Is my handicap a lie?

[Dent]

Yes there is an option to enter in my course and slope rating, so it must be correct.

[NM Golf]

I have this problem too. Im an 8.1 handicap, and i enter all my scores, but ive only broken 80 4 times this year, i constantly shoot 80-82. Is my handicap wrong too? Front 9 i can easily shoot anywhere from 38-40 on a Par 36. So when i think of it i can easily break 80. But i see guys on this froum that have near an 8 posting constand 70's.

I still think people are confused about what is a handicap. You handicap represents your potential . Like I said in another post, you should have to play a slightly above average round to shoot your handicap. If your handicap is correct then the odds of you shooting net par are about 1 out of every 5 rounds. Shooting 1 or 2 strokes below your handicap should be somewhat difficult, around 1 out of every 10 or 20 rounds. So your scoring average should be higher than your handicap, and if you consistantly shoot at or below par with your handicap then you are a sandbagger. For instance, my scoring average is 73.9 for my last 40 rounds this summer. With slope taken into account I am pretty close to right on with a 0.5 handicap

[Jeepthrills]

Yeah, I've had problems with the 9-hole scores too. For example, I can shoot a 42 on 9 holes-occasionally. But I will ALWAYS follow that up with a 59 on the back 9! :(

I think it is largely based on how your system treats 9 hole rounds. I use GAM (Golf Association of Michigan) and they do it chronologically. Every time there are two 9 holers they add them together. If they were using the best 10 and combining those then it would not be as accurate. I can shoot a low 9, but I have rarely put two low nines together in an 18 hole round. The last two rounds I played at White Lake were 40 & 41, but the lowest I have ever managed out there is 84.

[Big Lex]

Garbage in, garbage out on handicaps, on both ends...let me explain:

The handicap system works extremely well in "rating" a golfer and facilitating competitions, if several conditions are met. Not all of these conditions are always met, however, and that's where funny handicaps can come from.

1. You have to keep score all of the time, and post all of your scores. If you tear up the card and stop scoring because you're having a bad day, and only post your rounds in the 80s or better, obviously the handicap won't be valid. Some people call this "Vanity posting."

2. The opposite of vanity posting is, of course, sandbagging, or turning in scores that are too high. There are a number of checks and balances out there which are supposed to snare sandbaggers, but they don't always work.

3. Finally, course ratings and slope ratings aren't always great. I don't know how stringent the USGA's system of doing these ratings is, or how well raters are trainied. They may be excellent on both counts, but my experience has been that there may be 2 courses with similar slope and ratings that are far, far different in difficulty. But I'm a mediocre golfer and may not be assessing this correctly.

If your handicap is out of whack, it probably reflects something amiss in one of these three areas.

[greenail]

I still think people are confused about what is a handicap. You handicap represents your

Just to add a bit to the discussion, you can shoot consistently below your handicap but it takes a ton of work. I've dropped from 24.3 index 03/07 to my present instant index of 12.9. I post all my scores but have had a very steep improvement curve. Most people I play with don't call me a sandbagger and mean it because they've seen the improvement. We have people in our club who post in the 90's but show up for a tourney and post an 83, they win but the handicap never goes below a certain point.

[NM Golf]

Just to add a bit to the discussion, you can shoot consistently below your handicap but it takes a ton of work. I've dropped from 24.3 index 03/07 to my present instant index of 12.9. I post all my scores but have had a very steep improvement curve. Most people I play with don't call me a sandbagger and mean it because they've seen the improvement. We have people in our club who post in the 90's but show up for a tourney and post an 83, they win but the handicap never goes below a certain point.

Umm no you can't. If your handicap is correct and you post all scores you cannot consistantly shoot below your handicap. If you consistantly shoot below your handicap then you are a sandbagger. In fact, the very definition of sandbagger is someone who consistantly shoots scores below their handicap. If you work hard on your golf game then you don't shoot below your handicap, your handicap gets lower. Steep improvement curve or not your handicap gets updated twice a month you cannot improve faster than that. Unless the ton of work you are talking about is working on being a better cheater. You sound like the guy who shot 68 scratch with a 7 handicap in our last tournament.

