The Masters

This message was edited 6 times. Last update was at 02/12/2010 08:13:49

First before I get into all this.......let me say that I am giving this blueprint in hopes that people can read this, use this, to get good at this game. This is for brand new player just as it is for longtime addicts. Hopefully if you are a brand new player you get better faster using this and stick around this game. For everyone else, hopefully there is something that you can take from this just to get a little better. You don't have to do everything I say. You don't have to do any of it if you don't want to. But I assure you that all the things in this will help make you better at this game.

Controller

It's talked about a lot around here......but if you didn't know there are a variety of aftermarket controllers that you can buy that will make this game easier for you. The most common are the HORI (PS3) (around $30 - $40 online) or Madcatz (XBOX360) (good luck finding one) and then there are a large variety of others that people use in this game. If you want to use the stock controller that is fine. Just understand that there are people that use other controllers. There are 2 reasons they are used 1) a less sensitive analog stick allowing you to swing straighter 2) a turbo to boost your power full.

Hitting the Ball

Obviously you want to concentrate on swinging straight before anything else. Beyond that simple fact....learn how to swing your club for different %'s. You can pause your swing at the top to slowly drag % off your shot. For me it's about 5% for every second i count. So if i pause for 2 seconds then follow thru, i hit it 90%. For shots over 100% in amateur or pro mode....learn how to swing it with different %'s as well. For me, if i tap my power 3 times while executing a perfect swing that would be 100% without power, i get 104%. Learning how to get a variety of %'s in your swing will greatly help your ability to control your distance. I can get 122, 121, 118, 116, 115, 114, 112, 111, 110, 109, 108, 106, 104, 103 , 102, and 101. I can get these almost all of the time, any of them when i try. You should learn how to do as many of them as possible. Just remember, your swing animation will change the timing for all of this, so pick a swing animation and stick to it and learn how to use only it. I myself just use the default swing that your golfer starts with.

Building your golfer

Step 1 - Get Your Stats Up
They made this easy by allowing you to purchase everything with real $$$$ this year so you can bypass playing any of the offline game by doing so. You can even purchase max stats suits that automatically make you full without playing the game at all. If you wish to do this you can skip the rest of this building your golfer. If not keep reading.
You can create a course in this game using holes from different courses. You can use this to create a course using one easy hole or a set of 2 or 3 easy holes. In my own course i used Hole 1 *. Andrews for holes 1-9. Hole 5 *. Andrews for holes 10-18. Hole 1 allowed me to make sure i hit the fairway and the green. And also allowed me to have a short approach to ensure getting it close with a flop. Hole 5 allowed me to max my distance by bombing drives and also gave me a flat easy green to get 150 yard approaches close to boost my accuracy. You can use any holes you like tho as there are lots of easy ones. Once you get your course set up play it several times on easy settings in a stroke play game and your stats will go up at the end of each round.

Step 2 - Unlocking Items
Your best bet is to just beat everything in the game. You have good stats now so the challenges are much easier compared to starting everything at scratch. When you do the PGA Tour season make sure you set it to 1 round only as it will take A LOT less time to go thru it. If you don't want to play all the game has to offer, you can go to the pro shop and look at what items that you want to unlock. It will tell you in there how to unlock it. THis way you can point out certain things to take care of in the game and once they are all done you are set.

Step 3 - Getting to all 12's (and keeping it there)
If you are at all 12's at this point, bravo. Well Done! If not, this is where you bring back your custom course. Go play it as perfect as you can play it until you have all 12's. Now you must remember that any point of the offline game (except practice round or any game with mulligans) and the Live Tournaments online will make your stats adjust depending on your level of play. You can bypass this 2 ways. 1)Wear a max stats suit when you do any of these modes on the game 2)Save your maxed out golfer to a second profile on your ps3. Just copy it in your save game data to that user. Then when your stats happen to drop in a game, you can just delete your guy and copy the backup back to your normal user. Lastly, your stats will not drop when playing Gamernet or playing any peer to peer online games via the lobby or searching matches.

Tuning Your Clubs

First off this is all based on your personal preference. I will just key on the few basic concepts you should keep in mind when tuning your clubs:
1) Make sure you have Expert level clubs. This will allow you maximum ability to tune your clubs allowing for full everything.
2) Keep in mind what clubs you will have in your bag. Then get your distances spread based on those clubs making sure you have as few gaps as possible.
3) Workability - There are very few points in the game where all this is needed. Just occasionally with your Driver. Not using all of this on your irons and wedges will allow for some forgiveness on your sweet spot.
4) Spin - This is the natural spin on the ball when its in the air. It does not affect your ability to spin. There are 20 taps of spin in this game that you have regardless of your tuning. 100% spin... on wedges will make your shot come back faster when they land on the green... on irons will mike your shots stick or not go forward as much (these are both also dependent on green hardness.....I'll get to that later) 0% obviously does the opposite of these. Another thing spin does is effect your ball flight. The higher your spin, the higher the ball arcs and vice versa. This arc will also effect how much the wind effects your shots (but I'll get into that later as well)

As far as the way mine are tuned..... I have 2 setups. One for tour mode and one for amateur/pro. I won't tell you exactly the way they are but their differences are this :
1) Tour bag has smaller gaps in the clubs since there is no power used.
2) Tour bag has more spin on my clubs so that shots will sit down on green better.
3) My wedges go farther in tour mode and are shorter than one would think for default.

