SQJ Taipei

I really enjoy playing golf. Wish I could play more in Taiwan… but WAY too expensive in the Taipei area and I just don’t have the time to play as much as I would want to in order to play well.

So… here at my house… we do the next best thing… go to the driving range occasionally and play Tiger Woods 2007 on the XBOX. It is a great game. My friend Keevin and I played a bit while he was here and he went home to the US and bought it to play with his son.

There are several details I could point out about the game… if this were a review of TW2007. But it ain’t.

One of the details of TW2007 is that you can enable “specials” or side-bets when you play against other golfers… real or CPU controlled. I snagged $100,000 from Appleby, Daly, and Goosen tonight. I noticed that I was winning some bets that I didn’t know what they meant… namely: Polie, Arnie, and Greenie. The ones I did know were Bingo, Bango, Bongo, Snake and a few others.

I decided to look up the ones I didn’t know and found a nice listing of “specials” from the gentleman at Senior Men’s Golf Association of The Hills Course @ Stonebridge Ranch

On that page, I found out about all the specials that I didn’t already know and found a bunch of others that were totally new to me. Not all specials involve money… and those that do are provided for informational and research purposes only. One of my favorites:

No Alibis
No Alibis is a game of do-overs, or mulligans that can be used from any point on the course. In No Alibis, handicaps are converted into free shots that are used during a round. Say a player has a handicap of 14. Rather than applying the handicap in the proper manner, the player is instead given 14 free shots to use at any point on the course, at any time. Hit a bad shot off the second tee? Hit it again. Now you’ve got 13 left. The game can be played with full handicaps (as in the example above) but it most common to use only three-fourths or two-thirds of handicaps. That forces the player to be judicious in using his replay strokes. Two other conditions usually apply: The first tee shot of the day may not be replayed, and no shot can be replayed twice. Also Known As: Wipe Out, Play It Again Sam, Criers and Whiners, Replay

That means when I play with my brother that I’d get about 25 more do-overs than he would get. I bet he’d still win… he’d probably beat me at TW2007 too.

My Chinese is better though.