When Waiting Becomes Optional

What started as a booking annoyance became a window into how automation is quietly reshaping access, in golf and beyond.

Photo by Zichao Zhang on Unsplash

At the Old Course at St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland, people used to wait in sleeping bags for a chance to play golf at the centuries-old course. The queue would stretch out in the early morning fog: duvets borrowed from hotels, camping chairs, quiet murmurs among strangers. The ritual was part of the allure—show up and wait your turn, and you too might get the chance to walk the most storied fairways in the world.

Today, there’s no line. You simply tap a tablet at St. Andrews the day before you want to play, take an unflattering mugshot and hope for the best.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new digital lottery at the Old Course at St. Andrews. In a definitional sense of the word—and definitely not in the modern American sense—the system felt democratic: no membership tiers, no hidden fees, no exclusive back doors. Just luck, and with it, a shot at something sacred.

But increasingly, across golf and beyond, luck is no longer enough.

Tee times—as well as tables at restaurants, appointments at salons and reservations for campsites—are typically secured in one of three ways: by showing up, calling ahead or booking online. If demand is high, it goes without saying: don’t bother showing up.

When a friend and I planned a golf trip to California in March, we did what most golfers now do: log on the moment the tee sheet opened, which was exactly one month before our intended play date.

For two of the three courses we had our eye on, that system worked well enough. We even booked a few days late. But the third? The tee times disappeared as quickly as they were posted.

“Dude,” my friend texted me after yet another failed attempt. “Something’s up.”

A quick search revealed what we’d started to suspect: the bots had beaten us.

Bots are everywhere. But like much of automation, they tend to fade into the background until something breaks, or until someone notices they've been outpaced by a machine.

Most bots help things run, indexing Google results, refreshing inventory at Target and helping Expedia aggregate airline fares. During the pandemic, they even helped people find vaccine appointments, scraping availability across providers and surfacing newly opened slots in real time.

But a growing number of bots don’t just gather information but act and mimic us, clicking buttons, filling out forms, refreshing pages hundreds of times per second. They’re the reason CAPTCHA tests now ask us to identify faint stoplights or squint at melting letters, which bots have become exceptionally good at bypassing.

These bots aren’t sophisticated hacking tools. Anyone with basic coding knowledge can deploy scripts like DMV-Appt-Bot and SNKRS-Bot, which are freely available on GitHub. Users can activate these scripts to auto-refresh pages, autofill booking forms, and trigger an action (like clicking “reserve”) as soon as a slot becomes available, sometimes hundreds of times per minute.

Those who prefer a plug-and-play option can turn to services like Bot-It, a Shark Tank season 15 contestant, which markets itself as “automation for all.” For anywhere from $9.99/month to $275/year, you can build or deploy a bot whether you’re trying to snag a tee time, a tennis court or a last-minute dinner reservation.

(I reached out to the founder of Bot-It and several others who operate automation services, including on Fiverr and TaskRabbit. None responded, which, to be honest, didn’t surprise me.)

In theory, bots could increase access for people often left out—those who struggle with web forms, or who can’t sit by their laptop refreshing at midnight. But in practice, bots have become a shortcut for those who already have an edge: a fast connection, the right tools and a willingness to pay.

The advantage they offer isn’t technical—it’s social. It’s access, bought and sold.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In March, Miami-Dade County uncovered a network of scalpers who booked appointments for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles and then sold them to people who were looking to skip the line for prices ranging from $25 to $250. A day later, the U.S. Embassy in India cancelled about 2,000 visa appointments that it determined were booked with bots.

On an equally important scale (blatant appeal to the Swifties), Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour had bots to blame. During the 2024 presale, Ticketmaster’s site received 3.5 billion requests in a single day and crashed. Later that day, the tickets reappeared on third-party resellers, demanding, in some cases, up to 70 times their face value.

While some guardrails have emerged in recent years—such as the U.S. BOTS Act of 2016, which prohibits ticket-buying bots that bypass security measures—they have rarely been enforced and primarily target the large-scale operations.

What used to be a line is now a marketplace.

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Golf has long prided itself on being egalitarian, at least in theory. At municipal courses like Harding Park in San Francisco, Rancho Park in Los Angeles, and Bethpage State Park on Long Island, the promise has always been the same: show up, pay your fee and you can walk the same fairways as the pros.

But when the pandemic made golf one of the few safe outdoor activities, demand surged. If there’s one thing to know about bots, it’s that where demand goes, they follow.

At Rancho Park and other L.A. city courses, brokers used bots and coordinated cancellations to hoard tee times, reselling them through private social networks. To combat the ensuing outcry, the city introduced a $10-per-player reservation fee, which is forfeited if the player cancels or fails to show. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped: cancellations dropped by 95% in the program’s first six months.

Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

Bethpage Black—arguably the most iconic public course in the U.S.—followed suit earlier this week. Now, players are charged when they book (not at check-in), must cancel at least 48 hours in advance, and are limited to six cancellations per month. It’s still lenient, but it did implement real change: friction.

Friction, in a world of speed and advantage, has long been the great equalizer in the queue. Imperfect, yes, but shared. And increasingly, optional.

In New York City, Robert Samuel founded Same Ole Line Dudes, a business that offers line-waiting services. During Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in 2023, clients paid up to $1,800 to hold a front-row spot; Samuel's company has had to increase its staff and double its rates to meet the surge in demand. On TaskRabbit and Fiverr, line-holding is now a booming niche, holding the line until you can swoop in just before your turn.

Waiting was never just about time; it was about trust, where if you showed up early and followed the rules, you had a fair shot. When the queue disappears, so does that trust, and in its place, we’re left with something colder, more transactional. On the surface, everyone is invited, but not everyone gets a chance to actually line up.

My friend and I never did get to play that course in California. At one point, he even enlisted a budget-tier bot from Bot-It that checked the site every 30 minutes. But even that wasn’t enough: more sophisticated bots were pinging the server every second.

We gave up and booked a different course nearby, one that had no online lottery, no bots and no line. It was a great round—one I’d play again—and we weren’t alone in that feeling: according to the club pro, the tee sheet was nearly full that day.

It looked like what booking used to look like: first-come, first-served, not perfect but fair enough. Though the demand was there, the system hadn’t yet invited a race to the bottom.

And still, as we made our way off the last green, I did catch myself wondering:

How long until the bots find this place, too? 🤖