Your New WHS Index

Our captains prize was won with a 59 nett RD 1, 66 nett RD2. Guy started the comp off 18.1 index, 19 PH. Had no round under 94 strokes in his last 20 scores to then shoot 78, 83. A lot of disquiet in the club around it and would personally put me off bothering to enter it next year. We don't do random draw either and there would be fairly heavy suspicions around the legitimacy of some of that groups scoring in other comps too. Not sure what you can do about it if people are determined to cheat but its incredibly damaging for a club to have those sort of things happen. The entire club is talking about it and i suspect many members will simply stop playing these comps, they're not cheap to enter at €15 and if you are competing against dishonest players then it makes the whole thing pointless. Club doesn't seem to have any solution to it either, in those scenarios I would be expecting an ESR from the h'cap secretary.

I think there will come a point where entries to competitions will start to become an issue, its something i hear a lot when playing casually with randomers. Particularly very good golfers off <5, there is little or no point in them entering comps as they realistically can only win the gross which is a pretty small prize generally. Saying all that i think the system is pretty good its just really badly implemented and with clubs terrified of intervening it allows cheats to do as they want while punishing honest players.

Captains prize in Killarney: over 400 entries across the 3 days with the top 15 getting into a 9 hole playoff. Only 1 single figure golfer qualified (a 9 playing handicap). 22% of the competitors had a single figure PH but only made up 7% of the play-off places.

WHS is broken

Essentially that's the side I'd fall closer to. There's a limit of 54 which is effectively no limit and I am happy with that. I think it bothered me a lot more than most seasoned golfers that the really weak guys couldn't compete and I'm very happy that they now can.

I don't like the idea of such a small sample size being used to calculate a handicap, so I do think it would be a good idea to not allow winners for the club majors with less than 20 cards in and maybe 10 for regular Sunday comps.

The problems people seem to point out with the system are generally focused on new handicaps, but the stories I hear of people winning majors with suspect scores are generally seasoned golfers who know very well what they're doing. I've no idea how you tackle that really. It doesn't really work to give handicap secretaries more discretion because you can't just pick people out who you think are gaming the system. The cheaters will challenge it and win. The guys who'll accept the new handicap are the honest guys who don't want to challenge being given a lower handicap of 24.

@blue note I think initially a lot of complaints were about new members/players and high handicaps but most of the complaints i've heard this year have been about it being too easy to get back shots. I thought there was a hard and soft cap in the WHS but clearly it doesn't work if sandbaggers are easily able to get back what shots they've put off. I've also never seen anyone get a cut from the H'cap secretary above what the WHS does, that to me is where it falls down. If you apply a proper reduction to someone who beats their handicap by any more than say 5 shots should be in line for a manual reduction. That way the hard and soft caps are much more effective. Currently someone who does that might lost a shot or shot and a half and be back to their old handicap in a matter of weeks.

But isn't the difficulty with that the fact that under WHS your handicap basically completely renews itself from scratch after 20 rounds ? Any cut via ESR or the handicap sec is only good for as long as it takes to play 20 rounds. With casual rounds counting now, that could be only a month in summertime. There's no really meaningful "sanction" as such, that will deter or stop a determined sandbagger. You can hardly keep cutting a guy to keep his handicap at a level the H/C sec deems appropriate. At least under CONGU you were somewhat anchored fairly close to your handicap for potentially years. Personally I wouldn't allow casual rounds to count at all, I know that's not popular to say, but IMO if its not in a competition, its not a true reflection of your golf.

You could apply a cap for a period of time as opposed to a number of rounds. I think this is how it's applied anyway. But it's done from handicap index.

You could do it from score differential. If someone playing off 18 shoots net +8, they might only lose a couple of shots. So if they go down to -15.5, their cap will be based on that. Whereas if you did it from their best score differential, you could have a lower limit that I don't think many reasonable people would have a problem with. Say if it was even 6 for a year and 8 for 2 years. I don't many could give out about having a cap of 14 for a year. You can hardly say it's unfair when you went 6 under it within the last 12 months.

Seems like there's a few things at play here.

I don't agree with not allowing casual rounds to count towards your handicap. There are plenty of honest golfers out there - myself included - who play casual rounds all the time but not many competitions. These golfers want an official handicap and they pay their GUI fees like everyone else. They're entitled to a handicap and shouldn't be forced into playing competitions to receive one.

I'd imagine the horror stories are not as frequent as people make out they are.

Either way, the system doesn't need to be overhauled and punish the majority to combat a minority of cheaters. It just needs to be policed more by the clubs. And if your club isn't doing anything to address obvious issues then vote with your feet and stop paying into their comps until something is done.

