Before helping create one of the biggest companies in the golf world, Jared Solomon played poker professionally. He lived through the early days of the internet poker craze and saw how the game “blew up” through an expanded digital presence, perhaps most notably Chris Moneymaker’s groundbreaking win at the 2003 World Series of Poker as the first participant to win a world championship after qualifying at an online site.
A platform like DraftKings has had a similar seismic impact more recently in the world of sports betting.
As the CEO of Five Iron Golf, one of the biggest commercial simulator companies in the world with 40 U.S. locations (and counting) in 19 states, Solomon sees similar opportunity within the world of golf – in this case, the rapidly growing realm of off-course golf. Using online poker and DraftKings as inspiration – at least in terms of the surges in popularity and engagement they fostered within other industries – Solomon and Five Iron have launched a new tournament platform that introduces on-demand play for prize money across its network of venues.
As in the online poker world, this platform is built on flexible formats – 9- and 18-hole tournaments, closest-to-the-pin competitions, jackpot-style competitions that build until a player makes a hole-in-one, team events, gross and net play – that are time-bound but continuously accessible. It’s indoor golf’s version of a “sit-and-go,” meaning players can buy-in whenever they want and play for prize money during a given window. There are real-time leaderboards and guaranteed prize pools for the wide range of contest types.
“When we talk about off-course golf and where the sport is going, we talk about venues a lot: TopGolf, Five Iron, and so on, but we don’t talk really a lot about the different ways that you can play golf or consume golf,” Solomon said. “So that’s what we’re really excited about, and sort of inventing in some ways, is this new way to play with the competition and gamifying it all.”
Gamification is a buzz word in many industries in terms of yielding greater engagement, which is the opportunity Solomon and the Five Iron team see in the indoor simulator space. The new platform is a way to gamify practice and create more opportunities for play through a tight ecosystem – and in this case, play for real prize money, from a $1 entry for a closest-to-the-pin contest on the par-3 17th hole at PGA West in La Quinta, California, to a $10 entry for a 9-hole, individual stroke-play tournament, and much more.
“Everybody’s like, ‘How do we grow the game? How do we make it more appealing?’” said Solomon. “Well, you have people with shorter attention spans, you have people that are used to technology, you have people that are used to gaming and competing in everything growing up.”
The new tournament platform, easily accessible through the Five Iron app, has proven popular in beta testing among Five Iron members, with more than 1,000 entries logging nearly 20,000 tournament entries. Approximately two-thirds of those (65%) come back to compete multiple times a month. This year, participants will have the opportunity to compete for hundreds of thousands of dollars in guaranteed prize pools, with the initial launch this month spanning 15 markets in 14 states (and Washington D.C.). A full nationwide rollout is expected by late summer.
Engagement Over Profit
Five Iron executives say the new platform is not intended to be a profit tool.
The company’s goal is to provide more ways for golfers to play and compete any time of the day, every day of the week, and provide more avenues to do so.
“This isn’t about extracting money from participants. The goal is for people to enjoy themselves,” said Martin Adler, Five Iron Golf’s President of New Ventures, who notes that that there are free events and when guests pay $1 to sign up for their first tournament, another $10 is put in their online account. “We want people feeling good about the experience rather than a platform that’s ‘maximally extractive.’”
Players can compete, with net and gross scoring formats, using Five Iron’s proprietary handicap system to ensure a competitive balance – and limit “sand-bagging.” Most competitions are relatively low stakes; a 15-player 9-hole event with a $3 entry would yield $40 in guaranteed payouts, for example, potentially with the top five winning prize money.
“There (are) hour tournaments, weekly tournaments, daily tournaments, month-long tournaments,” said Solomon. “And anytime during that period of time you can play: a 9-hole match, a 4-hole match, you could play a tournament where the top 50% double their money. You can play a tournament where it’s winner takes all. Or you can play a tournament that is your typical poker payouts.”
Simulator Technology
In creating this new competitive layer for the indoor game with money on the line, the accuracy of the technology is imperative. In Five Iron’s case, that’s Trackman, one of the most well-known names in the game when it comes to launch monitor accuracy.
“We have footage of every single shot. So, we have our own internal referee and mulligan system as well that’s built into it,” said Solomon. “I come from the poker world where you can lose credibility really quickly if it’s not accurate.”
Ultimately, the new platform – one that was about three years in the making — is aimed at layering competition into the existing social experience, with the tournaments intended to increase engagement. This is just a new-age and frictionless digital format, one where players can drop in and compete whenever they want.
“Golf has done a really good job at is leveraging YouTube and audience and viral moments and things like that,” said Solomon. “This should lend itself to tons of viral moments — people getting hole-in-ones in a closest to the pin contest, winning real money, losing their minds. This is what golf needs for today’s day and age in terms of getting amateurs on the screen like poker did.”
