I hear coworkers talking about golf handicaps (usually in the 80’s range) and smile/nod my way through the conversation. I’m assuming it’s how many strokes over an 18 hole day?
In: 85
Every golf hole has a par. This is the number of times the course designer believes your club SHOULD make contact with the ball until it makes it into the hole. Your handicap is the average of how many strokes over par you were on each hole on average. A lower handicap means a higher skilled golfer.
At least that’s the intent. The true handicap is actually a fairly specific calculation taking in a lot of factors and numbers like course difficulty overall.
Every hole on a course has a “par” – the number of strokes (times you hit the ball) it should take you to finish the hole. This is typically how many strokes it should take you to reach the green if you play well plus 2 putts. If you add up all of the pars for the 18 holes, you get par for the course. Typically courses are par 72, plus or minus a stroke or two.
Now, _most_ golfers don’t play that well. They will take more than 2 putts on the green and/or take more strokes to reach the green in the first place. Averaged out over an entire round, this means that most golfers tend to shoot over par; they take additional strokes to finish the course than someone who played well all 18 holes would take.
That overage is the handicap – how many _extra_ strokes do you take to finish the course. So if a course is par 72 and you have a handicap of 5, that means that you’d would, on average, take 77 strokes to finish that entire course.
Par for a hole is calculated as how many shots it should take a very good golfer to finish the hole.
Most golfers will score over par on most of the holes, and therefore for the course in general.
My handicap is, by a slightly complicated calculation, supposed to represent not how much I am over par on average, but how much I would be over par when playing pretty much the *best I am capable of*.
That means that when competing against another golfer of a different standard, we can each deduct our handicap from our actual score and see who wins. The effect is that the one who came closest to playing their best (or did better than their best!) will win. Which is nicer than just getting thrashed by a much better player.
Each hole on a golf course has a par score, which is the number of shots it “should” take a golfer to make it into the hole on average. I put the word “should” in quotes because almost nobody, including lower end professionals, routinely shoots par on a typical golf course. Courses are deliberately designed this way because it’s the only way to help distinguish between the truly excellent golfers at the top end.
A handicap is the number of strokes you are expected to score above par based on your relative skill. Let’s say you have a handicap of 12. That means that you were expected to take 12 more shots than par (which, again, is definitely not something the vast majority of people who play golf will ever be able to shoot) to complete the course. Technically, there are actually two kinds of handicap. There is your overall handicap which is sort of a rating of your general golf skill, but then you also have a course handicap which takes into account the relative difficulties of various courses.
To enable amateur golfers of different skill levels to compete with each other, handicaps are used to see who’s shooting better than they ordinarily would on a given day. Let’s say people are on a par 70 course. Two buddies are golfing and one of them is considerably better at golf than the other. The better player has a handicap of 10 and the worse player has a handicap of 20. This means that the better player would be expected to take 80 strokes to complete the course and the worse player would be expected to take 90 strokes. Let’s say the better player has an average day and shoots exactly his handicap. It takes him 80 strokes. The worse player actually has a really good day and completes the course in only 85 strokes. The better player was still better in an objective sense. He took fewer strokes to complete the course. But on this day, after applying handicap, he loses. He shot exactly on expectation and the other guy did better than he would normally be expected to do. (Technically, handicaps are subtracted from your actual strokes and then compared to the par, so the better golfer would have shot zero over par and the worse golfer would have shot five under par. This is quite confusing for reasons I will get into shortly.)
To be clear, on the PGA tour, nobody gets a handicap. They just get scored on what they shot. But if you go through the work of calculating what their handicap would be, you find that at the really high end they would have a handicap of +5 to +8 strokes meaning they’re expected to shoot 5 to 8 strokes under par. On the low end, a pro golfer should have a handicap of pretty close to zero and no more than 2 or 3, i.e. they should be able to shoot on par or only a little bit over it.
You may have noticed that the system is quite confusing, because a handicap for an amateur golfer who normally shoots 10 over par is written as a handicap of 10. But the handicap for a pro golfer who normally shoots five under par is written as a handicap of +5.
