Handicap : Honest With Self vs True Tests

[zbeekner4]

From the whites I average even par 72, from the blues I tend to shoot around 76-78.

My handicap is at 3.9

When I play a “real” golf course (that’s a mixed bag that people here will give me a ton of flack about) I tend to shoot right around 85. Some of that is because it’s my first time around that course and then just killer lightning fast greens that take me 8 holes to even start to comprehend some kind of pace on them. Those are courses like TPC Boston, Old Sandwich, Boston Golf Club where I’m standing on a 495 yard par 4 tee box and find myself hitting a damn 3 wood into a green all day.

Well I’d probably agree with you in that in your case, the handicap system is a bit flawed. Is this a course you’re a member at? Because if you decided to play other courses more often, I’m sure your cap would even out.

 

[leftshot]

Just because your score is lower on shorter courses doesn't necessarily mean your handicap goes down if you play shorter courses/tees. Each tee box has its own course index and slope. In most cases, a several stroke lower score on a shorter/easier tee box can be mostly or totally offset by the change in index/slope.

Your handicap represents your potential under the course conditions you typically play. Some of us get eaten alive by length. Others by thick rough, or bunkers. Some by the wind. Others by greens that have a lot of slope and undulations.

If you primarily play for fun, don't sweat it. If you play in tournaments, you'll want to play most of your rounds under the conditions most like those you will compete.

 

[dduarte85]

Well I’d probably agree with you in that in your case, the handicap system is a bit flawed. Is this a course you’re a member at? Because if you decided to play other courses more often, I’m sure your cap would even out.

See that’s the thing... I read some article somewhere (no way I could find it now) that said the HC system needs a length / tee component to it.

A lot of times I’ll play with friends elsewhere and if three guys decide to play the whites then I’m not playing back. I’m there to be social as well. I’ve found that my scores are dictated by length from tee to green. Even courses I’ve never been to I’ll shoot low scores and these are courses that have such a wide slope / rating between them.

I’m a very consistent player but I’m just not long. Driver is 240 tops unless there’s some wind etc. Thats pathetically short.

However, my average putt this season has been 6 paces so I put balls in tight.

I just feel weird having a handicap that’s low because I take advantage of shorter courses. But you play where you play, not everyone has access to a tee box that’s 6900 yards. So if we’re playing 5800, 6100, 6250, 6400, 5790 well... you still have to hit the shots.


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[dduarte85]

Just because your score is lower on shorter courses doesn't necessarily mean your handicap goes down if you play shorter courses/tees. Each tee box has its own course index and slope. In most cases, a several stroke lower score on a shorter/easier tee box can be mostly or totally offset by the change in index/slope.

Your handicap represents your potential under the course conditions you typically play. Some of us get eaten alive by length. Others by thick rough, or bunkers. Some by the wind. Others by greens that have a lot of slope and undulations.

If you primarily play for fun, don't sweat it. If you play in tournaments, you'll want to play most of your rounds under the conditions most like those you will compete.

Oh see, I do. If you’re a single handicap golfer you can swing the club. The difference between 135 in and 235 isn’t skill... that’s a power difference.

Having 135 in with a green protected by bunkers allows you go for it balls deep with a big draw or play conservative with a high cut to the center ... play it low, etc.

235 is just swing fast, not hard and hope it gets up there on the green.


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[WMac19]

My handicap has traveled well. This season is an outlier for me as I've played over 90% of my rounds at my home course. I'm usually bouncing around to spice things up.

And when I have, after honing my game over the past few years on my own course, tracks that gave me some trouble in the past just seem way more get-able.

I usually play the back tees at my place (74.1/143, 7,011 yards) and while no Bethpage Black, it sure does offers some challenge. Many other courses just seem easier in comparison, especially when shorter. I'm comfortable up to 7,200 yards, any longer than that and I'm working waaay too hard.

But, the back is acting up again. Thinking about calling tomorrow to schedule another epidural shot. Might just be moving up a box whether I want to or not.

 

[DG_1234]

I’m a very consistent player but I’m just not long. Driver is 240 tops unless there’s some wind etc. Thats pathetically short.


