Episode 24: Golf Rules and Scoring Most Friend Groups Misunderstand

Most golfers play for years without fully understanding how golf scoring and handicaps actually work. In this episode of the Birdie Board Podcast, Corey breaks down several golf concepts that many friend groups misunderstand, including score differential, handicap indexes, stroke indexes, ready golf, net vs gross scoring, and maximum hole scores for handicap purposes.

If you've ever wondered how the handicap system really works, why your handicap isn't your average score, or how net scoring is calculated, this episode explains it in a simple and practical way for everyday golfers.

Whether you're new to golf or have been playing for years, this episode will help you better understand the systems that make golf competitions fair and fun.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Birdie Board Podcast is brought to you by the Birdie Board app, the easiest way to track matches, scores, and handicaps with friends. Now, here's your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to episode 24 of the Birdie Board Podcast. I only have one more until I reach my goal of 25 episodes. That's almost a half a year of recording. I think technically I'll hit half a year when I hit 27 episodes, because there was one week that I did two episodes. So just 26 isn't going to be enough. So we're getting close to half a year of the Birdie Board podcast, which is pretty exciting. But still, 24 episodes is a lot. My wife was telling me there's a statistic, something like most podcasts don't go past three or four episodes. So the fact that we're on 24 now is something I'm pretty proud of. Another big accomplishment that's on the horizon is 250 podcast downloads. We're at 235 currently, so I think we're going to be able to hit 250 in maybe the next podcast or two, depending on how lucky we get with the downloads. So recently I had a Facebook video go a little bit viral. So it had 70,000 views. That is a lot more than what I typically get on any of my videos, which can range anywhere between 200 views and a thousand views, depending on the platform. What was interesting to me is why I think this probably got some traction, is it was about course rating and slope rating. And what's interesting about this topic is it's an area of golf that I think a lot of golfers don't understand. And it's okay, it's there's nothing wrong with that, but I think that's what draws people in and what makes them interested in it. And I thought, well, let's talk about a lot of those types of topics on this podcast. So in previous podcasts, I've talked about course rating and slope rating already. So I'm not going to go over those. Maybe I'll bring it back up in a couple podcasts from now. But the first thing I'm going to talk about is score differential. And this is probably one of the newest things that I've learned recently. And what is score differential? Well, it's a number that is trying to tell you how you did on a course, irregardless of the difficulty of it. So to put other in an example, imagine you play at two separate courses and you shot a 90 at both of those courses. Well, how do you know which one is actually the better 80 or the better 90 90 score? That's where score differential comes in, and it's an equation that can tell you which one of those 90s is actually the better round. And then it takes things like the course rating and the slope rating and puts it all into this formula and gives you a number. And the lower that number is, the better you did on that round. So if you put your 90s in and one course came back with a score differential of a nine, the other course came back with a score differential of a seven, that second number is seven, which is lower than the nine, which means that is this 85 that is better. It accounts for course conditions too, if you wanted to, which we'll talk about in a second. But the formula is this it's your gross score, so the actual score you get minus the course rating, and then you multiply that by 113 divided by the slope rating. This is going to give you your score differential for that particular course and a number that you can use to compare all of your rounds to see which round did I play best. I adjusted a really or I talked about a really cool um mechanic of this formula, which is how you can adjust your score based off of the conditions. So imagine if you're playing the same course uh two days in a row, and 85 and 85. Let's say you shot 85 both days, and one day was the perfect conditions, it was sunny, nothing wrong. The next day was a torrential downpour and windy. Well, obviously, like we're trying to figure out which one did you shoot better at? Well, if you shot 85 on both days and the second day was rainy and windy, well, it's probably pretty easy to think I I played better on that day to be able to shoot 85 in those conditions. But this this score differential formula, as I spoke about earlier, wouldn't account for that. So, how would you account for that? Well, you can optionally add what's called a playing conditions calculation. It's PCC, it's a score from minus one to three that you can add or subtract from your adjusted gross score. So for that 85 that you shot with uh the rainy conditions and the windy conditions, depending on how bad you assess it to be, don't put 85 into this formula. Instead, put 87 or 88. Use this playing conditions calculation to adjust your score ever so slightly to account for these different conditions. Um I mentioned it starts at negative one, a uh scenario I thought about that. Why would you use a minus one? Well, I'm thinking I was playing a course one time, and our tea boxes that we were teeing off from uh had it was just one of those big T-boxes, and there were Fox on the T box. Well, we were kind of standing there waiting for the move off, and um we they just weren't moving off, so we didn't really want to go close because you you know you never know. So what we did is we kind of went up in front of the T box to the foot of