And so....for those with many rounds played this season, how much has the new cap system moved your number down?

links_slayer · Jul 7, 2020

i guess i'm a 6.4 with the new system vs a 6.7 under the old.

Elbow Jobertski · Jul 10, 2020

Snowman said:
Right now it's calculated by adding your 8 best differentials together and dividing by 8. If you want to compare it, add in your next two best differentials to make it a total of 10 (instead of 8), divide the sum by 10, then multiply by 0.96. That would be your index under the old system.

For example, the sum of my current 8 best differentials is 147.8. 147.8 / 8 = 18.5 (rounded off), which is my current index. Under the old system I'd include the next two differentials, which makes the sum 188. 188 / 10 = 18.8. I then multiply that by 0.96, which comes out to 18.1 (rounded off). So my handicap under the old system would be 0.4 strokes lower than it is under the new system.

I did some number crunching. For higher handicap indexes losing that .96 multiplier is a bigger deal than it may seem. Score dispersion is an issue.

A 20 handicapper before the change had to have an average diff of 20.83... (20/.96) over their ten best.

Now to have the same 20 handicap they have to have an average diff of 20 over the 8 best.

If the best 8 average out to 20 then how bad would the two scores the player now disregarded have to have been?

Well, for our 20 handicapper the other two scores would have average about 24.2 to break even. (20*8)+(24.2*2)= 20.84

It turns out that across handicaps this effect is H*1.21. So for a 15.5 handicap (me at present) those two disregarded scores would have to average to 18.75. My 9th through 11th scores are all lower than that and my 12th is 18.8. Looking back it appears most of the time this new rule would have on average raised my handicap about 0.1.

Results will vary. I have no idea if what the typical score dispersion is across the middle of a sample and no idea how to figure that out.

Snickerdog · Jul 10, 2020

I haven't noticed any huge drops or increases. I think the biggest was a going from 3.2 to 2.7 after I shot par. Otherwise it has been just .1 or .2 increases or decreases depending on the scores.

Jaoffo · Jul 11, 2020

blueonblack said:
I'm still a ten, ladies.
Golf? No idea. Who needs that stress?

One of my sons friends has been in the doghouse since having a serious conversation with his girlfriend after several too many drinks, she asked him if she was the only one he had been with since they met. He took a while pondering the question and told her “absolutely......all the others were either 8’s or 9’s”. That’s when the fight started.