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I don't know where you get the idea that 240 is "pathetically short". .
John Mahaffey had a long Tour career including a dozen wins including a Major, and he rarely hit a tee shot more than 235 yards.. I regularly play a 6,850 yard course with a 78 year old man who has an average score of about 73, and his tee shots are in the 215-220 yard range.
On a typical 6,900 yard public or private course , at sea level,on an average day I doubt more than 5 out of 100 players strikes a drive longer than 240 yards.
In general terms, if a player can hit a tee ball 220 yards and consistently straight he/she is well set up to shoot 72 on a 7,000 yard golf course. And a short 6,200 yard course is usually very narrow, which means tee shots in the 190 to 210 yard range are the most sensible.

 

[ArmyGolf]

The handicap system does it's best, but every player has a length threshold which is too much for the system to overcome. IMO rating and slope only work backwards, not forwards. What I mean by that is that the ratings only apply if someone is actually long enough to play the longest tees being compared.

This is how the real artsy sandbaggers do it "legally". Play 7000 yards and struggle hitting 3 wood into greens all day, cap climbs, then compete at 6100.

 

[leftshot]

The difference between 135 in and 235 isn’t skill... that’s a power difference.

Actually, quite often the difference is skill. I was playing with a guy today that was hitting sub-150 yard tee shots with driver all day, then he uncorked a couple in the 230-250 range late in the round. His power obviously didn't change from one tee to the next. This is a pretty common scenario.

 

[Otis32]

I would absolutely struggle on a 6900 yard course and easily shoot way above my cap too. Long irons & hybrids off the deck are easily the weakest part of my game. It might get a little better over time but would really impact my enjoyment of the game.

Up to a couple years ago I could play up 6500-6600 yards without too much pain but anymore I prefer to stay at 6400 or below.

I'm honest about my cap. It doesn't travel well. Still prone to give away shots and while I have learned ways to control that at the home track it doesn't translate playing at other courses.

 

[rollin]

The opposite of this bugs the daylights out of me (my score I mean, lol). The easiest rated course near me has epically slow greens and I just cannot wrap my head around how hard you have to actually hit putts until I'm well into the back nine. Just. Can't. Do it.

I always try to putt on the practice green before play as long as I have time. And also I always try to find a flat area (even if no pins are set up in a flat area i'll putt to a mark or something). My main effort there is mostly only about picking up the greens speed of the day. Without that it can be several holes and several wasted putts before I get a feel. Only issue is that on my public muni courses the practice greens can be a bit different vs the actual holes and fwiw so can a given hole vs another sometimes vary in speed. But what can ya do? it is what it is. That said it usually does help alot getting a speed feel before the round. I dont like very sloped practice greens cause imo that doesnt give a good feel for speed. Knowing the speed on flatter areas imo is most important. Once i got the feel for the speed then from that starting point the slope/s can be adjusted for more easily. But putting only on slopes doesnt ever quite give a feel for a speed strating point. But thats just me. Sorry for taking the thread a bit off topic.

 

[golfinnut]

Last year, my handicap travelled very well. I was always shooting within a few shots of it either way on all types of courses. This year, it was great to start with. However I’m so embarrassed carrying a 10.2 and shooting in the hundreds. But it’s creeping up fast as those early season scores are falling off. I just played a new course today and shot a 103. It was utterly embarrassing.

Dude .... that's unlike you. Definitely not like the rounds at Budget last year.

 

[Et Tu Brute?]

One of the many limitations of a real-world handicap system is it can only reflect your ability for rounds played under somewhat similar conditions to the majority of rounds in the system.

To take an extreme example, let's say you play your home course, where you've played for years, at 6,200 yards and you play it 20 times in a row resulting in a 7.5 handicap index.

Now you go play Winged Foot the day after next year's US Open and you play it from the tournament tees. No practice round, just show up and figure it out on the day.

