Everyone thinks they’ve got the most beautiful garden. And lots of golfers just love to tell you their course is more difficult than their near neighbours.
But sometimes numbers on their own can add to the confusion. ‘How is that club’s Slope Rating higher than ours? Our course is much more difficult’.
It’s a refrain I’ve heard many times when I’ve been playing at clubs following the arrival of the World Handicap System in Great Britain and Ireland at the end of 2020.
Course Rating shows the expected score of a scratch golfer (a 0.0 handicap) in average conditions, while Slope Rating is a measure of the relative difficulty of a course for a Bogey Golfer compared to a Scratch player.
So how do we really judge whether one course is tougher than another? Do we use Course Rating or Slope?
In an episode of The NCG Golf Podcast, Gemma Hunter, The R&A’s assistant director of handicapping, revealed the answer.
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How do you compare the difficulty of courses?
“For the measure of difficulty, if you’re going to try and compare ‘Golf Club A’ to ‘Golf Club B’, you need something that’s a direct measure. What compares A to B?” she said.
“The only thing you can do that with is Course Rating, because they both use the Scratch Golfer. They’re both using exactly the same golfer playing the two separate courses.
“If you’ve got a course that’s got a Course Rating of 71.2 and you’ve got another course that’s got a rating of 72.4 then the second golf course is perceived to be a harder golf course because it has a higher Course Rating.
“So in terms of which is the harder course you can only look at Course Rating. You can’t look at anything else.
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“When we talk about Slope, Slope can’t happen without a Bogey Rating. The Bogey Rating is looking at the ability for that Bogey Golfer to be able to play the same course as the Scratch Player.
“So the Bogey Player might go and play a golf course. If the Scratch Player gives us a Course Rating of 70.7 and the Bogey Rating comes out at 93.2 it is those two values, plus the consistency factor, which gives us the Slope Rating.
“The Slope between A and B isn’t the difficulty, it is the comparative difficulty between two players playing the same course. Slope’s only really relevant for that one particular course at any one time because it’s saying a Bogey Player needs an extra X number of strokes to be able to play the same course as the Scratch Player.”
Now have your say on Course Rating and Slope
What do you think? Let me know what you think about Course Rating by leaving a comment below, by emailing me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com, or by getting in touch on X.
