Not an investigation in the least. You started a very interesting thread awhile ago about luck/skill and then in this thread applied it to links v parkland courses. My question was solely to ask if your application was based on playing links courses. I have not played the New so I cannot assess the source of your viewpoint. I have played around 20 links courses (I am not counting Castle Stuart, Kingsbarns, or the Bandon courses) which is far fewer than many, but I disagree with your viewpoint for many of the reasons others have mentioned. We probably disagree on the meaning of “perfect information” or how it applies to golf courses.
Ira
I guess I would object to the essentialism in "links golf," even while I'm perfectly fine with the conception of a links golf course. Golf on linksland has some cohesive themes (wind, run, bumps, etc.) but I think it's difficult -- at best -- to create a platonic form of the game played there, because valid counter-examples will come in and ruin this essentialism. Here I think an empirical approach is flawed and is more often than not just onanistic gatekeeping of what are extraordinarily beautiful and rare places to play.
Links obviously means linksland. Linksland must to be adjacent to a sea, but is there anything beyond a strong prevailing wind that affects the golf next to the sea? Perhaps the humidity? It's certainly not the
views that are affecting the game. Do we qualify the Lido in Nekoosa as a links? The dunes are replicas, but there they are. The sand, fescue, and wind are real. Is it links golf?
Golden Gate Park GC refuses to call itself a links even though it's built on historic dunes land, and is adjacent to the ocean. They say they aren't the correct style. Does the style of golf matter to being a links if the course is on linksland?
Links lack trees, yet I was shocked to find a non-trivial number of trees, groves even, on Carnoustie's championship course when I was there. If there is enough soil to grow trees... is it linksland?
I needn't go on and on, as we all know that links is a vague term, but my point is that links golf, as a concept, makes the most sense to me if we're talking about the common features of linksland generally. That is, the ball runs especially far (due to the sand and fescues we
generally find on links courses), the wind blows especially strong and irregularly (due to the adjacency to a large sea or ocean, and lack of trees to block the wind). There tends to be a lack of trees (generally due to the soil content being insufficient to sustain trees). Finally, the hazards are occasionally peppered with thick native sections of grass, often of indiscriminate thickness to mimic grazing herds.
Each of these features strongly feature one theme. That is, reducing the predictability of the ball in the air, and dramatically increasing the dispersion pattern of the median shot for players at
any level. We also see a dramatic increase in the
variance of punishment when missing the fairway. This is why I put the median links course strongly toward the higher-luck quadrant than I would the median parkland course, and much farther than the median parkland "championship" course.
Each of these features is generally replicable, but do we consider these imitations of linksland environments "parkland courses"? It would seem silly to classify them as such. I play my "links" golf by the Oakland airport, because it's convenient and inexpensive. The ball still runs, the wind still whips, and the native grasses still eat up anything that goes offline. It's not the old course, but it's a lot easier to get a tee time.