Equitable Stroke Control. I'm better than I thought!

I've played recreationally since I was a kid with my father.  I've never been a member anywhere or pursued getting a legit USGA handicap.  I play about 3 to 4 times a month with various friends and to my knowledge none of them have handicaps either.  This is probably why I've never heard of "capping" my score at double bogey or 7.  I recently stumbled upon the Equitable Stroke Control system on the USGA website.  This seems a bit odd to me.  I was always under the impression that all the strokes had to be counted as they were.  With this new information I no longer look at a single digit handicap as impressively as I once did.  Nor does it seem out of reach anymore.  Countless times I've had rounds in the 80-90 range that included taking 9's or 10's on individual holes.  Does the majority of the golf community abide by the ESC?

This might make a person who has difficulty breaking 100 legitimately have a handicap of 27 and it might make a person who barely breaks 90 have a handicap of 18, but it won't help you achieve a single digit handicap. A genuine 9 marker has a few double bogies, but triples and over are quite rare for them. Perhaps one every few rounds.

A person who wonders if they're really a single digit (or an 18 or a 27) while playing recreationally and never being a member or having an official USGA index, they should consider playing a match straight up against a player with the same approximate index range who got that index as a member of a club and who plays matches at that club using that index. Good luck!

consider 'tracking' a handicap online...ie. put scores into a website that can generate you a handicap albeit not an official one. www.mobilegolfstats.com is great for that, and it's free. just a suggestion if you want to go a cheaper and 'easier' route to getting that wondering number down to something that's accurate. i did it for a few years before going to GHIN only b/c i was tinkering with my game so much i didn't wanna spend the $30 on a real handicap...and just like the op, i wasn't playing THAT often. hope this helps you 'wonder' less.

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Originally Posted by TyWebbb

I've played recreationally since I was a kid with my father.  I've never been a member anywhere or pursued getting a legit USGA handicap.  I play about 3 to 4 times a month with various friends and to my knowledge none of them have handicaps either.  This is probably why I've never heard of "capping" my score at double bogey or 7.  I recently stumbled upon the Equitable Stroke Control system on the USGA website.  This seems a bit odd to me.  I was always under the impression that all the strokes had to be counted as they were.  With this new information I no longer look at a single digit handicap as impressively as I once did.  Nor does it seem out of reach anymore.  Countless times I've had rounds in the 80-90 range that included taking 9's or 10's on individual holes.  Does the majority of the golf community abide by the ESC?

You don't 'cap' your score at double bogey or 7 unless you already have an established handicap.  See chart at the end of this posting (cap at double bogey if single digit hdcp or 7 if you are 10-19 hdcp).  This article on about.com explains things pretty well.

So what do you do with that information?  You use the chart that they reference at the end of the article.

So, basically, before you have a handicap established you still have to count all those '9s'!  Sorry

I would disagree on the last point, in fact, that is exactly the reason for ESC.  You get into trouble on one or two particular holes and get a couple of triple bogeys or worse (think Luke Donald at 2011 Masters or Kevin Na with a '16', etc), so the USGA doesn't want these scores (which are a bit of an anomaly) to skew your handicap.  If you are a single-digit golfer, then you most likely will NOT screw up the rest of the round because as you got to single-digit, you learned how to put those holes behind you and move on.  That is the only way to get to single-digit (imho).

And just to reinforce that with another data point: I'm a 14.x and have used ESC on 2.7% of holes during rounds which counted toward my handicap, and even with that high percentage it's only making a 0.7 difference in my 'cap - i.e., even when the use of ESC is 3x what Erik's stats indicated, I'd have to already be a 10.x without ESC for it to be helping me get into single digits.

I think it's safe to say a single digit handicapper earned it, regardless of ESC. ESC makes a difference but not that much of a difference, especially at that level.

Actually, Kevin Na's would've counted in his handicap, considering he shot -4 for the rest of the round.  Apply a double-bogey ESC (which, doesn't really even apply for pros, I was just using it as an example people could relate to) and he still shot -2, which is below his avg. score per round of 70.43.  Looking on pgatour.com, his last 20 scores, before and including that tournament were 77 80 74 73 69 72 73 74 68 72 72 69 69 69 75 74 71 67 66 71, which means with ESC applied, his round of 80 (ESC score of 70) would have been his 8th best score.

Yes, ESC rarely applies on a large statistical basis, that is true, but that wasn't my point.  It is there to adjust for the anomalies, ie - the guy that had 4 rounds in his last 20 that were great, except for that quad-bogey in each round.  Just because you rarely used ESC or only 1% of golfers used ESC on rounds that counted towards hdcp, doesn't mean it shouldn't be used.  Those 1% of holes which require ESC to be applied that counted towards someone's handicap might have only changed their handicap from a 8.0 to a 7.2, but that equals about one less stroke per round, which then applied to a 4-round handicapped tournament would be 4 less strokes.  Which would be quite a different result in standings and could be the difference between winning and coming in 10th.

