This clip explains why we have golf handicaps and how they are calculated – at an easy level.
Welcome to part four of Grandpa’s guide to golf which I’ve called how well are you doing and in this little video we’re going to look at how good your scores are and how that relates to your ability now here are two pictures of two of the most famous Sportsmen in the
World on the left here we’ve got Rory mroy famous golfer very successful and on the right we’ve got Novak jovic uh the world’s leading tennis player with numerous Grand samam titles to his name now in most individual sports if you play somebody who’s better than you you
Don’t stand a chance but golf is slightly different golf has a system of handicaps which mean that if you play somebody better than you you stand a better chance of beating them than you would do otherwise it’s not quite unique to golf I understand archery has equally complicated system uh to level the
Playing field but the handicap system allows players of different abilities to compete against each other okay so a golf handicap is a measure of your golfing ability if you’re really good and you score a par on every hole you would have a handicap of zero uh the golf term for a handicap
Of zero is scratch and that means you will always score or pretty regularly you will score a par score on a course every time you play Then There Are People and this is a bit like me who play off a handicap of around 15 this one’s called 15.6 let’s not worry about
The decimal point for now so this person their average score is around 15 shots more than par and then here’s another Grandpa and his average round is 31 shots above par and here’s a bit of a beginner and she’s got a handicap of 54 that means on every hole of 18 holes she
Can take more shots three more shots than par and still be scoring quite well so how do we calculate a handicap now on this scorecard I’ve written down slightly more neatly than before the scores that you had at each hole and here they are and you’ll remember that
When we added them up we got a total of 55 and that that was against a par or compared with a par of 35 so for really good gol for plays they take 35 shots you’ve taken 55 so you took 20 shots more than par now golf handicaps are
Based on 18 holes so over here we double the nine holes to get 18 and we double the 20 over par to get 40 so so on this round you took 40 over par so where’s that going to take us in relation to a handicap and here it is presented pretty
Simply your handicap is the number of shots above par that you usually score in this case 40 however it’s not quite as simple as that to calculate a handicap as many of your scores as possible are looked at we have a thing called The World handicap system that operates throughout the
Entire world in the same way and it takes the average of your eight best scores of the 20 you’ve most recently p played if you haven’t played as many as 20 it has ways of working that out until you’ve played the 20 but let’s assume that your average nine holes for those
Best eight was indeed 55 or 110 for 18 holes so that you’ve got a handy cap of 40 now when you’ve been playing for a while and you’ve got your 20 scores you’ll get a dashboard that looks something like this this is mine for my most recent games and along this line is
Time so that this score here is your most recent score this was the score you got when you played 20 games away up here we’ve got numbers 24 16 that’s the number of shots above par that I took in each of those rounds so what this then does is to put
A little dot for every score that I’ve had from that one down to that one but all the ones shown in brown up here are not among my best eight so they’re not what’s called Counting scores for handicap purposes the one down here in green that one that one see what chap
Tucked in there they are all my best eight and those are the ones that are added together divided by eight and give a total which is shown on this blue line that runs all the way along here and that’s my handicap or handicap index
Which in my case is 15. KN and that will move up and down as time goes on this graph I find really interesting it’s a little bit out of date because it shows over here the maximum handicap as being 36 that’s what it used to be but
It’s gone up now to you can have a handicap of 54 and it shows what percentage of golfers fall into each category so you can see the very best golfers who have a handicap of n scratch up to three is just three in a 100 so only three in every hundred have that
Handicap and then another 9% have an handicap up to S 18% have a handicap between 8 and 11 27% there and so on but if we just add these up together we add 189 and three which makes 30 only 30% of golfers one in three less than one in
Three is ever going to have a handicap of Bel of 11 or lower another 27% fall somewhere in the middle between 12 and 16 and then there are the rest and there are an awful lot of people playing golf who don’t have a handicap at all so
You’re coming in here this is where you’d expect to start and your aim is to move yourself up and up and up and see how well you can play uh my handicap has gone at one point from 26 down to 18 and it’s hovered around 15 for quite a long
Time I can’t get any better could be something to do with getting older
