Shawn Zack
If the dystopian predictions are correct, robots will soon take over the world. They will steal our jobs, enslave our minds. The worst of them will disrupt our tee times.
As many Los Angeles golfers say, that bleak future has already arrived.
Anyway, those were the refrains I kept hearing on my recent trip to Los Angeles, during which I traveled from local munnie to local munnie, searching for answers. On stop after stop, the golfers I spoke with had the same complaint: Booking reservations at city and county courses became nearly impossible.
On the one hand, this was not surprising. Los Angeles has the busiest year-round local golf market in the country, and the Covid boom has fueled demand. Yet local golfers have told me over and over that even the post-pandemic spike in participation is no reason for the feeding frenzy that occurs whenever new times are released in Los Angeles. In a matter of seconds, they said, all the coveted slots are devoured, thousands upon thousands of times, at the speed of broadband.
Humans definitely book most of that time. But among the golfers I spoke to, the consensus was that bots held some of the blame.
This seemed reasonable to me.
After all, bots have been around for years, used illegally to buy tickets for everything from playoff games to Taylor Swift’s concerts. If they have infiltrated other industries, why should tee caps be immune?
Back in the days when I was in Los Angeles, public frustration with bots was heightened further by a newly posted Instagram ad aimed at the local golf market. That was for a company called Bot-It, which positions itself as an AI-powered personal assistant capable of handling all sorts of online tasks, including reservations at coveted LA munis.
Are you trying to get time in Rancho Park? Try Bot-Itwas the gist of the social media promotion — though when I tried to use the Bot-It to get myself into Rancho Park, I didn’t see any times available.
Believe it or not, the ad caused enough of a stir that almost every golfer I met made a point of offering it to me. They felt it was a digital smoke gun.
That seemed logical too. But because “feeling” and “real” in golf aren’t always the same thing, I had to ask: Is this really what happens? Are Los Angeles Golf Reservations Under Blade Runner-Like Attack? If so, who is deploying these bots, and for what purpose? How misunderstood are they for business?
“Yes, we are well aware of the ‘alleged’ bots out there,” Rick Reinschmidt, Los Angeles City Director of Golf, told me in an email. But he added that the city has not yet been provided with any hard evidence that anyone is “using a bot to get times.” Going off with an advantage over everyone else.”
If such evidence ever comes to light, Reinschmidt writes, “we will certainly address it.”
Reinschmidt was not suggesting that robots should not exist. (The town’s golf website has a warning in boldface on its homepage warning against its use.) But he He was In saying that the city saw no sign that those bots were getting past its defenses, which include an online booking engine, operated by GolfNow, equipped with bot-squashing technology.
(A GolfNow spokesperson confirmed that in 2022, the company’s electronic defenses have thwarted more than a million bot attempts on the city’s tee boards.)
In a follow-up phone call, Reinschmidt told me that city employees were also keeping an eye on the Bot-It and, like me, didn’t see any of the hard-to-get tee times promised in the ad.
However, I had to wonder about something else. It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has gotten pretty awesome. Nor is it a secret that municipalities are not always at the forefront of cybersecurity.
Could other bots have been booking pole times in the Los Angeles area without being detected?
It’s not like this hasn’t happened before.
Chris May is a Los Angeles-based golf industry veteran who serves as senior vice president at Supreme Golf, a company he describes as a “golf kayak,” where courses help “navigate the crazy world of electronic tee boards and automated billing. “
One of Supreme’s clients is American Golf, which operates nine cities in the Los Angeles County system including Los Verdes, a coastal course located southwest of downtown Los Angeles that ranks among the toughest in the country. Two years ago, May told me, two avid golfers with high-tech backgrounds built a bot that hacked Los Verdes’ online tee page, resetting the reservation system’s clock so it could book times hours before those holes were available to the general public. The scheme only appeared when the bot’s algorithm broke down, filling an entire day of tee times with the same names.
The jig was up.
May said the discovery of the breach prompted Supreme Golf “to begin working with some high-level security officials” to strengthen its safeguards.
