Par Talk

[ballgolfconvert]

"the score that an expert disc golfer would be expected to make"

Nothing but positive integers can be the score.

Par 1s, sure. They'd be about 25 feet long. It might happen at a putting league.

If a TD departs from the definition, there's nothing a player can do to fix it. I've played on holes with n.5 pars. I was tempted to be late just to get a hole score of 7.5 and make extra work adding up the paper scorecards.

Without an accompanying definition of what an 'expert' actually is, that definition is pretty useless and arbitrary. I would say an expert in disc golf is anyone above around a 950-960 rating, which gels in my experience with what would be a scratch golfer in ball golf.

 

[glassila]

There is no such thing as incorrect par.

I understand what you are saying, but do not agree with it.
If a course owner manager sets par for an open 250 foot hole at 4...yes, that's what the par is on the tee sign, but I don't think anyone would say par was correctly set for the hole.
Likewise, if the course manager sets par at 3 for a tightly wooded 500 foot hole.

 

[enragedmullet]

I understand what you are saying, but do not agree with it.
If a course owner manager sets par for an open 250 foot hole at 4...yes, that's what the par is on the tee sign, but I don't think anyone would say par was correctly set for the hole.
Likewise, if the course manager sets par at 3 for a tightly wooded 500 foot hole.

Par is in the eye of the disc holder?

 

[Steve West]

Without an accompanying definition of what an 'expert' actually is, that definition is pretty useless and arbitrary. I would say an expert in disc golf is anyone above around a 950-960 rating, which gels in my experience with what would be a scratch golfer in ball golf.

Has no one read the PDGA Par Guidelines yet?

 

[oldmandiscer]

Without an accompanying definition of what an 'expert' actually is, that definition is pretty useless and arbitrary. I would say an expert in disc golf is anyone above around a 950-960 rating, which gels in my experience with what would be a scratch golfer in ball golf.

I would say 1000 rating. 9-10 points is usually 1 throw. So Paul who was 1060 would be around +6.5. Maybe 990.

 

[Steve West]

I understand what you are saying, but do not agree with it.
If a course owner manager sets par for an open 250 foot hole at 4...yes, that's what the par is on the tee sign, but I don't think anyone would say par was correctly set for the hole.
Likewise, if the course manager sets par at 3 for a tightly wooded 500 foot hole.

If the course was designed for Recreational Women, par 4 sounds about right for a 250 foot hole.

Par 3 on a tightly wooded 500 foot hole would be a tough par, even for for MPO, but not unreasonable.

 

[Steve West]

IDK how or why they came up with this scoring spread for Par. It is completely illogical and silly to me. Completely disagree with it.

Here is the how and why for the Par by Average Score table in the Par Guidelines.

For many years now, a consensus has been forming among the top designers and the TDs of the top events. Not that they all were all talking to each other, but they were setting pars that were similar to each other and consistent with the definition.

For example, just about everyone was using the 1000-rated player as the expert for MPO. Many were using Close Range Par (CRP) or something like it to take into account the types of throws and effective lengths.

Over the course of this thread (and as more and more hole-by-hole-by-player scores became available) a formula was developed which did a very good job of matching the pars that these top thinkers were setting. This is the Par by Scoring Spread Method.

This method worked well enough that it was the basis for redoing the PDGA public par guide in 2016.

In 2022, the definition of par was removed from the rules and put into the PDGA Par Guidelines. (This is when "as determined by the Director" was removed. Mostly so it would apply to Course Designers as well.)

To go along with the definition, the 2016 Par by Effective Hole Length and Foliage was revalidated and expanded.

Because not everyone wants to use any one particular method, several other methods were added. All methods were calibrated to the Par by Scoring Distribution Method, which - if you remember - was itself calibrated to the pars set by the top designers and TDs. In addition to being the best match to the human-set pars, this method could easily be applied to thousands of holes to find underlying patterns.

One of those patterns is how par varies by average score. See the chart for 70,000 or so distributions.

Par and Average are not a precise function of each other, but they are related. The ranges in the table are the best match to Par by Scoring Distribution (within the limitation of being based only on average score for the skill level), which is the best match to the consensus among the top TDs and designers -

 

[ThrowaEnvy]

You gotta love a guy that loves charts like that.. And math... math and poetry is the foundation for everything

 

[Steve West]

There isn't one that is satisfactory. If a hole is avg 4.94 is 1100 feet, I'm not calling it a Par 4. Sorry.

Nor should you. And, if you didn't, you would be following the guidelines.

From the PDGA Par Guidelines:

[...]Choose whichever method you are most comfortable with for your situation.

While these all aim to accurately determine par, none of the methods will automatically set par correctly all the time. The Tournament Director or Course Designer should review the results and make adjustments as needed.

