was more like an open bowling session where we could cap off the convention with something fun and non-competitive. (Not that we didn't TRY to bowl well!) I've long been a proponent of "participant mode" where you literally bowl a twenty-sided die down a polypropylene bowling alley. It is an acquired skill, as this event demonstrated!
We grouped everyone four to a lane, and everyone bowled at the same level of expertise, 205--professional level, although not elite. Some of us bowled a couple games, others bowled just once. As a group, everyone bowling in participant mode, we averaged just under 174, about 30 pins below our carded average.
Not surprisingly, I guess, I was at the top of the leaderboard, with two of the three best games of the night, 242 and 212. Of course, I have had a lot of practice! BUT--I think this is a cool aspect to the game, that "practice makes perfect." The more games you roll, the better you get at it. HINT: I have discovered that the twenty-sided die rolls more predictably if you roll it with the flat side facing the target pin triangle, as opposed to the "pointy" side. Also, with a pro level card, an average ball is usually all that's needed to pick up a one or two pin spare--you don't need to aim for the pocket. You can focus on simply getting the ball over the foul line and keeping it on the mat.
I also thought it was notable that Judah Williams scored relatively well--150 and 176--despite rolling just two strikes, one in each game. Reminds me of my real-life bowling: you can be super-accurate at picking up spares, but unless you can string some strikes together, you're never going to get into the 200s.