I don’t want to say I’m a man of few hobbies. You can be the judge of that. But sometimes when I’m at a loose end, I like to flick through golf courses on my digital app and see how many shots I’d get if I ever tee it up there.
Yes, I’m unbelievably sad. You don’t have to tell me. But this curious use of my spare time has allowed me to better understand one of the bigger changes to the World Handicap System that arrived just over a year ago.
We’ve had 13 months of Course Rating minus Par in Great Britain & Ireland and it’s certainly had a major impact on my game. I imagine some of you reading this might say something similar.
First a reminder. Course Rating minus Par is an adjustment for the difference between the Course Rating and par of the course you are playing.
Prior to April 2024, your Course Handicap was worked out like this: Handicap Index X (Slope Rating/113).
Don’t worry about the maths too much but, since last year, it’s been done as the label suggests it would be. You take the Course Rating, minus the par of the course, and add that to your Course Handicap calculation.
This was a big change and we quickly saw why. Golfers gained or lost shots on their Course Handicap overnight. If the par of their course was lower than the course rating, they got extra. If it was higher, some were taken away.
It applied universally. Every single handicap was affected. And I reckon, much as happened when WHS was first introduced at the start of the decade, that made 2024 a season of recalibration for many clubs.
If you had got an idea of how Stableford scoring might go, you basically had to bin it as GB&I shifted back almost to the old CONGU days of 36 points being the target score.
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For me, currently toting a 13.3 index, it also brought some eye-opening fluctuations in course handicap depending on the tees from which I was playing.
At Close House (Par 71, Course Rating 72.3, Slope 138 from the white tees), I’ve got a Course Handicap of 18 but lose four shots if I step forward to the yellows. Move to the British Masters tees and I receive 21. Those numbers never moved as significantly pre-2024.
Some of you might disagree – and feel free to @ me on this, it’s rather the point of this discussion – but I do like the way that Course Handicaps now shift compared to the relative difficulty of the tee sets being played.
I remember playing the championship course at Carnoustie expecting to be weighed down by shots and being really surprised at how little my Course Handicap moved.
Now, if I played off the whites, I’d get 20 and I’d pick up 19 if I played from the yellows. That does feel more reflective of how I’ve done when I played there. The last time I was on site, I bought a ball marker to celebrate the fact I’d broken 90.
Has Course Rating minus Par changed scoring in competitions?
As I said earlier, that shift is universal. Scratch players, depending on the difficulty of the course, have added a shot or two to their arsenal. They, and I, have also lost them when it has gone the other way.
Has that brought out any change in competition results? Are we seeing even higher Stableford scores (or lower numbers) at those courses higher on the difficulty scale? Are we seeing more consistency as Par becomes the target score?
I’m hoping you can tell me. Send me your data and we’ll try to evaluate it.
But a major point of WHS is that it was never supposed to be simply a static number. It would consider the difficulty of the course you were playing and adjust accordingly.
To use the Carnoustie example, once again, it was obscene to suggest a handicap fashioned over dozens of rounds on one course was in any way representative of the challenge you might face at one of the toughest venues on the Open rota. SSS didn’t go far enough in redressing that. People want their shots up front, not retrospectively.
But now Course Rating minus Par is firmly in our minds, a more important task lies ahead. That is establishing confidence in the Course Rating system itself.
To say many club golfers are sceptical about it is an understatement. How many times have you found someone who has taken issue with the number produced and passionately argued that it was wrong?
It’s a conversation I have had with many repeatedly during the past five years. Partly, that’s because many of us don’t understand it.
I don’t think the governing bodies have done an amazing job of explaining Course Rating and the secrecy surrounding lots of it is genuinely baffling.
See if you can get a copy of the full USGA calculations. If you are not a handicap chief, or a volunteer on a Course Rating panel, you are likely never to have seen it.
While that’s probably around proprietary data, and ensuring copycat handicap systems can’t be quickly drilled out by AI, it does rather add to the allusion there is something to hide. It’s a conspiracy theorists dream and, given the current notoriety of WHS, it frankly doesn’t help.
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So how has it been for you? Has Course Rating minus Par brought about a big change, or have you barely noticed it? Let me know by emailing me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com or leave me a comment on X.
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