There's probably a course/slope rating somewhere that the system could use to assign you a "10 handicap" but that's a totally blind guess. There's no evidence at all in the system for it to know how you'd play a 7,400 yard course with brutal rough and shaved greens. Maybe you have enough clubhead speed on tap and you mentally hold it together well enough to grind out a score within a couple strokes of that 10 hcp. Or maybe you have no ability whatsoever to make some of the forced carries, to hack the ball out of the rough or to deal with downhill putts on greens Stimping 13.

There's no way to build a handicap system that can know how you'd play in a situation totally unlike the situations in those 20 recorded rounds.

 

[BlueHen2006]

My handicap can be hit or miss when playing courses I am not familiar with. Sometimes I play better because I am not sure where to miss and play a little more conservative, but also not knowing where I can go and be fine is tough too. I will say I rarely look at the slope/rating and then do a calculation on what my handicap should be at the course, but am curious what the handicap would be adjusted to at each tee box, so something to look at in the future.

 

[joebute]

I don't know where you get the idea that 240 is "pathetically short". .
John Mahaffey had a long Tour career including a dozen wins including a Major, and he rarely hit a tee shot more than 235 yards.. I regularly play a 6,850 yard course with a 78 year old man who has an average score of about 73, and his tee shots are in the 215-220 yard range.
On a typical 6,900 yard public or private course , at sea level,on an average day I doubt more than 5 out of 100 players strikes a drive longer than 240 yards.
In general terms, if a player can hit a tee ball 220 yards and consistently straight he/she is well set up to shoot 72 on a 7,000 yard golf course. And a short 6,200 yard course is usually very narrow, which means tee shots in the 190 to 210 yard range are the most sensible.

I agree that 240 isn't pathetically short, but the hypothetical 78 year old shooting 73 from 6,900 (while cool) isn't a realistic way to play golf for most people. A drive of 220 from the 6,600 yard blue tees (par 71) at my course would leave fairway wood approaches on 10 holes, including 4 out of the 5 par 3's. That makes it unreasonably difficult to score, even with a good short game, and is an indicator that you're playing the wrong tees.

 

[Et Tu Brute?]

But if that 220 yard hitter playing a 6,900 yard course plays most or all of his rounds from the "wrong tees" the handicap system will dutifully calculate an index that works pretty well when he competes from courses of similar distance. You or I might not think playing that way is fun (I drive it nearly that far and wouldn't have a bit of fun from 6,900 yards) but there won't necessarily be any handicap issue.

 

[joebute]

From the whites I average even par 72, from the blues I tend to shoot around 76-78.

My handicap is at 3.9

When I play a “real” golf course (that’s a mixed bag that people here will give me a ton of flack about) I tend to shoot right around 85. Some of that is because it’s my first time around that course and then just killer lightning fast greens that take me 8 holes to even start to comprehend some kind of pace on them. Those are courses like TPC Boston, Old Sandwich, Boston Golf Club where I’m standing on a 495 yard par 4 tee box and find myself hitting a damn 3 wood into a green all day.



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I do know what you mean, and I just think the course rating system doesn't work when comparing different courses (since it's based almost exclusively on length). I don't get why a 6,500 yard muni course with no bunkers and slow, flat greens can be rated higher than a 6,200 yard private course with bunkers and OB everywhere and sloped fast greens. The slope doesn't do enough to make up for the difficulty difference (which might be 10 strokes). It seems like the handicap system does a pretty good job for groups that play together at the same course all the time, but isn't always a great measuring stick for your overall game.

 

[tahoebum]

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From the whites I average even par 72, from the blues I tend to shoot around 76-78.

My handicap is at 3.9

When I play a “real” golf course (that’s a mixed bag that people here will give me a ton of flack about) I tend to shoot right around 85. Some of that is because it’s my first time around that course and then just killer lightning fast greens that take me 8 holes to even start to comprehend some kind of pace on them. Those are courses like TPC Boston, Old Sandwich, Boston Golf Club where I’m standing on a 495 yard par 4 tee box and find myself hitting a damn 3 wood into a green all day.