From what I gathered, your point was that you don't think ESC is very useful because you never use it and it only applies to very few rounds that could or might change ones handicap (based on a large sampling of statistics).  If that is correct, then that is where we disagree.  And yes, I agree, this discussion with you is getting 'pointless'

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I never said that an '8.0 would become a 7.2 in the

What?  I'm confused.  How are 8 strokes required to produce a change from 8.0 to 7.2?  Are you talking about 8 strokes in one round or total over the 10 rounds counting towards someone's handicap?  If as you state above, the average that ESC changed someones score was 1.02 strokes, than that is exactly what I'm talking about.  ESC is used to account for the anomaly of a number of rounds like this effecting one golfer and thereby skewing his handicap in the wrong direction (based on the USGA definition of handciap).  If someone's score changed by 1 stroke per round, that would more than do it.  Or, if a golfer happened to have 5 rounds that each had a quad, but with ESC (changing them to a double-bogey) would be low enough to count towards his handicap, then that would be 2 strokes per round.  Which would change his handicap by about 1 stroke (taking into account the same slope on all courses in the mix).

Example - Golfer B had 8 rounds that were better by 1 stroke over Golfer A and his handicap changed from an 8.1 to a 7.5.  This was calculated using a standard slope for example purposes, but if you factor in different slopes, you could easily get an 8.0 to 7.2 swing.

Calculated from this website , based on 20 rounds, of which only 10 are shown above, since the other 10 are greater and don't change the handicap.

The idea behind ESC is that it's [b]low enough[/b] that no one hole can thoroughly damage your game's differential. For example, if you played a stellar game that would be one of your best differential ever but you had one hole where you put 3 balls in the water, your entire game shouldn't be dramatically swayed by that. This is in the spirit of the handicapping system, they try to keep individual bad occurrences from dis-proportionally ruining your stats. However, the idea is that it's [b]high enough[/b] that if you frequently bump into it, you won't be in the handicap range for that particular ESC for long. For example, if you're under a 10 HDCP and ESC is double bogey, then that's high enough that if you're taking double bogey as ESC frequently, you won't be staying a single digit HDCP for long. Double bogey a couple times a round puts you 4 over par over two holes, meaning you have to play the other 16 holes at at most 5 or 6 over par to keep carding differentials that keep you below a 10 HDCP. That probably won't happen. Similarly, if you're between a 10 and 20 HDCP and ESC is a 7, if you're carding 7s frequently then you will probably have a hard time not gradually raising your handicap. Again, say twice a round, means you're about 6 over par over 2 holes, meaning you have to play the other 16 holes at most 14 over par; and if you would be scoring 8 or more on two of the holes, what are the odds you're going to average better than bogey on the remaining holes? So, ESC gives you a [i]chance[/i] at salvaging your game enough to have it be in your best 10 for your HDCP. From personal experience, if I have to invoke ESC then odds are not good that it'll be the case. And Erik's stats show that this is almost never the case for single HDCPs. I wouldn't worry about it helping anyone, it's designed so that if it needs to help you too much then you don't belong in the category where ESC helps you often. It's self-correcting. How many people abide by it? I would think everyone with a USGA handicap would. For others, like myself, who only keep scores recreationally, I don't know. I keep by it, and most stat software should automatically do it for you. Side note: I think you're [i]supposed[/i] to play the ball out and then later cap it down to ESC, but I frequently make the ESC determination on the course and occasionally pick up and move on if I've hit it. I don't hit it often, but if I do then odds are half decent that I need to help keep the pace of play up.

Thank you all for your input.  The info about the mobilegolfstats website is especially intriguing.  I'm fairly certain that I'll try that out since I have wondered for a while what my handicap actually would be.

Interesting.  I have always wondered why there is an ESC as I seldom run into it and I'm a fairly high handicap player.  I'm allowed a 7 maximum on most courses/tees I play.  I didn't go back and check but I doubt I ever used in on a round that got counted in my handicap. I can tell from this thread that the value of ESC is controversial.  I doubt that any significant percentage (less than 1% I'd guess) of handicap indices would change more that a couple of tenths if ESC disappeared.  So I don't see much value in ESC,  but I use it on those occasions I score greater than 7 on a hole because I try to play by the rules.

"ESC is not that important" or "wasn't very useful"... same thing (imo).  Whatever, you don't get it.  Statistics don't matter when you get down to individual rounds.  ESC is there to try and make sure the abnormal rounds don't skew things one way or another and make the handicap system as fair as possible.

OP - I apologize if things got off-topic, I'm done with this discussion.