A key stretch of the TGL’s inaugural season begins next week with the indoor simulator league contesting three matches on Monday and a fourth on Tuesday night (US time). And they will occur after TGL officials announced they are making some big changes to one of the league’s more unusual features: the hammer rule.
The upstart simulator golf league touted the Hammer as a headline feature in its unique competitive format. It was considered a way to ramp-up the pressure and increase excitement in a fast-paced indoor golf league.
It was good in theory, but in practice, a problem emerged. Winning teams employed a strategy best described as “Hammer hoarding”. It’s a kind of loophole that undercuts what the Hammer was meant to be.
So, through five matches and ahead of the league’s countdown to its playoffs, TGL is introducing a new rule to fix it.
Here’s the rundown:
Old Hammer rules
There’s one hammer, which only one team can hold at a time. If my team has the hammer, I can throw it at any point during the hole. If the team holding the hammer throws the hammer, the other team can choose to accept or decline it.
• If the opposing team accepts the hammer challenge, the hole is now worth two points instead of the standard one point.
- If the opposing team declines the hammer challenge, they automatically lose the hole and therefore, automatically lose one point.
- Teams lose the hammer after they use it. So, if the team with the hammer uses it, the other team automatically gets it next time – whether they accepted the challenge or not.
That last point is important, because it’s what prompted the loophole strategy…
The Hammer-hoarding loophole
Due to the hammer’s use-it-then-lose-it rules, the leading team would often employ a hammer-hoarding strategy. They’d get the hammer, and because they were leading, they would simply refuse to use it.
It makes sense why? Let’s say my team had the hammer, and was leading 2-0 then decided to throw the hammer.
- If the other team accepts my hammer challenge, but it backfires and I lose the hole. Now the score is 2-2 and the other team has the hammer.
- If the other team refuses my hammer challenge, they lose the hole and a point, but get the hammer. The score is now 3-0, but it only takes one well-timed hammer to make the score 3-2 – a slimmer lead than where I started from.
The safest strategy, therefore, was to simply not let the hammer change hands if you had it and were leading, which was annoying, because it made it harder for the trailing team to catch up.
“With the change of possession if the leading team threw it, they’d make the hole worth two points, but then the trailing team had possession of the hammer,” explains Andrew Macaulay, TGL’s chief technical officer. “It’s why in two out of our five matches, not a single hammer was thrown in it.”
But the loophole is being closed.
New Hammer rules
The new hammer rules are simple: each team now gets three hammers, which they can throw at any point, but only one per hole. It means that the leading team can’t prevent the other team from getting the hammer when they need it most. If a team is trailing, they can use their hammers to catch up.
“It’s like time-outs. Each team has three. There’s strategy to when you use them. When you used all three, you don’t have any left, you’re done,” Macaulay says. “The hammer is a hot topic, and it’s been an awesome thing. Fans want to see teams throw the hammer, and we think this change will help increase fan excitement.”