Clubs need to segregate their comps and have different tiers with the better prizes being for lower handicap tiers. This will incentivise people to improve and lower their handicap.

If something needs to be changed then maybe it's the way your handicap is formulated for competitions.

Maybe your handicap for competition purposes should be calculated differently and kept completely seperate from your regular index.

By that I mean maybe, in order to be eligible to win a prize in a comp, a certain percentage of your best 8 should need to come from competitions (but not all).

Or maybe scores from competitions should carry more weight than a casual round. 

Fwiw .

overall I think WHS is a good thing, especially how scoring has returned to a more sensible level in my own club (and those nearby).

WHS has though, in my mind, highlighted just how erratic golfers tend to be when playing off a mark of 16-28, and if anything, moreso those who play every week, rather than the casual golfer.

And it’s for this, that much of the paranoia above is misplaced.

if there’s a healthy percentage of golfers in this range in your club competitions, then the reality is that a good stock of them are decent ball strikers who don’t work particularly hard at their game bar the weekly comp. And at least one of them should, each week, have a good day with the putter while keeping the lost balls to a minimum.

Same guy will likely struggle to break 100 for a few times shortly after that. And struggle to break 90 more than 1 in 10.

And over the course of 8-10 weeks of play, their standout score, which gets diluted a little every week, pretty much washes off.

Is this a problem? No, personally I don’t think so. But of course this is my handicap range so I’m never going to complain about “us”!

I agree with everything you posted. Look at a low single figures graph on the app vs someone off 16 - a much bigger distribution of scores high and low!

Our Captain's prize was won with 87 points over 2 rounds. Pre-WHS, 75 points would have won it every year except one.

And I would have had to shoot 59 gross (literally) on a par 72 course to win the Presidents Prize last year.

Totally agree with this and your previous post.

Leaving aside team building for a well known mid handicap inter-club competition, I genuinely think that real "banditry" is fairly minimal - I mean the guys deliberately and intentionally gaming the system. I think WHS makes it harder for the more casual bandit, the guy who's not trying to gain an advantage, but say, under CONGU didn't really care if he got 0.1 as opposed to actively trying to get one. For someone determined to gain an advantage, well, no system can combat that.

As you allude to, if 150 guys tee it up on Saturday, the majority of them inconsistent as hell, chances are two or three of them will catch lightening in a bottle and do a great score. Even if nobody does a great score, someone will be the winner, it doesn't make them a bandit.

Under CONGU golfers were supposed to only play to their handicap once every 7 rounds. If CONGU was more a measure of your potential and WHS is more reflective of your current form, it stands to reason that when a golfer has that one in seven round, he's going to have a very good net score as his WHS index is likely higher than before.

+2 golfer in our club shot 8 under in round one of our Captains. He wasn't even on the first sheet of the results... Imagine walking off with a 64 (net 66) and being nowhere in contention.

We had a two in a row winner this year. Went down like a lead balloon. Felt awful sorry for the Captain himself.

WHS isn't fit for purpose for Irish golf on the whole.

I still like the concept but agree with above point that it’s basically the reverse of what we are used to. Current v Potential.

A happy medium needs to be found.

A simple solution would be to cap the increase. No more than 3 shots above your lowest handicap index of the last 3 years. No further hard cap or soft cap. Just no more than 3 and stick to that.

The calculations are all daft also. Using 113 as an average slope????? Just make it a sensible 100.

rework how SD and indexes are calculated so that we just convert HI to PI once. With PH being same as CH). Be more penal to higher handicaps.

36 is more than enough shots for anyone. Personally I’d be happy to max it at 28. But I think everyone should be able to enter a comp and it should not be split. ie. Every comp has an overall 1-3 place then maybe if you want to break down class winners after that

Mine changed after a good score Sunday

That's a crazy situation, no question, but (and I'm slightly playing devil's advocate), is that a system problem or a people problem ?

We had two 45pts in our Captain's R1, yet one of them had 22pts on day 2. We had about 6 or 7 I think scores over 40pts in round 1, and after that, next was in the 37/38pts range, so while there were maybe 4 massive scores, the rest were very much "normal" or even slightly less than you'd have had under CONGU.

I wouldn't claim WHS is perfect, far from it. I do like the concept of it in theory, but 30+ years of playing under CONGU probably makes me biased. I can't decide if WHS being so completely different makes me think its not working, or if its working exactly as expected and "working as expected" is so at odds with what I've been used to and expected over the years.

You're possibly right with your reference to Irish golf - do we have a uniquely Irish "cute hoorism" when it comes to handicaps and prizes ? I can't remember the exact details but wasn't there a part of the ESR under CONGU that was mandatory in Ireland but not in the other Unions ? Might even have been the whole ESR thing full stop. There must have been a reason for that.