Close Call

Thank you, all, for your replies. There is still a lot for me to learn about this game. I am just amazed that I even care. Biggest surprise of my life- me playing and thinking about golf! What a wonderful new adventure in my life.

I just downloaded the Golfshot application for my iPhone. It sure allows for a lot of tracking. I guess I will learn to track each shot, each club, etc. with time. At this point, I am concentrating on score and number of putts per hole. The other statistics may be useful as I improve. Thank you!

This is good information. Thank you. I guess I just need to continue taking the maximum strokes that my handicap allows (since I have the highest allowable handicap) and work on my own game. I just get discouraged sometimes. I have been playing for 9 months and am still stuck in the 130s to 140s and everybody plays better than me. Oh well! This game has changed my life and I am surprised that I am playing at all. I always thought it would be boring.

I am a new golfer. My handicap is 40.4 and is used when I play club tournaments or with the ladies group on Thursday mornings. My girlfriend and I play with our friends and spouses every weekend. We each have a handicap of 40.4 and the guys generally range from 15-30. When we play with our spouses, we generally all shoot from the forward tees to maintain pace of play. The best golfer takes a maximum of 7 strokes, the second best take 8- 9 strokes maximum. They told us women that at our level we were supposed to take 9 strokes. I have since found that I am supposed to take 10 strokes for my handicap level, but since I didn't know this when I started, I take 9 when I play with these golfers. When the game is over, we tally our scores. Obviously the guy that only takes 7 strokes will win most of the time. We never calculate a net score based upon our handicaps. I know my husband would beat the better golfer sometimes, if he took a maximum of 7 strokes on his lousy holes instead of 9. In social play such as this, wouldn't it be more fair to agree ahead of time to all take the same number of maximum strokes to keep it fair? I understand that using a handicap is an equalizer, of sorts. But we never do any net calculations. It would seem that if we all took 7 or 9 maximum strokes, our games could be more fairly measured. Thank you all for your help