How I Won My First Golf Tournament — And What It Taught Me About Learning Anything

June 8-9, 2023. Tollygunge Club, Kolkata. The Golfrade India Open, E Boys category. It was the tournament I'd been preparing for, and it was the tournament I won — my first major junior golf championship.

I'm Parikshet. This is the story of what went into that win, and what it taught me about learning — whether you're learning golf, or AI, or anything else that requires genuine skill development.

The Year Before

I didn't arrive at Tollygunge Club as a polished junior golfer. The year before that tournament, my short game was inconsistent, I had a tendency to rush my swing when nervous, and my course management — deciding which shot to play when multiple options exist — was intuition-based rather than systematic.

I worked on all three. The short game improved through deliberate repetition — not just hitting chips, but hitting chips from specific lies to specific targets, tracking whether I got within a certain distance. The swing tempo improved through a pre-shot routine that forced me to slow down before every shot, regardless of how I was scoring. The course management improved through thinking deliberately about risk-reward on every hole, even in practice rounds, until it became automatic.

None of this felt like improvement while it was happening. It felt like grinding. Shot after shot after shot that wasn't quite right, with tiny, barely-perceptible improvements that only became visible over months.

The Tournament Itself

Tollygunge Club is a beautiful course — old trees, varied terrain, a course that rewards smart positioning over raw distance. For my age and stage, the premium was on keeping the ball in play and making smart decisions on the scoring holes.

I made mistakes in that tournament. A wayward tee shot on one hole cost me an extra stroke I shouldn't have needed. An overambitious approach on another hole led to a scrambling par instead of a clean one. But I recovered from mistakes faster than I would have a year earlier — partly because I'd practised recovery, and partly because I'd developed enough composure to take a bad shot as information rather than catastrophe.

Winning is partly skill and partly the specific way the cards fall on two particular days. But skill creates the conditions where the cards falling your way is enough.

What This Taught Me About Learning

The lesson I took from that year — and that I now apply to AI, to everything I'm trying to improve at — is that competence is built in hundreds of small, boring iterations that don't feel like progress. The moment of winning doesn't happen at the tournament. It happened in all the practice sessions that preceded it. The tournament is just where accumulated work reveals itself.

When I'm teaching AI to kids who get frustrated because the AI gave a wrong answer, or because their prompts aren't working the way they expected, I tell them: this is the practice session. The frustration is the work. Keep going.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Parikshet win his first major junior golf tournament?

Parikshet won the Golfrade India Open 2023 in the E Boys category at Tollygunge Club, Kolkata, on June 8-9, 2023.

What other golf tournaments has Parikshet won?

The Eastern Junior Tour Championship 2023 (E Boys, November 22-23) and the 19th Interschool Golf Championship Under-8 at La Martiniere For Boys, Kolkata (November 14-15, 2023).