Differential vs Course Handicap

[DeadMan]

We also already have soft and hard caps built into the system to avoid extreme upward movement. I don’t think we need to limit it more than that  

You could also have your competitions use the 12-month low handicap instead, if you want to mute the impact of short-term swings. 

Edited November 19, 2025 by DeadMan

[wacker]

17 hours ago, iacas said:

0.1%? I'll assume you meant 0.1 strokes, which is almost as silly, but not as silly as 0.1%.

Please post your handicap record and your last 25 scores and their ratings and differentials. You're a one-off case: you play frequently, and you played really poorly for a decent stretch (almost 20 rounds).

Like I have said many times, I know how the system works, I just think it needs improving. Yes, I meant 0.1 shots, my mistake

[wacker]

17 hours ago, DeadMan said:

We also already have soft and hard caps built into the system to avoid extreme upward movement. I don’t think we need to limit it more than that  

You could also have your competitions use the 12-month low handicap instead, if you want to mute the impact of short-term swings. 

I forgot to mention, the vast majority of golfers in the UK hate the new system, however I think it's OK, just needs tweaking 

[iacas]

4 hours ago, wacker said:

Like I have said many times, I know how the system works, I just think it needs improving. Yes, I meant 0.1 shots, my mistake

You're an extremely edge case and a data point of one. The purest definition of a small sample size, and you've not posted your handicap record. You also have a different definition of "rapid" or whatever.

Going up by 0.1 shots is far worse than what the system is now.

Someone with the handicap differentials history of 10 10 11 11 12 12 13 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 17 17 18 18 19 19 would be an 11.5. Yet after posting eight more rounds of just 19 - leveling out at what should be 15.0 (the first three are free, the last 1 is divided by half with the soft cap) they would only be… a 12.3, despite playing like a 19 for their last 10 rounds.

For most golfers, those eight round might take months. You seemingly do it in a week and a half.

You're the outlier, and the single data point. Your experience means a lot to you, but in the grand scheme of things… there are not a lot of golfers like you who would consider a run of 15 rounds WAY above your index where you're threatening the hard cap with "temporary" or "rapid" or whatever words you used.

3 hours ago, wacker said:

I forgot to mention, the vast majority of golfers in the UK hate the new system, however I think it's OK, just needs tweaking 

People hate change. Doesn't mean it's not better.

[GolfLug]

5 hours ago, wacker said:

Like I have said many times, I know how the system works, I just think it needs improving. Yes, I meant 0.1 shots, my mistake

Why only 0.1? If you ask enough golfers I bet you $5 you will find someone who might insist even that's too generous. I have even heard spirited 'suggestions' like HCP shouldn't rise AT ALL until you have three consecutive bad rounds. What would you say to them?

So there's this thing about opinions.

[saevel25]

I think the handicap system is really good. It achieves the following,

1. Takes into account the difficulty of the course
2. Takes into account days where the course may play more difficult due to weather
3. Is not a true average, it tries to mitigate the high variability in score potential for higher handicap golfers. 
4. It tampers downs drastic changes in a person score over weeks or months. This may benefit or hurt a golfer if they are on a heater or not. It makes the system stable. 

I think these are all good things for a handicap. 

Let's look at a bad way to do handicap. The USBC, for bowling. In our league, we use an average that changes weekly. Your average starts with the average you had from the previous season but then switches to the average for this season after 6 games (two nights of bowling). Then it updates weekly. My average jumped by 9 in one week. That is stupid. Now I am pretty much screwed for the next couple of weeks if I regress back to my last year's average. 

[iacas]

1 hour ago, GolfLug said:

Why only 0.1? If you ask enough golfers I bet you $5 you will find someone who might insist even that's too generous. I have even heard spirited 'suggestions' like HCP shouldn't rise AT ALL until you have three consecutive bad rounds. What would you say to them?

And it often doesn't… if the eight counting scores are not among your oldest three.

42 minutes ago, saevel25 said:

2. Takes into account days where the course may play more difficult due to weather

Or any other conditions, doesn't even have to be weather, yeah. This is almost an "upgraded 'standard scratch score' system" as I understand it (the old UK system at least would kinda change the course rating daily based on how the better players fared that day, I think).

42 minutes ago, saevel25 said:

4. It tampers downs drastic changes in a person score over weeks or months. This may benefit or hurt a golfer if they are on a heater or not. It makes the system stable.

A golfer that does go on a heater will also find two things are true:

• They may get an exceptional score reduction, further lowering their index.
• They establish a new "low index" for the next year which soft or hard caps how much their handicap can then rise.

[GolfLug]

6 hours ago, iacas said:

And it often doesn't… 

Of course, but wouldn't want that to be a rule. Point is where would you draw the line? 0.1 cap per rounds seems as arbitrary as any.

[wacker]

17 hours ago, GolfLug said:

Why only 0.1? If you ask enough golfers I bet you $5 you will find someone who might insist even that's too generous. I have even heard spirited 'suggestions' like HCP shouldn't rise AT ALL until you have three consecutive bad rounds. What would you say to them?

So there's this thing about opinions.

absolutely, and that's the point of a forum

16 hours ago, saevel25 said:

I think the handicap system is really good. It achieves the following,

1. Takes into account the difficulty of the course
2. Takes into account days where the course may play more difficult due to weather
3. Is not a true average, it tries to mitigate the high variability in score potential for higher handicap golfers. 
4. It tampers downs drastic changes in a person score over weeks or months. This may benefit or hurt a golfer if they are on a heater or not. It makes the system stable. 

I think these are all good things for a handicap. 

