"JES, a question - you describe what PV is like for a player trying to make pars. What's your sense of how it plays for the golfer aiming to make bogies i.e. playing to make no worse than bogey on any hole?"
Peter:
Interesting question indeed.
I believe I once posted something of an answer to that quesiton on here but maybe it was years ago. On the other hand, maybe I never did post it. If I didn't the reasons are pretty obvious.
1. I didn't want to give away one of my trade secrets about how I sometimes tried to play that course because I felt maybe it was a little embarassing under the circumstances.
2. I didn't want what I was saying to sound anything like I was suggesting it was some kind of course weakness.
But let me back up for a moment because at this point you probably have very little idea where I'm coming from much less where I'm going with this answer.
First of all, if anyone is lucky enough to play Pine Valley it's pretty logical to expect they would do everything they could to shoot the best possible score they could, in other words try to go as low as they could, and that goal would probably require that they take a bunch of chances (risk/reward) in that attempt.
I think I used to do that years ago playing there and I sure did try to do that if I played in something like a member/guest match play event.
But then I started playing in Crump Cups and with that I took on a whole new and different way to play the course and a whole different way of looking at the course in a risk/reward scoring sense.
The first order of business in the Crump Cup is to try to qualify as high (in as high a flight) as possible. Obviously qualifying is stroke play. If any Crump contestants no matter how good get really careless down there in Crump qualifying they can end up not qualifying for match play at all.
There is an old term down there that people use about that course. It's called the Pine Valley "others". The term is sort of lore but believe me it is true and some of the best golfers in the world have suffered some famous Pine Valley "others". They are things like quads or worse or double digits on a single hole. They result generally from stubborness on recovery shots and a quick compounding of one bad situation after another. There are plenty of parts of that golf course that produce those "others" and you have to know where they are and what to do to minimize real loss of shots if you get in them.
Anyway, when it came to stroke play qualifying for the Crump Cup I started to look at the course much differently simply to try to figure out how to avoid making worse than a bogey on any hole there. Of course avoiding making one of those Pine Valley "others" was always a given or it could take me right out of the tournament.
I came to realize that approximately half the holes down there (eight to be exact) have forced carries to the greens themselves. The rest have some form of open fronts.
By the way, that's a ton of forced carries to greens for a course that old when the ground game approach was more prevalent back in that day. (Merion, interestingly, has about the same mix of forced carries to greens).
Shinnecock, on the other hand, has much much fewer penal forced carries into greens.
So what I would generally do is sort of club down on those open approach holes and err into the approaches and on the forced carry holes I would sort of mentally take out the flags and just try to hit those greens anywhere. Adding to that there are some holes where you just learn what to avoid at all costs around those greens.
So my philosophy was to never make worse than bogey and it generally worked really well. I knew if I was in those approaches I could chip and putt for par at least half the time and I knew I would generally make a few birdies here and there too. Back in those days it seems like I generally chipped in at least once a round.
Basically I did this kind of thing because off the tee compared to the people I was competing against I was very short. The same wasn't so true with my irons though.
And I also applied to all this something I came to realize over time competing against good players and that is they make a whole lot more mental mistakes than one would generally suspect.
This all eventually got down to something like what professional gamblers do in horse racing. The deal is not whether the odds on any horse are representative of what a really intelligent bettor and rater thinks they should be, it's a matter or whether they aren't. And the latter almost always happens because bettors aren't really using they heads that well when they bet. So the goal becomes picking horses that bettors don't recognize the potential of well enough.
I hope that answers your question well enough about how to play Pine Valley if the goal is just to avoid bogeys. If you want a hole by hole analysis of that strategy, I'd be glad to give it to you as reflected in my own game.
Now, JESII may see this a whole lot differently than I do.. He plays in Crump Cups now and he knows how to play that course for his game just as well as I do for mine. Plus Sullivan Jr is a whole lot longer and better than I ever was.
The deal with Pine Valley is what's true about any golf course but with Pine Valley because of the danger there and those famous Pine Valley "others" it's magnified bigtime.
The deal is to first REALLY know your own game, what you're capable of and what you generally aren't (obviously this gets down to some pretty sophisticated risk/reward understanding and application). And then it gets down to really understanding that golf course and how dangerous areas and situations can combine in a heartbeat to really waste shots.
As for Shinnecock it took me years and years but I think I've finally figured out what can make that course hard for really good players. To say the least it is anything but obvious and for that reason the course is a very great one in my book.