Know Your Clubs

This is a big one that I'll split up into a few parts. Just want to point out that all of the info in this section is based on how you set your clubs up. You need to figure out all of this ON YOUR OWN by practicing with YOUR clubs. How I go about some of these things or how someone else does it will not work unless you have the same exact setup. Just the slightest tweak will change these things.

1)Distances: You need to know where your clubs land at. The #'s the game shows you on the screen are based on a shot hit with no wind onto a flat fairway. These numbers also change from game to game based on the fairway hardness. But even though the #'s change the club still lands at the same distance every time. It helps to write your landing spot distances down on a sheet of paper. I know what your saying.......this guy is telling me to write stuff down about a video game, is he gonna have me making course maps next?.........the truth is that all you need to write down is this 1 good yardage sheet. You can navigate your way around any course just knowing your numbers. Go to the club tuner to get these #'s on paper. I figure out where every shot lands for the following : 122%, 112%, 100%, 95%, 90%, 85% - all of these without touching loft stick, with full back loft, and with full front loft (full front only on 9 iron and all wedges) also 122%, 112%, 100%, 95%, 90% for flops and pitches. I know this sounds like a lot but I fit all this onto 1 sheet of paper. And every year that paper gets abused and wrinkled and torn in spots, but it lasts all year and its all you need.

2)After Landing(Green Hardness): Now that you know where your clubs land you need to now what they will do when they land. This deals with the green hardness. There are 4 settings (soft, average, hard, and very hard). In online games the hardness for the greens is the same as the green speed. (ex. fast greens = hard greens) Now you need to know what each club does when it lands on each harness. Does your AW come back, go forward, sit still? Does your 7 iron sit or release forward? Does your 5 iron release forward 3 yards on hard greens and 6 yards on very hard? This is kind of a lot of work learning this. You can figure out some things using your practice round but then a lot of this is just figured out by playing the game. There are a lot of variables on this as well involving the wind and the slope of the green. Wind at your back will make the ball release forward more on a club the releases forward or prevent a club that normally spins backward from spinning back as much. Wind in your face will prevent forward release and make your backspin clubs come back faster. The green slope part is pretty self explanatory. Just something I'd mention for those of you who aren't thinking about that.

3)In the Air(The Wind): The biggest mystery in the game. If you can master this part you have the tool it takes to knocking the ball in the hole. First off, if you didn't know...... there is a 1 wind in this game. What i mean by that is that there is not a #0 for a wind. 0 is the 1. To put it in better terms, sometimes the 1 wind is actually a 1 wind, and sometimes it is a 0 wind even tho it says 1. This is just a guessing game. I haven't figured out any tricked to telling them apart beyond someone else hitting a shot and telling me. Some online guys will hang back on a hole (i should say make a living off of) and steal what the wind is by looking at your ball arc. Second off, keep in mind one basic principal..... the higher the ball goes and the longer it's in the air......the more the wind pushes it. Now as for a starting point..... I used practice mode again to help me figure this out. I reloaded Hole 5 at *. Andys til i got a 1 wind that was blowing perfectly sideways at 9 o'clock. Then i dropped balls in the center of the fairway and i hit shots. You want to see how far that 1 wind moves each of your clubs at different swing %'s. The more power you give, the more the wind moves it. The more pause you give, the less the wind moves it. The best thing Ive found to use to mark your winds is the writing inside the club info box. I myself put the pin in the dead middle of the circle, and then slide my circle to the side from there to move it. I use the tip of the pin's position inside the info box to gauge my 1 wind. If you can figure out how much the 1 moves all your clubs....then when you have a 5 sideways, you just line up for 5 1's correct? For distance effect on clubs you can do the same thing just waiting for a 1 in your face and a 1 at your back. Again, each club is different so test them all. I will just point out the basic thought that wind in your face holds you up more than downwind will carry you.

4)Up or Down a Hill: Basic Priciple - the higher the arc on the shot, the less elevation effects it. Thsi again you have to figure out for your own clubs. For me approx..... my short wedges are 5 ft = 1 yard, long wedges are 4 ft = 1 yard, short to mid irons 3.5 ft = 1 yard, mid to long irons 3 ft = 1 yard. Yours should be somewhere in here but test for yourself.