the fairway and we just teed off from there. Well, this is where I might want to subtract a stroke because I made that hole easier. So if I shot 85 that day and then I went back the next day, shot another 85, um, but it was from the normal T-Box, you would want your uh score differential to account for that. So that's where this PCC, the player playing conditions calculations comes into effect. If you're playing somewhere official, or maybe a course might give you the PCC for the day, definitely take note of that. Um otherwise you can kind of do your best guess and come up with uh come up with it yourself. The reason these score differentials are very important is because it plays into the handicap index. And I will say this is something I got wrong in a previous podcast. What I said that was wrong was your handicap is the average of your lowest eight rounds. That is not true. What it actually is, is it's the average of your eight lowest score differentials from your last 20 rounds. So the difference is that I said is it's the eight lowest rounds. It's not that, it's the lace late eight lowest score differentials, which is that equation we just talked about in the last section of this podcast. So once you know all your score differentials for the last 20 rounds, now you can type the top eight and you average those together, and what do you get in the end? You get a handicap index. And this handicap index is supposed to tell you how how good is a golfer from a potential point of view. It's not trying to capture how good are they from an average point of view, it's trying to say this is the golfer's potential, this is how good they could be at when they're playing really, really well. Now, this is not like um I would say this is just a little bit better than average. It's the the eight lowest, so it's eight divided by 20. That's not quite 50%. So that kind of gives you an idea of like what really is it. It's about your top 40%. So if you're trying to figure out well, how cl how often should I shoot my average handicap? It's probably roughly around 40% of the time you should shoot it. So it's not like every other time you play out, but like you should shoot if you play five rounds, roughly roughly two of them should be um near your handicap index. And then the other three might not. So it's not uncommon for like a 10 handicapper to constantly uh shoot in like the high 80s to 90s, even though 10, if you take like a par 72, a 10 handicap would say, okay, your potential is an 82. Well, you might only shoot close to an 82, two out of five rounds. The other three rounds are going to be 85, 87, maybe even 90. And that's okay, that's the point of a handicap index, is it's not trying to measure your average, it's trying to measure your potential. Very important part, and it's all based off of your score differentials. So that that's the understanding of a handicap index. Understand that's based off of that score differential that we talked about in the last the last section. So now that you have your handicap index, how do you use it? Well, your handicap index is a number, and what it's trying to tell you is how many strokes you get on the hardest holes on the golf course. So the easiest way to think about it is if you have an 18 handicap, you get one additional stroke on every hole. If you have a nine, you get an additional stroke on just the nine hardest holes. So a lot of times what golfers assume is, believe it or not, and it's okay if it's you, is like the number one hardest hole is they're gonna be the first one you play, the last one you play is gonna be the easiest, and it just gets easier as the day goes on. That's not true. There is a what's called a stroke index, some kind sometimes call it as the handicap index. And it's gonna be another number on your scorecard that's not the order of the holes that goes from one to eighteen. And what this is telling you is how difficult is the hole you're about to play. So 18 is going to be the easiest hole, one is gonna be the hardest. And when you get, let's say, 10 strokes on a different on a particular course, depending on your handicap, what it's saying is you get 10 strokes on the 10 hardest holes. So one through 10, you your par would be one higher than what's actually on the scorecard. Um, if you have a handicap over 18, what that means is you get a stroke on every hole, and then you get a stroke on another stroke on the two hardest holes. So you would actually get two strokes on the two hardest holes and one on all the rest. If you have a opposite handicap, so you have a plus handicap, let's say you're plus two, the opposite actually happens. You actually lose strokes on the easiest holes. So if you have a two handicap and the calculations say you get two less strokes, on the eighteenth and seventeenth, you actually have a par one below what's listed. So if the eighteenth hole is a par four, your new par would actually be a heart par three. So you can see kind of how all of these systems are kind of working together to pull the golfers of different skill levels all down to about par so that they can have a competitive game. And with the potential of it, it shows okay, well, if it was your average, then the competitiveness wouldn't mean as much. It's saying, okay, this is like if my average is 85, um, or let's say 15 over par, your average is five over par, our difference is 10, like you're not gonna get much of a round. The cool thing about golf potential is like it doesn't say when your best rounds have to occur. You can do the math and say, okay, about 40% of the time I'm gonna have a good round. Well, I guess in a way, like if you've had five bad rounds in the round in a row, you're due for one, or you could be resetting your handicap. But what it's saying is like, okay, I am a 15 handicap, that is my potential. I need to lock in and shoot my handicap at 15. I'm gonna course strategize, I'm really gonna think about each hole. That's what I need to get. So that's the coolest that competitiveness is like it's still