Your New WHS Index

Sure, but only in golf are the elite competing directly against the ...."less elite"!

The reason it was (and still is) not 100% in fourballs is down the the potential deviations. Fourballs makes this even worse, so higher guys give up more shots.

Possibly in a 1:1 match the +4 guy would have the edge, but Im not so sure, I reckon Joe would would hold his own. When there are multiple Joes its game over.

Its not accurate to say you only got 1 shot a year. You only gone one automatically but the handicap sec was free to give you more if needed. I frequently gave people 2 or 3 shots back at the end of the year as it was clear they needed them.

I think it does make odds either way, as it shows that ignoring all else WHS doesnt balance out anything. The 80 year old off 28 doesnt want to be directly competing with the 20 year old off 28.

Its not extreme at all, as people are hitting the ball further and further, the back tees move further back. No course wants to cut the extra fairway so the carry to reach the fairway is getting longer and longer. If you dont make the carry you are probably in deep rough and wont be able to poke more than a wedge out, and that is quite likely to not make it, since your tee shot only went 100 yards.

I see it every weekend, an old guy knocks down a tee shot and is overly punished as no one was expecting anyone to be hitting from there, even though it was a straight shot. Queue a 9+ score on a hole, all because the tee shot requires a longer carry than many of the old guys can handle. You cant just keep giving them shots to make up for this, it doesnt work like that. A par 3 with a forced carry over water is the same thing, forget about it from 200yards for the old guys, they whack a driver and use the drop zone. They never have a chance of making it, so its just silly to force them.

You are basically arguing that there is no inventive for someone to try to improve as they wont win?

If thats the attitude that WHS wants to encourage then I'd call that a total failure.

That's true, and I think the key here is average. It could be one of those situations where numbers can be made to show something that's not really there. 10 guys shooting 40pts and 10 guys shooting 20pts is still a field average of 30, but the reality is the field wasn't really shooting much the same score. Not really sure if that's a positive or a negative tbh, it does fit in with a guy's H/C being a mix of higher and lower scores than his index, and some of the field will be on a good day, some on a bad one.

You could be right, and I wouldn't care for a second if CONGU came back, but why would Ireland want to abandon the system that's now in use around the world ? I don't see it happening tbh. I could obviously be totally wrong, but I can't see the 5 shots being changed much, because less than that, and you're into a kind of hybrid of CONGU and WHS and would be a complete mess. Kind of like, "yeah, you're playing bad, but we can't let you have those shots, well, just in case....." All that would do would reduce the number of players that are, based on their last 20 rounds, potentially competitive every weekend. Maybe the soft cap earlier might work after 2 rather than 3 shots, but honestly I think the biggest issue is that WHS has pretty much completely redefined what a golf handicap actually is, and we're all struggling to accept that. We still seem to want an element of "potential" in the handicap, no doubt because that's what we're all used to for years/decades, whereas WHS isn't that at all, its purely current form.

Not saying its anyone on here, but under CONGU before there was ever WHS, you had people complaining about bandits winning the Captain's, and under WHS you have people complaining about bandits winning the Captain's. Lower guys complaining about higher guys has been part of golf since forever I think.

We had the Vice-Captain's prize this weekend gone. First prize was won by 49 points off 24.

General play rounds is the only thing I would have a major objection to. Part of why they were brought in were for people who can't play the weekends to still keep and maintain a handicap. Reduce them to a 1/10th of the competition rounds and you might aswell not have them at all . ( which I'm sure some people would be thrilled about )

They could perhaps do something like limiting them to one per week provided no competition is played that week. That way anyone can enter 4 qualifying scores monthly if they can't enter comps. If they do enter comps, then no general play rounds needed.

Look we have to be honest about it.

People are calling for a ban on casual scores because they believe they are being used for handicap manipulation.

if someone wants to manipulate their handicap, they will do it, casual rounds or not.

they were introduced to make golf more inclusive and to be less discriminatory. It’s a good thing IMO. A very good thing. Not everyone is using them to manipulate their handicap, indeed say very few are. But if you have stats to back it up, I’m all ears.

points like @newport2 where you can enter a supplemental score provided there is no club competition that week is as equally discriminatory. What about the lad who has a family with responsibilities or who does shift work etc and can’t play in the sole weekend competition …… or the fella who just doesn’t want to play in a competition? You are just saying that these people can’t have a handicap and they aren’t welcome

I'm not so sure people want casual scores banned because they think they're being used for manipulation, like you, I think there's very little of that in reality. I'd say its more that people think unless its in competition and with a card in the pocket, it doesn't or shouldn't count.

I actually doubt there's much deliberate manipulation goes on anyway. Most people don't really care enough to go to all the effort required, with a few honourable exceptions. I suspect these 48pts etc are more to do with pretty much the whole field being handicapped, let's say "differently" under WHS, and the winner could come from anywhere. If you have 150 guys teeing it up, and maybe 100-120 of them high handicaps based on their current form, there's a good chance a couple of them will have a hot day. Under CONGU there might the same number of high guys, but they probably hardly ever played close to their H/C. Almost by definition, everyone is beating their index close to 20-25% of the time now regardless, based on average of best 8 out of 20, probably being 4 above and 4 below the index.

incentive?

that is what a tiered system promotes

with a handicap you can win at any level, if you shoot a better than average score

You've just excluded a bunch of new golfers from playing competitions, which in our club is 3 days of the week. As was said earlier we shouldn't be excluding people from playing golf in an attempt to target handicap manipulation by the few.

I do agree clubs could limit 'overall winner' of majors/big comps to those with a fully developed index, but we can't then put limits on the number of general play cards that can be submitted and/or charge admin fees for general play cards which I've seen in quite a few clubs.

Our club has had 18 'big competitions' this year (medals, cups, majors). 4 have been won by handicap range 0-9 (22%); 8 won by handicap 10-18 (44%); 6 won by handicap 19-27 (33%); 0 won by handicap 28+.

10 of these events were stroke play with best winning score -6. Other winning scores: -5; -4; -4; -4; -3; -2; -2; -2; E

8 of the events were stableford with best winning score of 45 points. The other winning score were: 43; 42; 42; 42; 41;41; 40

No.

to complicated

Also, we want different things from a system. So we're not sure what the system actually is doing, we don't agree on what we think it should do, but we still are discussing how to fix it.

But there's simply conflicting things that we want from handicaps. We want them to be suitable for going out with your mates and playing a mini comp in your 4ball. If all handicaps are yielding similar average scores this is probably okay at the moment. We also want the most exceptional scores to be rewarded. At the moment, someone could shoot a course record and not come close to winning a comp. And we also want a bigger handicap guy to have a chance to win captains day or whatever competition. If we split comps into categories, you're losing the part of the game where everyone can play against anyone. And we want entry to the elite comps to be fair, so there should be more protection on people engineering artificially low handicaps. And we definitely want protection against people engineering artificially high handicaps. And we want people to be able to enter their casual scores to keep their handicaps up to date, it also not able to enter them.

I agree with everyone on this thread really to some extent at least.

Did a quick scan of comp results in my place since the start of the qualifying season. Breakdown as follows

Handicap 0-10 - 4 wins, 7.69%

Handicap 11-18 - 19 wins, 36.54%

Handicap 19-27 - 21 wins, 40.38%

Handicap 28+ - 8 wins, 15.38%

The lowest winning Handicap is 6, the highest is 48.

Average winning score is 42.6 points (stableford)

Early in the year, when things would have been playing a little softer and longer, the average score is 41.4, once we hit June and through the summer months it increases to 43.1, with August up to 43.9