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Very fast greens will take time to adjust to, especially if they have some slope. Having logged over 3,500 rounds, half of which at private course including some top ranked ones like Whistling Straits and Hazeltine, I though I knew what fast, difficult greens were like. After I joined a new club last year with fast, very sloped greens I found that I had much to learn about putting on difficult greens and am still adjusting after 70+ rounds. The course rating at my club does not, IMO, account for the difficulty of the greens. Only 5 holes have relatively flat greens and on the other 13 holes, with a downhill or side hill putt, 3 putts are very common whatever the index even inside of 10 feet. I had a 6 foot side hill putt last week that I played 4 feet of break and missed on the low side. I also had a putt where my ball was 15 feet from the hole recently that traveled about 30+ feet to finish 2 feet below the hole. It’s a new challenge and often it takes more touch and green reading skill at my home course to 2 putt from 10-15 feet than it does to make a 25 footer elsewhere. It also will ultimately make me a better putter - it makes all the greens at other courses I’ve played this year seem so easy.

 

[SHIFTY]

Bad course knowledge on new courses hit my HC sometimes. Otherwise its a pretty good indication of where I'm at.

 

[joebute]

Very fast greens will take time to adjust to, especially if they have some slope. Having played over 100 private courses in my life including top ranked ones like Whistling Straits and Hazeltine, I though I knew what fast, difficult greens were like. After I joined a new club last year with fast, very sloped greens I found that I had much to learn about putting on difficult greens and am still adjusting after 70+ rounds. The course rating at my club does not, IMO, account for the difficulty of the greens. Only 5 holes have relatively flat greens and on the other 13 holes, with a downhill or side hill putt, 3 putts are very common whatever the index even inside of 10 feet. I had a 6 foot side hill putt last week that I played 4 feet of break and missed on the low side. I also had a putt where my ball was 15 feet from the hole recently that traveled about 30+ feet to finish 2 feet below the hole. It’s a new challenge and often it takes more touch and green reading skill at my home course to 2 putt from 10-15 feet than it does to make a 25 footer elsewhere. It also will ultimately make me a better putter - it makes all the greens at other courses I’ve played this year seem so easy.

In my opinion, courses like that also sharpen your approach game, since you know that you have to hit the green in the correct place to have a chance at par/birdie. The course rating/slope never does a great job of accounting for the difficulty of fast/sloped greens.

 

[DataDude]

If your handicap is built on 1 course it probably isn't going to travel very well. You will also take time to adjust to different conditions than what you normally play. If you normally play slower greens and go somewhere with extremely fast greens you will probably struggle until you get the pace down and then you will have a more realistic chance of hitting or bettering your handicap. If you generally play a long wide open course and go to a short tight course or vice versa you may struggle until you get adjusted. I have a friend that plays a really short tight muni here at home all the time and always uses his 5 wood off the tee, but we go on our golf trip and one of the courses is wide open, no trees in sight with wide fairways and huge undulating greens. It's also about 400 yards longer from the white tees. That short but strait strategy doesn't cut it anymore. He tries to make it work, but I keep telling him he needs to get that extra 20 yards from his driver to get to these holes, the strait is not as important here.

I guess the main reason handicaps don't travel is that we as golfers try to play the same game everywhere we go. Really if we wanted our cap to travel really well we should regularly play courses of different styles and lengths, keep 17 or 18 different clubs that we use for different circumstances, and have a wide variety of shot making skills. As is most of us are lucky to be good with 1/2 of the clubs in our bag, we we play the same course from the same tees over and over again, and we have one go to strategy that we don't change. Then we wonder why we don't play good at new courses when we travel LOL!

 

[DG_1234]

I agree that 240 isn't pathetically short, but the hypothetical 78 year old shooting 73 from 6,900 (while cool) isn't a realistic way to play golf for most people. A drive of 220 from the 6,600 yard blue tees (par 71) at my course would leave fairway wood approaches on 10 holes, including 4 out of the 5 par 3's. That makes it unreasonably difficult to score, even with a good short game, and is an indicator that you're playing the wrong tees.