Let's look at a bad way to do handicap. The USBC, for bowling. In our league, we use an average that changes weekly. Your average starts with the average you had from the previous season but then switches to the average for this season after 6 games (two nights of bowling). Then it updates weekly. My average jumped by 9 in one week. That is stupid. Now I am pretty much screwed for the next couple of weeks if I regress back to my last year's average. 

I think you are wrong about point 2. I played out of my skin the other day in testing weather conditions, and was the only person in a 17 man bash who came in under net par. I had an 84 come off, which was my best score this year, and an 86 go on. I got .3 back which meant my course handicap went up a shot. I can't see how the system can account for weather when the weather varies from region to region

[Ty_Webb]

5 hours ago, wacker said:

I can't see how the system can account for weather when the weather varies from region to region

PCC. This is the equivalent of CSS under the old CONGU system. I think it stands for playing conditions calculation, but I know a couple of people here know this better than I do

[xrayvizhen]

I’ve been rather surprised how my original question relating to the logic behind “differential vs course handicap” elicited the responses expressed on this thread so far. I suppose it shows that there are many who have given this subject a lot of thought. I personally like the current system for the same reasons stated in the post by saevel25 and it works very well in our league. I just needed to get the reasoning/logic clear in my head so I could explain it succinctly to those who had questions.

Regarding the ongoing discussion, the only tweak we make is only the scores made in league competition count. (We don’t use GHIN, we do the calculation ourselves.) The only additional thought I had is perhaps the powers that be can come up with a method, when doing the differential calculation, of giving greater weight to the rounds played more recently than those from 20 rounds ago. I’ve been testing this with an idea I had similar to the way colleges calculate GPA’s based on credits offered by different classes, but honestly, the complexity it adds to the calculation isn’t worth the trouble as any change made has proven to be inconsequential.

[saevel25]

9 hours ago, wacker said:

absolutely, and that's the point of a forum

I think you are wrong about point 2. I played out of my skin the other day in testing weather conditions, and was the only person in a 17 man bash who came in under net par. I had an 84 come off, which was my best score this year, and an 86 go on. I got .3 back which meant my course handicap went up a shot. I can't see how the system can account for weather when the weather varies from region to region

I played in an outing a few years ago. The course was wet, and it was windy. We all did bad enough to reward us with a PCC of +1 (If I am remembering this correctly). So all of our differentials went up 1. 

So, if that score is part of my best 8 out of 20. That means I am getting 1/8th of a differential improvement. For you to get a PCC, you need enough people submitting their score for handicap during that day. Let's say you were the only person who was submitting the score for handicap, odds are you are not getting a PCC. 

Which is fine, because no handicap system can be that nuanced. I don't think you'd want it to be.

Still, my statement is correct. It takes into account weather and abnormal difficult conditions. 

[Ty_Webb]

2 hours ago, saevel25 said:

So all of our differentials went up 1. 

Down 🙂

[iacas]

16 hours ago, wacker said:

I think you are wrong about point 2. I played out of my skin the other day in testing weather conditions, and was the only person in a 17 man bash who came in under net par. … I can't see how the system can account for weather when the weather varies from region to region

As others have pointed out, he is not.

https://www.whs.com/articles/2019/playing-conditions-calculation.html

I might suggest you may not know quite as much about the WHS to be forming strong opinions.

[wacker]

10 hours ago, iacas said:

As others have pointed out, he is not.

https://www.whs.com/articles/2019/playing-conditions-calculation.html

I might suggest you may not know quite as much about the WHS to be forming strong opinions.

I know enough to realise it's flawed, however my opinions on it are more positive than the average Brit

[iacas]

2 hours ago, wacker said:

I know enough to realise it's flawed, however my opinions on it are more positive than the average Brit

Dunning-Kruger on line 2. 🙂 

"I don't like change" (almost every human being ever, including golfers in the UK) and "it doesn't work the way I think it should work for my one-off data point" (you and a few others here and there) aren't proof of it being "flawed."

[Ty_Webb]

9 hours ago, wacker said:

I know enough to realise it's flawed, however my opinions on it are more positive than the average Brit

Where are you getting the opinions of the average Brit from? Most people I know are fine with it (or at least not fussed enough to complain about it). I've spent roughly half my golfing life under the CONGU system and half under the US/WHS system. I think WHS is a significant improvement over CONGU for two main reasons - one, it adjusts for how difficulty varies by ability, where CONGU does not and two, it catches up with changes in ability far more quickly than CONGU did. If your handicap was 5.0 under CONGU and you started shooting the course rating/SSS every time you played, it would take 21 rounds to get to 0.4 and would never get below 0.4. Under WHS, it takes at most 8 rounds to get to 0.0 and could be fewer. Similarly if you were 5.0 and started shooting 8 over every time, you'd get to 5.5 in 5 rounds and then you'd be stuck at 6 forever. WHS gets to 8.0 after at most 20 rounds and could be quite a bit fewer than that

[wacker]

12 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

Where are you getting the opinions of the average Brit from? Most people I know are fine with it (or at least not fussed enough to complain about it). I've spent roughly half my golfing life under the CONGU system and half under the US/WHS system. I think WHS is a significant improvement over CONGU for two main reasons - one, it adjusts for how difficulty varies by ability, where CONGU does not and two, it catches up with changes in ability far more quickly than CONGU did. If your handicap was 5.0 under CONGU and you started shooting the course rating/SSS every time you played, it would take 21 rounds to get to 0.4 and would never get below 0.4. Under WHS, it takes at most 8 rounds to get to 0.0 and could be fewer. Similarly if you were 5.0 and started shooting 8 over every time, you'd get to 5.5 in 5 rounds and then you'd be stuck at 6 forever. WHS gets to 8.0 after at most 20 rounds and could be quite a bit fewer than that

You actually just made my point for me, it's too reactive, cheers