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Sounds pretty short and easy to me Nick RAGC is 144 from the blues or 141 from the whites...Average is 113 apparently.I believe that every course in Scotland has a course rating and slope index and they have had for a while now. Surely they'll just have to train a few more people in England & Wales (& NI?) - can only take a day per course surely?
If https://www.ushandicap.com//golf-course/course.asp?facilityID=28889 is correct, RSG is 145 even from the medal tees. Does that mean if they start accounting this our handicaps will take a hit?
As Col has indicated.....what happens is that the best 8/20 rounds is used to calculate your Handicap INDEX. Then, to calculate how many shots you will get playing from any given set of tees, you multiply your INDEX by the Slope Rating of the course you are going to play and then divide by 113.So....your Handicap Index will probably take a hit compared to your current CONGU h/cap, but the strokes you receive when actually playing probably wont change much at all.
Of course one of the biggest issues that we haven't mentioned yet is the fact that the vast majority of social rounds of golf allow short putts to be given rather than putted out, and often are played as 4BBB matches rather than singles (and I imagine that there are other 'casual' play rules that are used at times rather than playing strictly to the rule book). How that ties into recording social rounds for handicapping purposes will be a challenge, and I can also see quite a lot of resistance to submitting casual rounds for handicapping purposes amongst club golfers.
I just hope they can do the calculation in the handicap software without too much user input based on my past experience with h/c secretaries!
no....the casual golfer will not have a Scooby Doo about his current handicap index.....
Just browsing my county unions site and found a report of the progress of rating course for Slope.They completed 7 in 2017 (including my home course), plan to do another 7 in 2018 and the same in 2019. This would leave NINE courses unrated at the time of introduction of the World Handicapping Scheme.Somewhat worryingly the report states that it is the assessors understand that courses that have not been rated by then will be given a temporary SSS/Slope figure by England Golf pending formal rating!!So if they cant get it done they will guess!!....would have been interesting to see what they would have "guessed" for my course as the general perception of it is that it is a short easy course!!!....but was rated at 129 off the back tees.
Nick - Maybe I am misunderstanding how things work, but aren't slope ratings based on statistical analysis of rounds played by actual golfers rather than a course being 'assessed' like they are for SSS?My understanding was that the courses receive a 'course rating' which is assessed in the same way as SSS (assessors walking the course), albeit with a different measurement system. Course ratings are also to one decimal place rather than being rounded to the nearest whole number. The slope rating is then calculated looking at actual rounds played (by scratch and 'bogey' golfers) and working out how much tougher it is for 'bogey' golfers than scratch golfers based on the results. So in theory every course could be rated for slope (bit not course rating) without ever being visited?The course would need to be visited for the course rating to be calculated, but from what I have seen there seems to be a very close match between SSS and course rating, so if they did have to fudge things and just set the course rating to equal SSS then I don't think they'd be too far out.
I could be wrong though... I'll ask our handicap sec next time I see him if he had to provide score data.
How are course ratings and slopes calculated?Those figures are generated two ways. Ideally, all courses are rated empirically. That means that hundreds upon hundreds of rounds are played on each tee under various weather conditions by scratch golfers, bogey golfers and high-handicappers. All these rounds are stored in the USGA's handicap database. They know how Golfer X has played other courses which are already rated. Their computer mashes all these data points together to generate the rating (by examining the performances of scratch golfers) and then the slope (adding in the results from higher-handicappers). The problem is that it takes months to acquire a large-enough sampling of actual rounds to perform the above calculations. In the meantime, the course would otherwise remain "unrated" were it not for the second method of rating a course. The USGA has studied the elements that make a course easy or difficult for many years. They have computer models which predict that adding a sand trap here or water hazard there will boost a hole's difficulty by such-and-such an average number of strokes for the scratch golfer and a different number of strokes for a bogey golfer. They also quantize the influence of dog legs, narrow fairways, trees, hard pan, deep rough, swales, gulleys, green speed, you name it. All these course ingredients are captured in a handbook which is available to a course architect so a preliminary rating and slope can be estimated for each tee color. These ratings and slopes may be thought of as similar to a provisional handicap in that the figures are estimates which are treated as "better than nothing" yet not as good as the real ones which will be reckoned after several thousand rounds have been recorded.