Why do I get an allowance for stroke play and match play competitions?
You get your Course Handicap and then, depending on the format of the game you are playing, there’s a mandatory allowance to come off.
Under the WHS, there’s an allowance for various stroke play and matchplay competitions in the Playing Handicap.
But Why?
The allowance that you get for competition play, is about equity. It’s about ensuring that, when all players are playing together in a field, every player has an equal chance of success and gaining success in that competition.
If you could imagine a player off scratch, the variation between their best score and their worst score is relatively tight.
They might have a bad round but their bad round is five over. If they have a good round, it might be two or three under. It’s not going to be eight or nine under, or 10 or 11 under, or shooting 25 over.
It’s going to be relatively tight, in terms of their expected score, whereas a player of 28 is going to be very different.
They could have a good day. A 28 handicapper might actually play to 22 one day, or 20, but they might also play to 45.
Their expectation is also quite wide, so the higher the handicap the wider the tolerance for their scores.
If you played everybody off 100%, the higher handicap golfers, statistically, always have a better chance of winning – because they could shoot six or seven below, or eight or nine below, quite easily.
What 95% does is it basically reduces that down – so by taking more shots off the higher handicap players, and fewer shots of the lower handicap players, it means that there is a better distribution of success across the field.
These allowances were already built within the old CONGU system. It was just built in a way that was hidden, you just didn’t see it. It was part of the way that a handicap was calculated, and why you only went up point one and you came down by a certain value depending on your handicap category.
The difference is it’s now public facing. It’s not just us, the rest of the world is doing it as well.
NOTE: The playing handicap only applies to the competition. What goes forward for a golfer’s WHS record – what affects their index – is taken from whatever they scored with their Course Handicap.
There is also a limit of net double bogey on the maximum hole score (for handicapping purposes only).
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