Hole in One

if he made this hole in 1 every 500 shots he should give up golf and start carnival-work


your story reminds me of a joke


so there were this girl and guy looking over the side of the cruise-ship at sharks swimming below


she asked, "if i fell in there, would they eat me whole?"


he answered, "no - they'd leave that bit"

There are holes of approximately that distance that Tiger plays. And to say that his chance of making an ace on Thur. or Fri. is zero- well that is just ridiculous. I think the 2000 to 1 odds is overlooking 2 things. First, some shots on line but long will hit the pin and go in. Second, the ball rolling through those sq. inches at a slow enough speed will also fall in. Add to that the fact that he IS Tiger, I think about 900 to 1 is ball park. To fine tune it any further, other factors need to be known. ( firmness and contour of green, pin placement, wind speed and direction, etc.)

Speaking of carnival work, I think I was cheated at a recent state fair (big surprise). You had to shoot a star out of a piece of paper completely using a machine gun with limited bullets. As far as I could see I did it and left a huge hole, but when the guy hauled the card back in, there was a small piece of star left. Others have had the same experience. Last year I left that exact same little piece after thinking I shot the whole thing. The next day I remembered something. When the guy hauled the card in, he held up a new card in front of the old one so I couldn't see my target right away. I think he used slight of hand and swapped my card with a standard one with a little piece left.


I noticed that many games involve stars. Shoot out a star, hit a star with a dart, throw a football through a star shaped hole. Mathematically I believe stars maximize perimitter for a given area, or something similar to that. I suppose that makes the games look easier than they are.


In another game you had to place 5 circles so they completely covered a big circle. I was barred from this game when they caught me making some relative measurements.


Anyone know anything about beating any of these games and cheating methods? I know there isn't alot of money to be made in analyzing carnival games, but I would have liked to have won the giant dog. I had to settle for a smaller one, although I did win a giant snake in a pool game.

How often do you think he'll hit the green, and how tight will his shots be left to right 95% of the time?

I think 15 ft. left or right is app. correct. It will be a tighter pattern front to back.

From Scarne's complete guide to gambling..


..If there ever was a game of skill or science, Spot the Spot is it.......


...Experiments I have made show that chance and skill both play a role in Spot the Spot. The probability that a skilled player can drop a disk from a six-inch height onto the exact position on the red circle is about 1 in 3......This means that the probability that a player will make five perfect drops is 1 in 243......


...The operator is able to succeed in his demonstration because he has practiced a smooth,deceptive move. His hand sweeps quickly over he red spot in a fast back-and-forth movement which is confusing and hides the fact that the disk, at the moment he drops it, is only an inch or so above the layout........


...some operators also carry a slightly larger set of disks....

Assume that he can hit center of green about 40% of the time, center is a 20 ft circle around cup, and that any where in center is equally likely. Area of center is the square of (20*12/2)*pi. Assume cup is 3 inches in diameter, and has area 1.5*1.5*pi. Then probability of hole in one is area of cup divided by area of center, times the .40 chance that he is in the center. I get about 0.0000625.

this is a good prediction but i think your maths is slightly off


area of centre is 45257 sq ins and area of hole is 7.07 sq ins


so he holes 1 in 6401 hits of the green with probability of 0.015625 x 0.40 = 0.00625 or once in every 16,000 shots

The cup is 4 1/4 in. in diameter. I think your 40% estimate is low. And, a ball will finish in the hole more often than just the number of times it should stop within that diameter. If the hole were just a painted circle on the green, there would be many, many fewer holes-in-one than what there actually are. Balls hit the pin and fall in; balls rolling fast, medium and slow speeds sometimes find the bottom of the cup. Occasionally, a bouncing ball will land and stay in the hole.