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
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.
Latest Answers