A contest winner perhaps?

If you are wondering if I am posting the change meter total you will be sadly disappointed.  Rather I just finished playing a Facebook app that I have mentioned in some notes, World Golf Tour (though it is also available in a non Facebook version) and I think I may have won something.  The thing is the game progresses in stages based on how good a golfer you become, I still suck and am stuck at amateur status.  That being said, one of the tricks to the game is that you can earn credits that can be applied to buying newer and better equipment.  You start with a pretty crappy set of clubs but get your first new set after completing one of the early challenges.  Stupid me earned the clubs and forgot to equip them.  So I was losing things like distance and accuracy and what not.  So I managed to rectify that situation last night and set about shooting some familiar courses to see what I could do.  The results were mixed, courses I was familiar with took some new getting used to, courses I didn't know were very much works in progress for my limited skill set.

There are numerous ways to earn credits to improve your clubs, but it is a time consuming process unless you just spend money and buy the credits outright, something I refuse to do.  That leaves a couple of options, completing special offers or winning tournaments.  Since I am cheap, if there is an offer for a few credits that requires little involvement, say watching a couple of short videos, then I will do it, but actually dropping coin, unless there is some great offer out there I have been dying to get/do, then my money will again stay in my wallet.

Another way is to enter tournaments.  There are usually a list of tournaments one can join, based on their skill level and they pay out in credits based on how well you do..  The tournaments are of two varieties, stroke play and closest to the pin.  A stroke play tournament is almost self explanatory, shoot the lowest round score as it relates to par.  Closest to the pin is a little different.  Your ball is placed in a place on the course where you have one shot to get as close to the pin as is possible.  The shot ranges vary from anywhere between 75 and 220 yards, depending on the hole and the course the tournament is taking place on.  You get 1 point for every foot from the hole you end up, plus penalties if the ball ends up on the fringe (+5), fairway (+10), rough (+20), sand (+30 I think), water (+40) and lost ball (+50).  The tournaments pay out to the top 70 finishers, and while I had shot a few rounds on the current weekly challenge, the best I could do was around 66th place, good enough provided no one beat that score over the next couple of days so it was a tenuous place at best.  Until now, now I feel confident that I might have actually won something, with a score of 201.51, good enough for 28th place on a nine hole challenge, hitting 7 of 9 greens and fringing 2 others.  As for how the round went down

1.  20.75 ft
2.  17.79 ft
3.  9.10 ft
4.  14.03 ft + 5 ft fringe penalty
5.  22.74 ft + 5 ft fringe penalty
6.  31.20 ft
7.  9.64 ft
8.  49.75 ft
9.  16.51 ft

Hopefully this means a new set of clubs will be in my future.