n e w s m a k e r s : Golf Handicaps

by Cate House

awrence L. Kupper, professor of biostatistics, has played golf competitively for nearly 40 years, and he knows the handicapping system firsthand. Suspecting that the system was biased in favor of the better golfer, he decided to do what any statistician would do: crunch numbers.

The U.S. Golf Association (USGA) developed its handicap system to allow amateur players of differing abilities to compete against each other and have roughly an equal chance of winning. "It's a way to make the game more enjoyable for all players," Kupper says.

After collecting and analyzing scores from 130 golfers at Finley Golf Course in 1997 and 60 golfers in 1994, Kupper and his colleagues showed empirically that poorer golfers are less consistent than better golfers. "Coupling this with some statistical theory on the way the USGA computes handicaps means that the poorer golfer gets a handicap that is less representative of how he typically plays than does the better golfer. So, if my handicap is six and yours is eighteen, I could give you twelve strokes and win roughly two out of three matches. In other words, the better player typically has a sixty to seventy percent chance of winning," Kupper says.

he USGA currently generates handicaps by taking the lowest 10 of a golfer’s last 20 adjusted scores (i.e., factoring in the difficulty of the course) and averaging them. After each round, players log their scores into a computer, and their handicaps are automatically updated.

To make the playing field more even, Kupper recommends that the average of the 20 most recent scores be used to generate a more accurate handicap. Another possibility would be to use the average of all but the two highest and two lowest scores to compensate for unusually good or bad rounds. "With the current system, the more inconsistent a golfer is, the more his USGA handicap is overly optimistic about his average golfing ability," Kupper says.

Since it would be difficult to get the USGA to change its long-held handicapping system—believed to give players incentive to improve—Kupper says another way to make tournaments more equitable would be to have golfers with roughly the same handicaps compete against one another.

Discuss this story.

© 2001 Endeavors, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.