Best Golf Courses In Las Vegas

Best Golf Courses In Las Vegas

Las Vegas is famous for many things, among them golf. It has been a regular venue for the PGA Tour ever since 1983. The Panasonic Las Vegas Pro Celebrity Classic debuted that season, and had the highest purse of any Tour event at $750,000 (the next largest at that time was the Tournament Players Championship at $700,000). Golfing history has been made here in other ways too, whether it is a FBI surveillance plane making an emergency landing on one of the courses, a deliberately false yardage, or a 20-year-old Tiger Woods winning for the first time on Tour. For these and other tales, and for all the key info on the best golf courses in Las Vegas read on.

Bali Hai Golf Club

• Designed by: Lee Schmidt & Brian Curley
• Par: 71
• Yardage: 7,002 Yards
• Green fee: Various packages
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The course has 100,000 Balinese tropical plants growing on it – not that we have counted them – and the seven-acres of water features includes the water that encloses most of the par-3 15th green. Players may wish is was a true island green, as the landlocked part includes a restaurant terrace, giving players, at certain times, an audience that they may or may not wish depending on how they have tackled this hole.

Las Vegas Country Club

• Designed by: Ed Ault
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,215 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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The 18th is a par-5 dogleg with the wide shallow green fronted by a lake and one of the legends of the history of the club is that a sprinkler head on the approach was purposefully marked with the wrong yardage, so members could win the hole, and bets, over their guests. Another is when an FBI surveillance plane made an emergency landing on the course, which was dramatized in the 1995 movie “Casino” and commemorated with a plane placed there (above).

Las Vegas Paiute Resort (The Wolf)

• Designed by: Pete Dye
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,604 Yards
• Green fee: $89-$259
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Proudly boasting that it is the longest course in Nevada, it will be no surprise to you to learn that The Wolf is considered the hardest of the three courses at Paiute. There are five tee options, which means that the 15th hole (above), to a three-tiered island green, can be played from between 98 and 182 yards.

Shadow Creek

• Designed by: Tom Fazio
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,560 Yards
• Green fee: $750-$1,000, MGM hotel guests only
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If you think Augusta National is hard to get a game at, well Shadow Creek is not much easier. Access is extremely limited and, for starters, you have to be staying at a MGM property to qualify for the small number of tee times made available to the public. MGM bought this course from Steve Wynn, a Vegas hotel and real-estate magnate, who had built it, at a rumoured cost of dozens of millions of dollars, as a private place for him to invite his friends for a round. As one does.

The Summit Club

• Designed by: Tom Fazio
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,022 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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Rather than design a desert course, Fazio created a parkland layout, complete with man-made creeks, in desert surroundings. There are 19 holes here, as there is a par-3 19th built for those who need to settle a tied match or for a double-or-quits bet - as had been the original intention at Augusta National as well.

TPC Las Vegas

• Designed by: Bobby Weed & Raymond Floyd
• Par: 71
• Yardage: 7,016 Yards
• Green fee: $195-$300
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The high elevation – between 2,000ft and 2,500 feet – of this layout can add an extra 10 yards to your drives. Even putts may go a tad further than you expect, too, so read them carefully – if in doubt, most putts here break away from the mountains. The course involves a series of forced carries to ribbons or peninsulas of grass fairways running through the unforgiving desert landscape – especially unforgiving if you ball tumbles into one of the arroyos, such as the one (above) on the inside of the gently doglegged 14th. These desert surroundings have given the par-3 2nd a waterless island green, one of several striking holes at TPC Las Vegas.

TPC Summerlin

• Designed by: Bobby Weed & Fuzzy Zoeller
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,243 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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This layout is notable for a strong trio of finishing holes all of which have water hugging the green. The course has long featured on the PGA Tour. It was one of the courses that hosted the five-round Las Vegas Invitational of 1996 which gave Tiger Woods his first PGA Tour victory, and it is currently sole host of the Shriners Children’s Open.

Wynn Golf Club

• Designed by: Tom Fazio
• Par: 70
• Yardage: 6,722 Yards
• Green fee: $550
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Tom Fazio built a 7,042-yard course here which opened in 2005, but this track was mothballed in 2017 as the owners had plans to build on the site. Two years later, Fazio was called back in to resurrect and redesign his course. He did so with his son, Logan, and the result was eight new holes and 10 refurbished ones.