2022 was the first time in a number of years that trainzwholesale has run weekly doubles. Except for the week I had Covid I was able to run dubs with the help of Arthur, and sometimes Cecile, our GM here at Sabattus. It’s a real team effort to make sure the shop stays running at the same time that we have people playing in our weekly tournament.

Random doubles was a blast whether it was rain or shine. I looked forward to playing and running dubs all week. The shop filled up 30 minutes before we pulled minis, Arthur saying “looks like a quiet night” right before everyone showed up, and of course the phone ringing off the hook with people who wanted to let us know they’d be 1-2 minutes late and could we wait? Dubs night has been my favorite of the week all year.

There’s a few takeaways from dubs now that we’ve wrapped up our Falcon/Eagle dubs for the year. And I want to share them all with you! So buckle up and be ready for some stats, and maybe some changes coming next year.

1. To win you have to shoot a 43 or better.

That’s 18 down on the Falcon.
The best rounds of the year were 41 on the Falcon by Ethan and Damien on June 9th, and a 52 on the Eagle by Kyle & Connor and Damien & Kaiden. The “worst” win was a 47, and looking at my notes everyone finished in the dark and rain. It did happen that a 43 wasn’t enough to cash one week, and it took a 42 to make cash, that week my partner and I shot a 43 of course.

2. We averaged 24 players per week.

That’s 6 full cards, and in the beginning it was awfully thin. We didn’t have 20+ players show up for a single dubs until June. I’m pretty pleased with that stat. I got to meet so many folks and I’m hoping that even more show up next year.

3. 39 was our most attended doubles.

We really ramped up in the summer, especially with a 500+ dollar ace pot on the line. After that night we made a new policy to draw minis outside, because almost 40 people in the shop are a lot at once. It was a little overwhelming the first time.

4. The Podium Player of the 2022 season is Chris Morley.

He had 4 first places and a 2nd place (in a playoff for first). Out of the 22 weeks that we played, he was able to finish in cash that many times, with 3 wins in a row in June/July. Honorable mention to Connor Moody who managed to finish 1,2,3 twice each. This is an award I just made up. We’ll see if it sticks for next year. Maybe I’ll make a WWE belt or something as a trophy.

5. We played the Falcon 17 times and the Eagle 5 times.

I’ll do better at getting a more even distribution of courses next year. There were 2 reasons that I chose to do dubs on the Falcon significantly more than the Eagle.
A. Multiple women suggested they’d rather play the Falcon because it’s a much more realistic distance and they can compete with the men. And we did have more women show up on Falcon weeks.
B. I wanted to see some aces! There are 16 aceable holes on the Falcon and 7 on the Eagle.

6. We went 5,635 ace chances without an ace.

Someone hit an ace on the last Hawk dubs of winter so there was no rollover ace pot. Then we had 16 weeks where the course fought against us. To put it another way, we aced .0001% of the time when Cory Mac finally hit hole 4 on the Falcon in August.

7. Cash only for dubs.

I know this is a bummer, we live in a society where some folks just don’t carry cash anymore. Sabattus is going to continue with our Cash only policy because it makes things easy to pay out.
The breakdown is
$5 for the round (which can be paid on a card.
$6 for the payout
$1 for the ace pot.

8. Setting up CTP’s so one card takes them out and another brings them in.

I feel like a bit of a genius for this one. We’d have maybe 6-7 cards each week. So I’d start them 1-5 and 16-18. Then make the card heading out to hole 5 take all the CTP flags out and the card on 16 pick them all up. This does lead to making all the CTP’s between holes 5-15, but the last 3 times I did this no one forgot to bring a flag in.

We offered a ladies singles league on Wednesdays at the same time as random dubs. With Women Wednesday it was free for women to play our Hawk course, 100% of the money spent on singles went back to them in the form of the cash CTP and payouts.

While we were not super successful in attracting a regular crowd, we’ll be offering ladies league again in 2023. Hopefully starting sooner in the year will allow us to push the start time back with more daylight, and promoting Women Wednesday’s will encourage more to play. Thank you to everyone who came out.

I offered food prizes each week as a CTP, Sabattus put up 2 stock stamp discs each week. And players often brought in food, drinks, discs, and even a sweet frisbee! I tried to always grab 2-3 of each prize. So you could split with your partner, and one for the ladies league. I like food prizes because they can be split. I think that for 2 hours a week you’re a team and should be able to split prizes. But it’s impossible to split a disc, so you usually just give it to the person who hit the shot. But maybe you played it safe for your partner to run it and you kind of wish you had thrown second now so you could have a shot at it. That’s my reasoning on having food CTP’s, it’s probably flawed.

If you can think of anything (other than booze) that you’d like for a CTP let me know so we can make it happen. I tried to mix up the holes as well, people tend to like CTP’s on shorter holes so everyone can reach them. I’m a fan of that 99% of the time.

Changes and Goals I’m thinking about for 2023 and the future.

1. UDisc pairings instead of drawing minis.

I used to joke that we run dubs as a way to sell minis. But some weeks we had 4 people without minis. I have some extras in the lost and found but it just makes sense if UDisc has the feature to have them randomize it.

2. Possible Odd/Evens holes for Falcon and Eagle.

I really like the layouts that Alex Olsen has set up at Devil’s Grove. He has multiple teepads on his Devil course (red, white, and blue) and makes custom scorecards with different countries' flags to play from different pads during the round. I’ll look into it with Arthur and Chris this winter and plan for maybe doing that every once in a while for fun.

3. Let’s get 48 players here for dubs one week.

Whether that’s a big ace pot, or a bunch of CTP’s one night to bring folks in I’m game. I really enjoy the dubs over at BSR in North Yarmouth because I think they have the biggest in Maine each week. It’s not uncommon for them to have 40+ people on a Thursday night.

4. Whenever the new course gets built, we’ll have a dubs round on it.

No, I have no timetable. I have no new updates on when it will be finished. But whenever we get it all ready to play you all will be invited.

5. Any changes you’d like to see.

I’d love to hear any suggestions! While I think we ran things fairly smoothly I would love advice or suggestions to improve our dubs. We have all winter to think about it and we’ll be starting back up with random dubs on the Falcon/Eagle in the Spring.

This Winter’s Singles and Dubs

Sabattus will be starting our Friday Night Under The Lights Singles League on November 4th, and our winter random dubs will begin on the Hawk course on November 5th. That’s right, no need to wait for the snow this year to get started.

Make sure to follow us on Facebook for more information, weather cancellations, and anything and everything else about our leagues.

May your discs miss all the trees,
Andrew Streeter #70397