How Your Handicap Is Lying To You (And The Stat That Doesn’t)

We golfers focus on our handicaps to the point of obsession, but what if truth about your golf game is hidden somewhere else? In this video I outline the concept of the ‘anticap’, and why this might be an even more important stat to track if you want to get a proper handle on your golf improvement, and where you can still make quick gains.

*Chapters*
01:45 – What is an anticap?
02:26 – Why does it matter?
04:49 – How to calculate your anticap
05:32 – How it can help you improve

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Is it possible to take up golf late in life and still make it on tour? I’m embarking on a mission to go from golf rookie at 40 to tour pro at 50, doing everything I can to get good enough, quickly enough to qualify for the Legends Tour.

Follow my journey as I try to understand what drives sustainable improvement in golf, how quickly that improvement can come, and if this mad endeavour is even feasible.

Welcome to my Golf Life Crisis.

What are you playing off? How many strokes are you getting? What’s your handicap? What’s your handicap? What is your handicap? We golfers focus on our handicaps to the point of obsession. But what if your index is lying to you? You lie. What if the truth about your golf game is actually hidden somewhere else? Hello everybody. Welcome to the channel. If you are new here, I am Joel, a man in his middle age enduring a golf life crisis and tracking that journey for the world to see. If you are not new here, then cool. I must be doing something right. So, in today’s video, I am going to be asking the question, how do you properly track if you’re getting better at golf? If the range sessions and the lessons and the practice rounds actually having any effect, typically we look at handicap and stop there. If it’s moving in the right direction, we’re getting better. if it’s moving in the wrong direction, we’re probably not. But there’s another stat which is equally or perhaps more important to look at to understand our true progression as players. And this is one which very often gets overlooked or possibly not even understood at all. A little while back, I put out a video asking the question why it’s often the case that we can be better at golf and yet our scores won’t show it. And this is something of a companion piece to that video. One of the things I outlined in that video is this concept of an anticap. This is something that a lot of players aren’t even aware of or if they are it might be getting ignored and I think that is to the detriment of their progression and improvement as golfers. So in this video I’m going to go through what an anticap actually is, why it matters, an important caveat to know if you are tracking your own anticap, and then how you can actually use it to improve your golf game, including getting your handicap down. Because whether we should or not, we obviously are all completely obsessed with that. So first things first, what is an anticap? What am I actually talking about with this whole video and this concept? First of all, it’s important to say this is not something I have come up with. It is out there. It is something that is on certain podcasts or written about a little bit here and there, but it’s not necessarily widely understood or discussed. So, if your handicap is the average of your best eight rounds of your most recent 20, then an anticap essentially the opposite of that, the average of your worst eight rounds of your most recent 20. So, for instance, with me, my handicap is currently at 11.2, but if I look at my anticap, it’s way up there at 19. So, what why is this important? Well, it’s important for a few different reasons. Lots of people dislike the new handicapping system, although whether I can still be called new after basically 5 and a half years is obviously up for question. I don’t really have a horse in that particular race. This handicapping system is the only one I have ever known as someone who’s only been playing the game for a couple of years. So, let’s just take it as it is. But by design, it is biased towards a player’s ability ceiling rather than their floor. If you were truly hysterical with the widest possible variants and you shot eight of your most recent 20 rounds in the 70s, then you would very likely be a single figure handicapper, even if the other 12 were all over 100. Today anticap is there to give you a realistic expectation of what your floor is rather than your potential. I may be an 11.2 handicap but a 19 anticap tells me that it is very possible for me to shoot in the high8s or even the low 90s. While I may not like doing that, the fact that I can know that’s possible and within my range of outcomes can help me manage my expectations when things aren’t going necessarily to plan and to not put myself in a bad mood or ruin my day just because I am on track for a round that might be high 80s, low 90s. That is very much within the model as far as my range of outcomes is concerned. So I shouldn’t be shocked or disappointed or a gasast if one of those days crops up every now and then at my current level. This knowledge can also help with improving as golfers and how to understand our potential and where we can make some easy wins or quick gains, but I’ll come to that in a bit. The anticap is also something which can help us track improvement. As I said in the better golf doesn’t equal better scores video, this is something to look at if you are frustrated with the fact that you know you’re