I wouldn't be surprised if low handicappers were often at the upper end. They are more consistent and likely to shoot scores up and around their handicap. Many of the poorer golfers can often implode. But when you take the overall best score, it'll often be a higher handicapper that gets there, simply because they have more shots on their handicap and on their absolute best day can get a very high score. Especially when you have new and improving golfers.
Your point being that you agree there is no issue with low hcs being disadvantaged compared to high hcs, and the issue is just one of the honest versus the cheats ?
But do they yet advocate categories I think you said ? Which would seem somewhat of a conflict ?
Nothing is going to change the opinion of those who think better players deserve to win handicap competitions (probably more often than) 1/50th of the time in a field of over 100.
"Divisions for allocation of prizes are recommended, giving all players the opportunity to compete against their peers."
Not if they are standing by the statement 'there should be no advantage to holding a high or low handicap'.
Probabilities of winning or finishing in the top-x places, average finishing position, potential best score, average score, average best score, expected score, potential worst score, etc.
My HI is fairly consistent, but my scores are bonkers. I don't feel that I'm consistent at all.
Is that not the 1998 or so survey ? Low HIs needed re-education are concerned about WHS as the cause of their perceived uncompetitiveness against the cheating high HCs.
If the data predated WHS as is suggested, I would rather suggest that in Scotland the system did not need changing.
It did. That was when the bias in favour of low HCs was happening. They were winning more than high HCs. Its possible most of them didnt know that, but became used to a certain frequency or chance of winning. Now that balance has been restored they feel victimised. Rather than equals.
Without figures on the chart one cannot be certain but it looks like there was no problrm at all in Scotland , any difference being tiny and of highly dubious significance.
No, the conclusions from that survey are clear, and, as expected given that it was known the UHS was biased towards low HCs. The lower you were, the greater your unfair advantage over high HCs of winning. The red column is the number of winners. The green, the number of entrants. The categories are the old handicap based ones. Perfect fairness would have the columns in each category level. But as indicated, Cat 1 players won more than their representation ideally would have, Cat 4 winning less proportionately to their numbers. As I say, this was a known profile favour the low, and similar to the picture presented in the earlier quotation here where the lines are shown converging, and removing the over-winning of low hcs.
In any natural system you cannot achieve perfectly equal figures those look a very decent approximation.
Yes, the bias to the low HIs was gentle, and didnt make they higher ranger completely uncompetitive. But even that has now been flattened with WHS which has left no effective difference in the chances of high or low handicappers.
The old SGU "analysis" is incredibly simplistic, only looking at a single metric (as I indicated earlier, winning in larger fields is not the only thing that needs to be assessed when evaluating equity). However, the slight advantage it shows for the low handicapper of winning in fields of 75 or more translates to a much larger advantage in smaller fields and matchplay.