By all appearances, those guarantees worked. However, May admitted that combating bots is “like a game of Whac-a-Mole” — you drop one, and another pops up somewhere else.
Complicating matters further, there are “good” bots and “bad” bots. Good stuff is essential to running websites. “So you have to find a way to let them in while keeping the bad guys out,” May said.
This requires constant vigilance.
As we spoke, May said he was on his computer, tracking activity around Los Verdes’ online tee sheet. The way he described it, the reservation system looked like a castle under siege.
“Right now, there are 120 bots trying to get in,” he said. “We have about 85 to 90 people that we know are bad actors.” May said some other people deemed suspicious by the cybersecurity system were being held in a digital waiting room, and would only be allowed in if they passed a rigorous background check.
Just as there are different types of bots, there are different motivations for booking tee times. Most golfers are simply looking for a secure reservation for themselves and their friends. There is nothing wrong with that – unless they circumvent the rules to game a Moony system that is meant to be fair and inclusive. This slippery exercise bot before dates; It’s as old a tradition as bribing the initiator, and it’s a simulated offense that’s as difficult to thwart and perhaps even harder to stop than a booking bot at tee time. Algorithms often leave a clearer trail than a nod and a wink on the first tee.
But there are also people who book tee times to resell them. Los Angeles scalpers are a “small but persistent” presence, May said, “and I bet it’s a marginally bigger problem than bots at this point, mainly because it’s driven by human interaction with booking engines.” For the most part, he said, scalpers don’t use bots. They attack reservation systems with constantly changing email addresses or accounts.
“We go in, find them and disable accounts that we think are abusing the system,” May said. “But they come back very quickly with new accounts, different IP addresses, etc.”
Resale platforms are also hard to find, May said, as speculators often use obscure websites and Craigslist-style bulletin boards in languages other than English, with transactions conducted by text or WhatsApp-style messages.
If putters are more prevalent in the Los Angeles golf district than robots, the technology behind them is far less sophisticated. And bots are evolving at a much faster pace. May said they first came to his attention in the fall of 2020, as courses reopened after the pandemic shutdown. The demand for golf was skyrocketing, and many monies were scrambling to adapt to contactless booking and payment. It was around that time, May said, that he started seeing Reddit posts from people looking for information on how to use the bot to book a tee time. About a year later, the first commercial marketing of tee-time bots caught his attention, in the form of a service called NoTeeFy. All the while, bots for individual consumers have continued to advance, becoming more accessible and intuitive — making it easier for tech-dinosaurs like myself to use them.
This isn’t to say that I’ve found a bot that can give me playtime at Rancho Park. The fact that I didn’t suggest that what people like May and Rick Reinschmidt, of the city’s golf department, have told me is true: that robots, while real, don’t rough-saw through the LA muni system. It is not a big problem as it is widely perceived.
Never mind AI The biggest challenge facing golfers in Los Angeles is simple economics: supply and demand. The busiest golf market in the United States is also the most thirsty golfer, according to statistics from the National Golf Association, with more people competing for fewer holes than any metropolitan area in the country. Like the middle class, the middle of the Los Angeles golf market has been depleted, drained in recent decades by the closing of daily fee courses. These days, if you don’t belong to a private club, you’re probably competing for Monis’ tee slots. And because you know those times get hijacked quickly, you call right when reservations open, along with everyone else.
In such a climate, it’s understandable that golfers would start blaming the bots.
Or, as Craig Kessler of the Golf Association of Southern California recently wrote in FourSociety’s Journal: “How an entire 9-day tee can sell in less than 20 seconds, critics complain, never thinking the problem isn’t bots; the problem is the market that creates value.”
This was a point echoed to me by Jorge Padel, the former Los Angeles County Golf Director who now works in community outreach for American Golf.
“We have a lot more golfers than we used to have,” Padel said. “But we don’t have any more golf courses.”
However, Padel added, “The people who complain the most about how hard it is to get out to Monis — those people are still playing golf.”
I tend to agree. But I also don’t dismiss those miserable expectations. The robots are coming. They will make us miserable in many ways. They just didn’t take our tee sheets.
Until now.