My 78 year old friend is not "hypothetical", he is real. I play with him 6 to 8 times each year and usually caddie for him at a big tournament, super senior flight. At 6,800 yard courses he is swinging 6 or 5 iron, one of his hybrids, or a fairway wood into most greens, including the par 3's.
He seems to hit about 8 to 12 greens per round. His missed greens leave him shots within 15 yards of the green. For his tournament play, super senior division, they play tee boxes at about 6,000 yards. On those he still rarely has less than 7-iron to a green and on several holes is playing to the green with a hybrid or fairway metal. Regardless of 6,000 yards or 6,900 yards , at least 8 rounds out of 10 this 78 year old shoots near par, rarely above 75 and once in awhile a score in the 60's. Distance is overrated and matters very little to scoring. A player who consistently strikes straight shots and has a good short game can shoot 75 at any course.

 

[Et Tu Brute?]

Really if we wanted our cap to travel really well we should regularly play courses of different styles and lengths, keep 17 or 18 different clubs that we use for different circumstances, and have a wide variety of shot making skills. As is most of us are lucky to be good with 1/2 of the clubs in our bag, we we play the same course from the same tees over and over again, and we have one go to strategy that we don't change. Then we wonder why we don't play good at new courses when we travel LOL!

Isn't this whole discussion putting the cart before the horse? If you ask 1,000 golfers for the Top 10 things they wish for in their game, how many would say "For my handicap to travel well" as one of their priorities?

It's always amazed me when I do encounter people (more often online than in Real Life) who focus a lot of their effort and energy into maintaining a handicap, trying to lower a handicap or (in some cases) trying to game the handicap system to eke out some sort of "edge". Whether by deliberately playing a different set of tees than they will compete on or whatever.

Like I said upthread, I play then I post then the system spits out a number. I really don't choose my tees for the day or decide what course to play for away rounds based on its implication for my handicap index. The handicap is just a simple way to get or give strokes, it's not the purpose of playing.

 

[Et Tu Brute?]

Isn't this whole discussion putting the cart before the horse? If you ask 1,000 golfers for the Top 10 things they wish for in their game, how many would say "For my handicap to travel well" as one of their priorities?

It's always amazed me when I do encounter people (more often online than in Real Life) who focus a lot of their effort and energy into maintaining a handicap, trying to lower a handicap or (in some cases) trying to game the handicap system to eke out some sort of "edge". Whether by deliberately playing a different set of tees than they will compete on or whatever.

Like I said upthread, I play then I post then the system spits out a number. I really don't choose my tees for the day or decide what course to play for away rounds based on its implication for my handicap index. The handicap is just a simple way to get or give strokes, it's not the purpose of playing.

P.S. And given the lack of peer review in the USGA Handicap System, if you want to tweak your handicap it's probably easier to just fudge a few scores up or down than it is to try and figure out what weird course or set of tees will trick your index into moving a couple strokes. ;-)

 

[PapaJohick]

My handicap is probably 98% legit. i say 98% because there are times where I end up not posting rounds for some reason or another.

Bad thing is, my handicap doesn't help me at all as its 7.9 currently and I can be as inconsistent as a 15 haha. I can shoot 70s, but just wait and that round of 90 or worse will pop it's head up at some point.

 

[Et Tu Brute?]

My handicap is probably 98% legit. i say 98% because there are times where I end up not posting rounds for some reason or another.

Bad thing is, my handicap doesn't help me at all as its 7.9 currently and I can be as inconsistent as a 15 haha. I can shoot 70s, but just wait and that round of 90 or worse will pop it's head up at some point.

From a statistics viewpoint, you might say that our handicaps suffer from being one dimensional. The one dimension is "average" potential scores. A useful second dimension would be how variable our "potential" is from round to round.

I know guys with about your handicap who are, frankly, a little boring to play with. Lots of 80's and 81's, the occasional 78 and a sprinkling of bad rounds like 85-88. Then there are others with the same index who might shoot in the 70's three rounds in a row and then struggle to break 90 for the next month.

The more-variable guys like PapaJohick certainly make for more entertaining rounds and post-round drinks conversation!