Guidelines are not dictates. Guidelines are more about steering people away from really bad places than always getting them to the ideal place.

In this case, you know the length of a hole and you used that in your assessment. You know that a hole that long which averages only 4.94 can't have much punishment, so a lot of the throws were errorless, thus par should lean to the high side.

To validate your judgement, you could look at the Par by Hole Length and Difficulty chart and see that a light foliage 1100 foot hole could be par 5. You could look at Close Range Par and see it indicates a par 5.

But in any case, you would be deciding between par 4 or par 5. Either one is pretty good. At least you would have been discouraged from calling it a par 3 or a par 6.

 

[PMantle]

 

[Steve West]

I presume you were fishing for this:

This chart shows that all the pars were standard, with the probable exception that #13 should be par 2. The 90% confidence interval runs from 2.46 to 2.52.

However, it also shows that all the holes except #9 were quite birdie-rich.

In terms of score in relation to standard par, this matches Paul's best round.

"Paul Par", what a 1050-rated player would be expected to get with errorless play, would be 48, with hole #8 as par 3, and #3, #4, #6, #10, #12, #13, and #16, as par 2.

 

[PMantle]

I don't fish here, and I have no idea what your posts mean.

 

[glassila]

I don't fish here, and I have no idea what your posts mean.

Most of Steve's posts are over my head, but I'm not gonna lie I LOVE THEM!!!

 

[Alobar]

I don't fish here, and I have no idea what your posts mean.

I don't follow all that closely, but the par chart he just posted is infinitely more comprehensible than the scatter plots I remember…



.

 

[Steve West]

Hole #1 at Supreme 18 did not allow enough 2s and 3s to confirm that par should be lower than 4.

 

[biscoe]

Hole #1 at Supreme 18 did not allow enough 2s and 3s to confirm that par should be lower than 4.

This is one of the ones (few) we are going to disagree on. IMO that hole is a silly par 3.

 

[Steve West]

This is one of the ones (few) we are going to disagree on. IMO that hole is a silly par 3.

I agree it's not a par 4.

No automated system works every time, because all systems have human activity in the input stream, so they need human intervention to deal with it.

Sometimes players don't play a hole as it should be played. That could either be because of the greed of going for 2, or high winds, or the hole just doesn't give the players a fair shot. Or all three, and maybe other reasons.

When that happens, we can't prove by the scores that it should have par less than 4. That's when human judgment kicks in. To set the right par (assuming normal winds and smartened up players), or to fix the hole.

In this case, the fix is pretty obvious. The size of the green is only 44% as big as recommended for the length of the hole. The green should be 50% larger in each direction, or the hole should be shortened to 195 feet.

 

[Ryan P.]

In this case, the fix is pretty obvious. The size of the green is only 44% as big as recommended for the length of the hole. The green should be 50% larger in each direction, or the hole should be shortened to 195 feet.

From where are you getting these recommendations?

 

[Steve West]

From where are you getting these recommendations?

Good question. Apparently, this particular one hasn't made its way into the PDGA or DGCDg documents yet. (Perhaps it's in the internal guidelines the PDGA uses to decide whether to grant waivers, I don't know.)

So, here's the work that went into it. Decide for yourself.

www.stevewestdiscgolf.com/Proper_Sizes_for_Disc_Golf_Island_Greens.pdf

 

[Cgkdisc]

When do penalties move from being considered "errors" for setting par versus becoming part of the "normal" scoring for calculating the correct par appropriate for holes with penalty design elements intentionally placed with the expectation (or knowing via testing) that a significant number of players at that skill level cannot avoid them?

At DDO courses and on several others over the past years, players have averaged over 5 penalties per round even when the wind wasn't boosting those numbers. Seems like determining par for these holes/courses needs to incorporate "errors", and as a result, it becomes recognized as a different game than traditional disc/ball golf in the same way basketball with 3-point scoring became a statistically different game from high school through the NBA than before it was added. You don't mix the scoring stats between games with and without 3-pt scoring and even games where the 3-pt line is a different distance from the basket.

Playing a disc golf round where players are allowed an optional mulligan per hole measures the same skill set as competition rounds with no mulligans, i.e., the players' scores and results correlate closely. And yet, purists would say that the results and ratings from mulligan events should not be considered legit as tour events or included in stats.

On the other hand, these extensive OB courses are considered normal or legit to be combined with stats and results from minimal to no OB courses. Extensive OB courses can become legit, but they are a different game, a cousin to disc golf, from a scoring, randomness, strategy, and skills standpoint. Perhaps a design guideline might be that every hole be surrounded by OB for consistency, like gutters in bowling. Some hole designs could probably be improved once this format is recognized as a separate game and make penalties even more common. (But rather than penalties, they would become 2-strokers to make the format sound more inviting.)