3.0
Sand Hills
Friar's Head
Cal Club
Boston Golf Club
Sebonack
2.0
MPCC Shore
Erin Hills
Kingsley Club
Galloway National
World Woods Pine Barrens
Hidden Creek
Old Sandwich
Kinloch
Headwaters
Bayonne
1.0
Dallas National
Mountaintop
As an editorial comment, I am shocked that Boston Golf Club is not getting any mentions...it's in my top 5 modern.
Jim:
You can vote any way you want, of course. The good thing about polls like these is that one skewed vote isn't enough to make a lot of difference. Statistically, though, your ballot is clearly an outlier.
No one is telling you to favor the same courses that others have chosen. However, it appears that you've only played three of the courses that are currently in the top ten [Sand Hills, Friar's Head, Kingsley]. Yet you give out five *** ratings and ten more ** ratings. That's really too many for someone who has only seen three of the top ten; unless you have seen the rest of them and disagree with their inclusion, you ought to assume that some of those other courses are pretty good, and leave some room for them, too.
If you can't separate out the five you put at the top, or the ten below them, that's how you should vote. But when you take a group of ten courses that everyone else would give *, and give them all **, even though you aren't saying that any of them should be in the top ten ... that ballot doesn't really grade on the same curve as all the rest. You wind up just elevating [slightly] all of the courses you've seen, relative to the ones you haven't.
In truth, everyone votes a little too high on these sorts of polls ... that's why as of early results, it takes a unanimous ** vote or *** from somebody just to crack the top ten. But yours is certainly the outlier of those ballots taken so far.
P.S. I have not seen Boston Golf Club but was surprised it hadn't got a ** vote before yours.