Playing The Ghost is Great Practice

What is the best practice routine?

We get this question asked many times a week, “what is the best practice routine for cornhole?” What a hard question to answer because honestly, it’s different for everyone. It really depends on what you need to work on. But playing against the Ghost is a great place to start.

Practice is meant to help you hone and refine your problem areas and make you better at whatever you do. Every cornhole player has different areas they need help in, so every player should have their own routine. But man, throwing bags over and over, back and forth with no goal can be boring! That is what makes this great and gives you a goal to work on improving.

Sometimes, you just want to play a game against other people but it's not always easy to find someone with the same skill set. You need someone on the same level as you. It gets old losing every game to someone more advanced and at the same time, it’s boring beating someone that is not as good as you. So who is going to be your best opponent, your best challenge? A Ghost player with the same PPR as yourself!

Sometimes, your best opponent is yourself

Believe it or not, your best opponent is yourself. That’s why we recommend for you to play the Ghost. Playing a Ghost is a great tool to add to your pratcice routine but it should not be your only. While this tool will help you work on getting the bag in the hole, it does not teach you any type of strategy since there are none of your opponents bags on the board to maneuver around. 

The main goal of this is to just put the bags in the hole. There is no blocking or strategy needed and what is great about this kind of practice is that the points you score are true. No one is there to "help" your bags in the hole. If you get all 4 bags in, it's because you put them there!

As much as we are Cornhole Addicts, throwing bags back and forth can be quite boring, sometimes, and tedious. While I am a strong proponent of working on your fundamentals, identifying problem areas, and working them out, I also believe that cornhole is supposed to be fun. So, it’s best to change up your routines and this is an excellent way to challenge yourself.

Who is the Ghost and how do I play against?

The Ghost is an imaginary player. You are going to pit yourself against this player at different levels and attempt to beat him. If you can do this, you will be able to beat almost anyone you face!

So how does the Ghost play? Perfectly. Yes, you heard me right. The Ghost never misses. Every round, the Ghost scores X points, without even throwing a bag. So, if you are playing the Ghost 7, every round you automatically start down 7 points. Which means you must throw 8 points or higher to score. Just imagine how that looks as you play against the Ghost 8, 9, 10 or 11! You need to be perfect! And the only way you will get there is with practice. 

The best tool for practicing is Scoreholio! If you are not familiar with this app, go to your app store on your device and download it today, set up a free account and check out the features. You may need to be a paid subscriber to access the practice tools but trust me, it's worth it's weight in gold! Once you have the app, go to the Player Profile section and all the way on the right, click the PRACTICE tab.

How to play against a Ghost for practice:

- First you want to figure out what level you should start at. We recommend not going below Ghost 5 as, for most, it would not be much of a challenge. Although, if you are a true beginner and can barely get your bags on the board, Ghost 4 might be where you want to start.

- Throw all 4 of your bags and tally up your score. If using the Scoreholio app, enter your round score and it does all the work for you!

- Continue to play the game as normal, keeping score every round. First to 21 wins

So how did your practice session against the Ghost go? Did you beat it or did it get the best of you? If you won easily, move up 1 point and see how that game goes. If you barely won, stay at that level until it becomes too easy. If you keep winning, keep going up. But, even though you destroyed the 6 Ghost by a score of 21-5, we recommend you move up by 1 point.

Many people will make the jump to 8 and skip 7 because they feel “they got it” based on their dominant performance against the 6 Ghost. But keep in mind, you must drop a minimum of 3 bags in the hole every round. to score 1 point on the 8 ghost. Let that sink in!!

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