in your control to be able to shoot your potential. And this is something Tiger was so good at and Scotty is so good at is like shooting your potential when it matters the most. Like both Tiger and Scotty, they've had their bad rounds throughout their career, but it seems like when majors roll around, that's when they're shooting their potentials. That's what you want to do with your your handicap is like when you're when it matters the most, live up to your potential, live up to your handicap, shoot that number, and you're gonna win every time. So transitioning away now from just the whole handicap system, the next topic here is ready golf. The traditional ordering of how you play is the winner of the previous hole is the one who tees off first, and then you go in the order of whoever went got second, third, so on and so forth. Um, and then once you're off the t-box, the person that's the furthest out is the one to go first. Um that is the traditional golf order. So, what happened is this would cause pace a play problems because someone in the middle of the fairway, pretty far up, would be just waiting for someone looking for their ball when they could have gone ahead and gone. So, this is where ready golf came in, and the concept is just to help pace a play. So, what ready golf says is if it's safe to do so, go ahead and play your next shot. I think in general, most people play ready golf now. But if you're actually being affected by slow play, I would encourage you to jump back to your traditional ordering. Just to slow yourselves down a little bit, you have time, you have no reason to hit up on the people in front of you, you can take that time to play more traditional golf. Um if you're in a tournament play, a lot of times you do play traditional because there are advantages and disadvantages to this. For example, if you won the if your buddy won the previous hole, you might want them to tee off first so that you can get a shot and and see what might happen to the wind or see where it rolls or something like that. Um, so there is advantages to traditional play golf and the disadvantages and competitive edges. Um, but if you're if you are concerned about pace of play or something like that, just play ready golf. So the next topic here is net score versus gross score. So the net score is uh, or let's start with the gross score. The gross score is the actual score you recorded on a hole. This is the one you wrote down on the scorecard. This is if you've swung the club six times, you put a six down. This is what PGA players play with. A net score is your gross score adjusted by your handicap. Go back to our easy example. If you get 18 strokes, that means that you get a stroke on every hole. If you got a five on a hole, your net score would be a four on that hole. You also can say net scores based off of the word for the hole. So if the par was a par five and you got a net four, you got a net birdie, which is pretty cool. Uh, easy way to remember which is which is one, if you have any sort of financial background uh with gross and net, it's gonna be the same. Uh, if you get any sort of paycheck, then you're gonna see a gross amount on that paycheck. And then taxes, deductions, all that are gonna be taken out, and then you'll get a net number in the in the end. That's what you're actually gonna get in your bank account. So, one way to think of it, another way to think of it is the gross score is usually higher, so you think like, oh, gross, like I don't want that score, I want the the net score. So that's another way you can think of it, just a little memory trick there. And then the last one we have to go over in this episode is the maxims maximum score you would record for handicap purposes. What this is saying is there is a score that you would no longer record higher than, and what that is is a net double bogey. So you take the strokes you get on a hole, you add two, and then that would be your maximum for that hole. So if it's a par four and you get a stroke on it, you your par would be a five, you add two to that, and then it would technically be a seven. That is what the maximum score is for handicap purposes. Now, that's not saying you pick up at seven. What that's saying is when you put your number in for calculating your score differential, you wouldn't put a number in higher than your net double bogey. The purpose of this rule is because it's trying to stop inflated uh handicap numbers. So someone can't just score a you know, they're on whole 18, they decide to putt it 30 times just to raise their handicap, they're not going to be able to do that. This is why that's in place. Um now, whether or not you pick up, I think it depends on the type of match you're playing, how you're playing, things like that. So if you're playing competitively and your buddies already beat you, then I would encourage you to finish it out if you can. But if pace of play is important or you just need a break, you can probably go ahead and pick up at your net double bogey. So you can just kind of go hole by hole and see how you feel. Um, but the official rule for handicap purposes is net double bogey. And that's it for this episode. So I think the game of golf is just really cool that like I've been playing for 15 plus years now, 20 plus or probably close to 20 years in some capacity, and I'm still learning a lot about the game of golf. Um, not only from an athletic point of view, but just from the knowledge of knowing the sport and how it can change from week to week, or it seems like we week to week. It probably changes from season to season based off the USGA ruling and PGA and stuff like that, but it feels often what often what does feel week to week is just learning. I feel like I'm constantly learning things about the game of golf, which is pretty cool. Um so that's it. I think I want to go over for this episode of the Birdie Board Podcast. Thanks for listening, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

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