a better player even if your scores don’t show it. Our handicap just shows us the reduction or improvement in our upper bound. So unless you’re shooting numbers which are significantly lower than the best you’ve shot previously, it is possible that your handicap isn’t moving, but maybe your anticap is moving. Maybe the range of scores at your upper bound, those days when you just don’t have it, maybe that is coming down. So it can help us to understand if we’re progressing as golfers despite no movement in our handicap or even a backwards movement in our handicap. If your worst days aren’t as bad as they used to be, then you are getting better even if your handicap isn’t moving. There’s an important caveat with tracking your anticap, which is potentially obvious, but probably worth calling out. Your handicap is calculated not on the best eight of your most recent 20 scores. It’s calculated on the best eight of your most recent 20 score differentials. So, that’s taking into consideration the course you’re playing, the T boxes you’re playing, course rating, slope rating, all of that kind of thing. So, when you are calculating your anticap, be sure to use score differential, not scores. Otherwise, it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Do you like apples? A fair question at this point is so what? So, why do we really need to know about an anticap? Yes, it might help with expectation management, and yes, it might help with tracking our progress, but how can it help us to actually get better? Well, there are a few ways that I think it can do this, including one that I’ve stumbled on recently, which has actually made a very big difference. The first thing is it can help you identify how often you are having those blowup holes that ruin routes. If you’re only taking into consideration your handicap scores, then it might be that you are losing track of how often those bad triples or quads or blobs are happening and you think that they’re happening way less than they actually are. By analyzing your bad rounds, as painful as it can be, you can help to understand what is going wrong on the days you’re not scoring as well. Is it just one too many triple bogey or is it an aggregation of singles and doubles? In order to actually lower your handicap over the long term, you do need to understand what’s going wrong on the days it is going wrong. Otherwise, you’re just not getting a full picture of your golf game. Secondly, although a lack of movement in your handicap might be masking your true improvement as a golfer, it’s also possible it’s hiding a lack of improvement. You may have had enough good days recently to lower your handicap index, but what if your anticap or even your scoring average is actually moving in the wrong direction? It’s possible you might not be making the progress you think if 12 rounds of your last 20 aren’t good. And it could be covered up by eight or even fewer really, really good rounds. So, you might think you’re progressing better than you are. And you might not then be putting in the practice time, the work on the range, or whatever it might be to actually get better in a meaningful, sustainable, long-term manner. And then what you can do is combine those last two things to figure out what it is you should be practicing on. If you are able to analyze your blowup holes, then look a layer deeper and understand why they were blowup holes. Think back to what it was that caused those triples or those doubles. Was it bad play off the tea causing you to go OB? Was it four putting even though you hit a green in regulation? Analyzing your bad rounds is key to making them better rounds in the future. Without understanding what’s causing the bigger scores that aren’t contributing to your handicap, it’s hard to know how to fix them. And again, if you think you’re progressing more than you are, you might not be dedicating the time to fixing those things subsequently. So those two pieces of information can work handinhand in putting together a proper progression plan and a practice plan so that you can move both your anticap and your handicap in the right direction. The final thing, and this is something that I have stumbled upon recently, which has really helped me on the days when it isn’t going quite to plan, is that tracking your anticap can help you keep focused. Trying to get your anticap down can be a great way to stay invested on those days when you just don’t have it or you’re not feeling it and you’re not playing your best. Okay, you’ve had a couple of bad holes and this might not be a counting round, but can you keep your head? Can you keep focused enough to make sure this doesn’t become an anticap round? Developing that kind of grit is crucial to long-term golfing improvement. And it’s funny how often a lost round can actually be anything but. If you can just keep your head in the game, keep focused, and go hole by hole, it is possible that trying to make something not an anticap round could in fact transform it into a handicap round. So, there you have it. What is an anticap? Why it’s important, and perhaps how it can help you in your golfing improvement journey. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed the video and found it useful. If you did, as ever, I would love it if you could drop a like, perhaps subscribe to the channel for more videos uploaded every week and to follow along with my golfing journey. And if you do have any thoughts or questions, please drop them in the comments below. And I will see you in the next one.