The difficulty of a course is an important factor to consider too. You can’t say one is right and one is wrong but there is a clear philosophical difference here. This USGA system took these days into account more specifically. This meant that on a given day when someone played exceptionally, they could exceed their handicap considerably.

The R&A system was geared toward the average playing standard of a player.

This may sound insignificant, but it is an important point to build on. The other governing body, the USGA, had been tweaking their handicap system separately and one of the key differences was that they wanted a handicap to reflect the potential of a player. Until this point, the R&A was in charge of handicapping rules. Over time, handicapping was refined to consider the differing difficulty of courses and to build this into the system. This elegant system is thought to have been around since the 17th century but wasn’t known as handicaps at that point. It’s a clever way of creating more level playing field. It isn’t immediately obvious how the handicap system can be used in differing situations but, once you get your head around it, it is all very reasonable. It is a straightforward system but one that requires a bit of explanation to really understand. That means that the lower handicapped player must win the hole by at least two shots in order to truly win the hole under these match conditions. On these holes, the player receiving a stroke will have one shot deducted from their score. In the case of the player getting fifteen strokes, from stroke index one to fifteen that player will be “given a stroke”. This Stroke Index says that the hole rated number one is the hardest up to eighteen as the easiest. If the two aforementioned players meet, then the player with a handicap of twenty gets fifteen shots during the round as this is the difference between the two players’ handicaps.Įach hole on a course is indexed from one to eighteen depending on its difficulty. Most clubs offer gross and net prizes so you can see who has taken the fewest shots and who has best outperformed their handicap, respectively.Īnother way this is useful is when players face off in a match play game. In this way, even though both players have scored differently, when compared under scratch conditions, they have performed the same. If someone with a handicap of five takes seventy-five strokes then they too have a net score of seventy.

If you take ninety shots to complete a round and have a handicap of twenty then your net score is seventy. Now let’s look at a specific example of how this can work in practice. In a nutshell, when you play a round of golf you take your handicap from your gross score (how many shots you actually took) to produce your net score (your gross score minus your handicap).

The other key feature is the handicap system, a way of altering a players score based on his/her skill level. One factor is the choice of tees you can play off of which can make the course easier or harder depending on your liking for self-punishment/challenge. Various features of the sport are designed to level the playing field and make for good competition between players despite potentially vast differences in skill level. One of the most unique things about golf is that people can play and compete at almost any age. It is a little bit like the offside rule in football, most know it’s there but may not be able to accurately describe it. The thing is, whilst many know that golf has a handicap system, few can actually explain what this means for golf or how it works. For some reason it is something about our great game that sticks in the mind of non-golfers. If you stop a random person on the street and ask them to name things about golf, even the person who is most oblivious to golf will probably know about the handicap system.

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