[Jim Eder]

Rustic Canyon is a great example of this issue. It is the surroundings that deceive. In Las Vegas it is the tower on the strip. Etc.

[Tim Nugent]

The best advice I can give to golfers on reading greens is to find a spot 4-6' below the green surface and go there to look at the green.  At eye-level, the green contours are more evident and you do not see any of the optical effect of the surrounds.  Next, look around the edges of the green to where the water drains off.  I know it's elemental, but you'd be surprised how many people never put 2+2 together.

The only time I ever got completely disoriented was when we were building Makalei Hawaii.  It was on the side of a volcanic mountain at 1,200-1,800 feet.  About a 12% gradient. You could see Maui on a clear day. However, the land down along the shore about 10 miles away was flatish for a couple mile (the result of successive lava flows ending into the ocean).  What happened was the flat land began to appear as ocean and the shoreline as the horizon. Conversely, the ocean appeared to be the sky.  My brain, reacting to the slope of the land and without any visual landmarks in the distance "tilted" what I was seeing to make the 12% I was standing on appear to be level.  To add insult to injury, since everyone in Hawaii uses the "everything breaks to the ocean" logic, my father decided to have some greens break into the mountain.  We had a very experienced Wadsworth shaper who remarked it was the 1st time in his 20 yrs of shaping he couldn't 'feel' level with his ass.

[Matthew Petersen]

The most pronounced I ever saw that was at the Broadmoor course in Colorado Springs, on the Ross greens.

Somebody told me every putt broke away from the carillon on the mountain.  It was the first time I ever read putts with my ears!

And it was true!  If a putt appeared to break toward the mountain, it was an optical illusion.  Quite a few of them did.

Courses in the Colorado front range may be more prone to this than even the mountainous courses. There are so many along that same area running north and south where, as at the Broadmoor, you have to pick a landmark and trust it and not your eyes. The courses at the Air Force Academy, just a couple miles north of the Broadmoor, also have this feature and it's incredibly pronounced.

I've since played many other courses where they advise of this type of local tip (every scourse in Scottsdale will claim that putts break toward the valley, but this is only rarely true). At the AFA the optical illusion could have as much as a 2-3 ball effect!

[Richard Choi]

Dave, I have to agree. When I play courses in Hawaii (especially those on the side of a mountain), I kinda look for this effect (in addition to Bermuda grain) and I am not surprised. I also think the view of horizon in the far distance also helps you adjust.

That was not the case at the UM course. There is no horizon or straight or level anything. The course is sloped, but no overly so. The putts were just baffling.

[Mike Hendren]

I find the most troubling putts to read are those where the green is canted into a hillside, particular where the low side of the green is built up so that the putt breaks into the hillside.   Lookout Mountain has the most confounding greens to read as a whole.  Specific greens that I recall being impossible to read include the 8th as Cascades (greens slopes downhill from the front but Flynn abruptly built up the back of the green to mask that) and the 14th at Beverly (canted into a small hillside).

Bogey

[cary lichtenstein]

I am so happy to read these posts. I've played lots of mountainous courses and ravine courses, valley courses with counter slopes.

Been fooled so many times it is very heartening to see others have experienced the same thing.

It is the courses I have played multiple times that I never master that confounded me the most.

red Sky Ranch beat me every time. a course in Maui, another resort course in southern California made me crazy. I remember going into the pro shop, asking for the head pro and saying, "ok, I give up, how don you read these things?

There were so many counter balancing slopes that I never could kind the dominant.

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