The dictionary I use has a Sports & Games definition for the word handicap, “A race or contest in which advantages or compensations are given different contestants to equalize the chances of winning.” In golf your handicap is subtracted from your total score to determine your net score and theoretically “even the chances of winning”. Simple enough. But what do you do if you are in a match play (hole by hole) situation or some form of a skins game. If a 10 handicap is playing an 18, do you deduct a half stroke per hole? And what if a 7 is playing a 23? Woe!, who brought their calculator?

The solution can be found in a very unlikely place, the handicap section of the scorecard. You didn’t see that one coming, did you? The handicap number for each hole tells you the hole difficulty, 1 being the hardest and 18 the easiest. In our first example we are going to match a 10 handicap against a 16. We don’t need a calculator to know the 16 handicap gets 6 strokes from the 10, so using the Hole Handicap rating on the scorecard the 16 would get strokes on the 6 hardest holes (rated 1 – 6). Before the round begins the box for the corresponding hole is separated as in (Fig. 1)

(FIG. 1)