Length deception

[Ally Mcintosh]

i was playing a competition at mount juliet on sunday... on the 8th and 15th, nicklaus had built in a large diagonal left to right ridge about 50 yards short of the green (maybe 30 on the left, 70 on the right) with bunkers built in to the wall... in both cases, if i'd been playing by eyesight alone, i would have underclubbed by about 2 clubs... there was an extreme deception in length in both of these cases...

i've obviously seen this done on other courses but it got me thinking about what other techniques architects use to throw the player off his yardage?

i'm sure this has been discussed ad infinitum and i realise many are obvious but it would still be great to hear your thoughts...

thanks

[Adam Clayman]

Fazio's Shadow Creek has a hole that uses a tapering of bunker sizes to make the hole appear longer than it really is. I find, especially green front, even the smallest of rolls, to have great deceptive effects.

[TEPaul]

Large swales and such in front of greens create distance deception as does the technique of raising bunker tops that hide the space behind them. But the most common architectural technique is done through the manipulation of "scale"---eg put a small green at the end of a long hole and it will look farther away than a large green at the end of the same hole.