City Golf Tour

City Golf Tour is an online golf league where you can regularly compete against players from across the country without ever actually meeting them in person. Using USGA handicaps and scores recorded from your local course, City Golf Tour lets you compete for prizes against 156 other hackers. The press release follows.

CityGolfTour.com Celebrates the Hacker in Us All

Not since greenskeeper, Carl Spackler, fired the shot from the Mum bed heard around the world of Bushwood C.C., has the amateur golfer been more celebrated.

Until now.

I’m proud to bring you, now on the first tee, playing out of Seattle, Washington, CityGolfTour.com.

Today, we launch a revolution in fantasy sports. CityGolfTour.com provides ANY golfer the opportunity to compete in national tournaments that you can play from your favorite home course. All you need is a USGA handicap and a City Golf Tour membership in this new concept in tournament golf.

Play begins in the inaugural tournament on July 12, 2010.

CityGolfTour.com is the brainchild of husband and wife team, Jack Hutt and Wendy Anderson. They have been running a Seattle golf league for amateurs by the same name for around ten years, when they decided to expand their vision online.

Golfers at every skill level are invited to compete.

CityGolfTour.com uses a combination of the player’s USGA handicap, the slope rating of the course they’re playing, and some secret sauce algorithm to level the playing field for fair competition. This way a 15+ handicap hack like me can compete with the Eubank phenoms of the world.

A total of $500 in cash prizes are awarded to the top 20 players, while 10% of all tournament entry fees goes to charity. Really, though, I think it’s going to be more about bragging rights than bucks. There’s still that competitive streak in all of us, even if it’s just with ourselves.

So tee one up for charity and make CityGolfTour.com a part of your game.

In the words of Carl, “It’s a Cinderella story.”

They’ve got rules to help prevent cheating, but since so many will cheat on their own handicaps with nothing on the line but pride, I’m not sure how they’ll avoid cheaters in the league. Maybe that “secret sauce algorithm” will compensate for that.

At any rate, it sounds like a neat idea.