[greenail]

Our handicaps are updated once per month, and about 2 weeks in I've dropped a stroke or two on my instant for the past few months and I haven't missed a score post and play very strict rules with Equitable Stroke for each post.

date--Index
3/1 24.3
4/1 24.1
5/1 21.4 (swing revamp by pro)
6/1 19.8
7/1 18.8
8/1 16.1
instant 12.9 ( two 85's in a tourney this month stay for a year)

Thanks for calling me a cheater though...

[iacas]

Thanks for calling me a cheater though...

The point he was making is still valid: it's virtually impossible to shoot "consistently" below your handicap. In order to do so, you need to be constantly improving, and over a long time (which "consistently" implies to me - it isn't consistent if you do it only 1/10 times or for only a two-week stretch during the summer).

Thus, it's virtually impossible to shoot consistently below your handicap. Everyone will hit a ceiling in their improvement sooner or later.

[greenail]

I guess I did the impossible!!! Or virtually at least.

I did quit my job in April, and decided to take the summer off. I've been playing 4-5 times a week. There is no way i would have improved this much working full time.

As far as peaking I'm guessing I'm going to hit it very soon, and unfortunately the club championship is Sept 1-3 with the rough growing like crazy, and a tough setup I'll have to play as a 15 and I'm not sure I'll even get to net +4 by the 3rd round. If I can get my putting to keep improving I may have a chance to do well, but Saturday I shot a 41 on the front with 23 putts. Ball striking can only get you so far, and practicing your putting in 101 degree heat is not something I'm up for.

[Fourputt]

The point being that as long as your game is improving, yes you can shoot better than your handicap, but at the same time your handicap will drop with each revision, and once you reach a certain point, it is no longer possible to better it consistently, because your game will not have the room for improvement that it had in the past. While my progress hasn't been as dramatic as yours (I didn't have as far to go as you did), I did win, or at least finish in the money, several times last year in club events. But this year has been a different story. Even though both seasons have seen a 2.5 stroke improvement in my handicap, last year I was more competitive than I am this season. In 2006 I went from 17 to 14.7, and this year from 14.7 to 12.2, but I have yet to cash on any tournament this season. And now my game has stabilized, so I would really have to shoot lights out in the couple of remaining competitions to do any good.

I think you have a exceptional advantage, almost a built in opportunity to sandbag (not an accusation, just an observation), because your club has such a liberal revision schedule. The Colorado Golf Association (of which my club is a member), publishes a new revision every 2-3 weeks during the season, thus making it more difficult to to keep your game ahead of your handicap. I had the advantage of playing a couple of matches this year at the favorable end of the cycle, playing just before a new revision came out, and I won those matches. But I stabilized before I got in the money brackets, and lost a couple of close matches to get dumped just one round too early.

Our next revision comes out this Friday, the day my club championship starts. So my handicap for the tournament won't be updated since the event will be set up this week prior to the revision. But it won't matter, as my handicap won't change more than a tenth of a point this time. I just have to go out and shoot 3 rounds to my potential, rather than my usual thing of playing to my average...

[Jeepthrills]

The course we play our league on is not rated. Since more than half of the people in our league don't play anywhere else and I am the only one with a true handicap, we use a simple formula. We use 80% of the difference between your average and par. Unfortunately this has actually hurt the better golfers this year in two ways. First, we don't cap it. Therefore it is possible for someone to have a handicap for nine hole greater than 18 (USGA Max 36 for 18). Secondly, we use all scores, not just the best ones. We have two new golfers this year that have been getting better each week. This makes them very tough to beat as they can consistently shoot belwo their averages.

I played Sunday with the two guys in the league that have relatively low averages/handicaps and we agreed that we need to change the formula for next year to make it more fair for everyone. I proposed that we do the best five of your last ten. Several years ago we used only the last four scores, but I think that the potential to drastically change a handicap with one blow up round makes that unfair. Of course everyone is going to think we did this because we are the better golfers and it benefits us. At the same time, a better golfer should at least have some advantage against a lesser player.