Golf Quotes
| Eighteen holes of match or medal play will teach you more about your foe than will 18 years of dealing with him across a desk. |
| The Handicap System |
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Qualifying competitionsThese are normally club competitions which ‘qualify’ for handicap adjustment purposes. These is a complex area and not for these pages! Purely as an example, a competition may be declared non-qualifying if it is played when many temporary greens are in use, affecting the overall length of the course. Standard Scratch Score (SSS) This is a fixed number agreed by the Club with the ruling bodies. This is the score it would be expected a scratch golfer would go round in. This can differ from the course par by anything up to +3 to –3 of the course par. It is this number which is used for handicap adjustment, rather than the par of the course. Competition Scratch Score This is arrived at as a result of calculations on the day of a competition, taking into account the degree of difficulty (climactic conditions) size of field and generally how the different handicap categories performed. If this is different to the SSS, it replaces it for that day Qualifying score Any score, including a ‘no-return’ returned in a qualifying competition Net differential Is the difference (+or-) between the nett score returned by a player in a qualifying competition and the competition scratch score Buffer Zone Adjustments Changes to handicaps are made in accordance with a set of rules administered by the national/regional authority. For simplicity’s sake, a player’s handicap may increase or decrease by a tenth of a point for every full shot that player is above or below the CSS x the number of their category. So a 10- handicap player (category 2) coming in 3 below the CSS would expect to see his handicap reduced by 3 x 0.2 shots = 0.6. There is a so-called ‘buffer zone’ which prevents handicaps increasing quite so directly. Again, the category number is used, but this time as a whole number, and this is applied before any adjustments are made. So a score of 3 over CSS for our 10-handicapper (category 2) would result in an increase in handicap of just 0.1. Exact v Playing handicap It will be immediately apparent that there is no point moving handicaps up and down by the odd decimal place if there is no record kept of other than round numbers. Every player has an exact handicap as well as a playing one. The playing one is simply the ‘rounded’ whole number of the exact one. Thus 8.4 = 8, 8.5 = 9 |
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