Routine to hitting a shot

You need to follow a routine every time you line up your shots. I'll give you mine:
1)Figure out the distance need to fly to my landing spot. Obviously I did my distances to where shots land for this reason. Do I want to bring it in the back door? Am I going in the front? Key being where you are landing it. Make sure to factor in the wind and elevation change.
2)Figure out the % and the club needed to get your distance.
3)Line up for the wind. You now know what club and % you are going to use so you can now line keeping that knowledge in mind.
4)If you know the break, adjust for that too. Most greens are noticeable from the fairway but some you just have to know. This comes with playing a lot.

Putting

Apparently I have no clue how to do this. So I guess I'll leave this up to someone else to tell you. I will let you know that putting is very easy. Just get your green speeds down and figure the elevation change. Reading the grids comes with practice. A helpful aid is switching to a chip shot on the green so that you get a grid that you can move around to get a reading on all green.

Knowing Courses

Many players on this game "map" courses. They play a course a few times offline and write things down so that they know what to do every step of the way. There is a downside to this tho. Once these players get off their mapped courses they don't know how to figure things out on the fly. IMO, you only need to know what your clubs do and from there you can just play the numbers on the screen along with the conditions of the course. If you do want to take time to know the courses better you shouldn't "map" them offline. You should play them online under the pressure of an actual game. Mix them all up as much as possible. I personally run a system where i just rotate to the next course when setting up my games and I mostly play 18's, which helps me to know the entire course instead of just the front or back 9. Now what I have done for the first time ever this year, (and it is definitely what has made me better at this game than any of the previous) is that I have mapped the pin placements. Nothing extensive. I simply have a # and arrow for every pin in the game. For example the Expert Pin on the 1st hole of Torrey Pines is a (1 <--) meaning it just goes a little bit left. I have my own system for the #'s and they only go as high as 10 and the couple of those are on Predator. I wrote these ratings down as I played each course for the first time online. I spent no time offline for this. I was able to fit it all on 2 sheets of paper front and back. And just writing each down has helped to remember them. Now I rarely ever look at those sheets anymore cause I remember them all so well, but on the occasion I can't remember, I have it right there.

Holing Out Full Swings with Wedges

You need the right roll - by this I mean that you want the ball to be rolling at the hole at the correct speed to drop. If it is going to roll too fast it will probably doink. If it lands too close it will probably doink (or dunk glitch). You want to land the ball so that it has enough room to strat rolling and then make sure it is not rolling too fast. The key to this is club selection combined with green hardness. Hopefully you figured out how each of your clubs reacts to each of the green hardness. If you did, you need to figure out your best club on each hardness. The one that comes back on its own but not too fast. Then try to lay up to that club off the tee. For me i try for the following... Soft Greens - a distance where i can slightly pause my AW. Average Greens - a distance where i can hit a full AW. Hard Greens - my GW. Very Hard Greens - either my SW or my LBW depending on whether or not I am with the wind or into the wind. Each of these clubs reacts almost exactly alike when on each of these hardness settings for me. Yours may be different so check for yourself. Now laying up to these clubs is really easy to do if you can do some quick math. It gives you the distance to the hole off each tee. 400 yds to hole and hole is dead straight, you want 145 into the hole, hit your drive 255. Simple. Just make sure you account for doglegs as it doesn't measure around the dogleg off the tee, but it measures straight to the pin.

Spinning your perfect club in the hole - So you lay up to the perfect yardage. You know what to hit and that your ball is going to roll backwards perfectly. But you misplay the wind and you see the ball coming in a bit offline. There is a simple skilled manner in which you can still give the ball a good run at the hole. Since you know the ball is gonna come back on its own all you have to do is steer it in. You don't have to give it some crazy panic spin at some random angle towards the hole. You can simply give it spin taps sideways at 3 or 9 o'clock. See the ball coming in a little left of the hole...... 2 or 3 taps right should steer it over there. Missing by a good yard or two... try like 12 to 15 taps sideways. Your ball will still roll backwards, just back at an angle towards the hole. The side spin can also be used to hold the line of the break. Say you know that the hole breaks a cup or two left. You see that you are going to land right on line with the hole but you know it will break out of the hole. You can give that shot 2 or 3 taps to the right and it just might hold a straight line the whole way back canceling the break. In conclusion, you can use the spin in a controlled manner. You don't just have to panic spin it in random directions and hope to get lucky. Only do that when you are waaaaaay off line.

Topics to come:
- Holing out with pitches
- Holing out with flops
- The punch shot - $$$ shot that so few use.
- Tips for Tour Mode

The Masters

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13

Electronic Arts

Highlighted Game

Mass Effect 3