The origin of this is fundamentally that amateur golfers are always expected to shoot over par and pro golfers are always expected to shoot under par. So everybody knows that if an amateur golfer has a handicap of 10, what that means is you subtract 10 from his strokes and then compare to par. Pro golfers who are expected to shoot under par have a + sign in front of their nominal handicap in order to emphasize that if they were playing in an amateur game, this number of strokes would actually be added to their score, not subtracted. So if they had a handicap of +5 and shot 5 under par, they would get an overall course score of +0. If they had a bad day and shot five over par, they’d get a course score of +5… Meaning that if they were playing against that bad player I mentioned earlier who had a handicap of 20 but only shot 15 over par (resulting in a handicapped score of 5 under par), the pro golfer would have lost.
Golf handicaps – basically an excuse for bad golfers like me to feel good about our terrible scores.
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of big ice cream cones and bunch of kids. So you hand one ice cream cone to each kid and tell them that we’re going to see how quickly they can finish the ice cream in terms of number of licks (not time). Someone tested it on a few kids and decided that pretty fast eating kid that isn’t phased by brain freeze can do it in 50 licks. That sets “par” or what the organizer thinks is a good standard for a competitive kid to lick the ice cream cone clean.
So they turn all the kids loose, licking away at the ice cream and counting their licks. Technically a bite is a lick – anything that involves your mouth touching the ice cream. So some brave kids take bites and hope it doesn’t give them brain freeze or hurts their teeth too much. Other kids are more conservative and take small licks but keep chugging away.
Eventually, some kid manages to get it done in 48 licks. Other kids range from that up to 70 licks. Any individual kid’s handicap is the difference between par (50 licks) and however many it took him to finish it. So if it was 60 licks, then his handicap is 10.
Golfers use this terminology to compare themselves to each other. And sometimes, it’s used as a way to create tournaments in which players of all skill levels have a chance to win. They can give the handicap to the players as a “bonus” or put them in tiers so they’re competing only against people of a similar handicap. You don’t see it on the PGA tournament because it’s meaningless to that level of player. They don’t care about their handicap – they’re just there to win the tournament. But for average weekend golfers and small local tournaments, it’s incredibly important to allow for socialization and team-based play in an otherwise very solitary sport.
To golfers, a handicap just tells us how good you’re at golf.
Lower the number, better the golfer. Someone who says they shoot mid 80s is probably like 10-12 handicap and is a decent golfer.
A Scratch golfer, a zero handicap, is a very good golfer. Less than 2% of all golfers are scratch.
Handicaps are not the same as scores. People who golf in the 80s tend to have a handicap in the low to mid-teens. Handicap is a way to equalize scoring based on skill. The number is based on the usual number of strokes over par that the person gets for a round.
To explain par, each hole has an ideal or target score called par. Most holes are par 4 (need four decent shots from tee to hole). A couple-few will be par 5 (long holes) and an equal couple-few will be par 3 (short holes), so a usual par is 72. Different courses might be a bit different, 71, or 70.
If you want to compete against your buddy, who is a much better golfer, a straight up contest is no fun. You will almost certainly lose. However, if my buddy shoots 75 or so, regularly, and I shoot 90 or so, regularly, when I play him, we can compare handicaps and figure out how many (free) strokes (hits on the ball) I can get so we would both have about the same score. Also a good way to correct/compare scores from different courses because a 72 on a par 70 course is not as good as a 72 on a par 72 course.
Using handicaps makes it so a mid-golfer like me (shoots in the low 90s) can have a contest with a good golfer like my brother (shoots about 80), or a much worse golfer like my son (shoots in the low 100s).
Handicap number is basically (not exactly) the number of shots over par the golfer gets, on average over many rounds. A 5 handicap would shoot in the mid-upper 70s (on a course with a par of 72), while a 15 handicapper would shoot in the mid-upper 80s, typically.
Let’s say I want to have a friendly game for beer or quarters with my buddy who had a 5 handicap while I have a 15 handicap. Straight up playing, I might as well buy that beer right now. To make the contest fair, I get a number of strokes that is the difference between our handicaps (10 strokes over 18 holes in this example). Out of the 18 holes we play, I will get a stroke for free on 10 of the holes. The holes are numbered by hardness, so I get a stroke on each of the ten hardest holes. If I shoot a five on one of those holes, and my buddy shoots a four, we tie. If he shoots a five when I shoot a five, I win. At the end of the round, we add up wins and losses and the one who won the most gets a free beer (or whatever).
So, handicap is just a way to estimate how good a golfer a person is. Lower numbers are better than higher numbers. Can be used to make fun contests even when skill levels are way different.
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