Winter Is Here

UK Handicap; 3.3 USGA Handicap; 1.7

Apologies for the lack of updates, but there has not been much to update on. Winter is officially here.

The day of my last post I played my last competition round of 2010. It was meant to be the penultimate competition of the year, but it is so cold, and the course is playing so long with greens that have the roll of a test site for the moon landings, that I decided that there is absolutely no point in playing again to try and get my handicap reduced, as it’s almost certain it would result in a 0.1 increase instead.

Despite the conditions, I actually played fairly well. Two birdies and two bogeys in the first 5 holes wasn’t too consistent, but I then rattled off 8 pars, followed by 2 stupid bogeys, followed by another 3 pars. So I walked off with 37 points, one better than my handicap, and what I considered to be a very good score.

The UK system of handicapping is good in that the Competition Scratch Score can alter based on the conditions of the day, so there was the possibility that I would get more than 0.1 reduced from my handicap due to the harsh playing environment. The downside is that the CSS uses the scores of the competition to decide what alteration, if any, there should be. So it’s open to statistical anomalies, especially where there are a small number of competitors, and a few of them score 34 points or better. In fact, in an event where all the entries are category 1 players, and everyone scores 35 points, the CSS would actually move downwards and everyone’s handicap gets increased, even though the worst score was 35 points. The calculation also doesn’t take into account a few people all having a good day on the same day.

Note that when the competition is stableford (i.e. the scores are around 36 and the higher the points the better the score), the CSS ‘coming down’ actually means you need more points to play to your handicap. Where the competition is strokeplay (i.e. the scores are around 70 and the lower the score the better) the CSS coming down means just that, to play to my handicap I need to shoot one shot less than normal.

That is unfortunately what happened in this competition, as 5 of the 11 entrants (45%) scored 34 points or better, and the chart for this makeup of competition states that the CSS comes down if more than 44% of entrants score 34 points or better. So instead of needing 36 points to play to my handicap, and get cut 0.1 for every point I get above 36, I actually needed 37 points to play to my handicap, and 38 or more to get cut.

The end result is that I finish the season on 3.3, not a disaster but not the progress I had hoped for either. I played my best golf of the year in the final 2 months, I have a few months to figure out what the difference was in that time and make sure I can keep it into next year.

Over the winter I am aiming to play once a week, and the Tigers section of my club have agreed to have a meeting once every 3 weeks, plus a matchplay event over the winter months. This will keep everyone’s eye in, instead of the temptation to put the clubs away for the winter and dust them off in March.

The first of the 3-weekly events was on Saturday, and as if an omen, it snowed on Friday night. There were seven brave (or foolish, I can’t decide which) people who turned up on Saturday, and we played 9 holes in about ½ inch of snow. It was a bit of a lottery, but good fun overall. 5 of the 7 managed to get 14 points or more over 9 holes, which was actually not bad, and we managed a couple of birdies, and an eagle on a 400 yard par 4, between us.

Next up for me is a lesson in a couple of weeks time, in order to get some things to work on over the winter, other than that it will be the occasional round just to keep things ticking over, I’ll endeavour to keep this blog up to date with any interesting developments, either involving my game or other topics I happen to come across.

A Supplementary Bonus

First of all, happy 100^th blog post to me! It’s taken less than a year, and although I’m well behind my target golf-wise, I’m pleased with my persistence with this blog, as many other blogs on a similar subject have come and gone without a trace. Here’s to the next 100 posts.

I have started planning for next year already, which has thrown up some interesting logistics, and an unexpected bonus.

As has been previously detailed, after my last qualifying competition for 2010 which takes place tomorrow, I will have played in 56 qualifying competitions. This is quite a good number, but I need to really ramp that up next year, together with a lot of hard work, if I want to progress. There are several ways I am going to make this happen.

Firstly, I am going to join a golf club in Scotland that has qualifying competitions every Saturday and Sunday. In fact, there are two on a Saturday as there are two courses, and you can play on each. So if I am in Scotland playing a Monday – Friday tournament (of which I have 3 of these planned), I can travel to Scotland the Friday evening previously, play in 3 qualifying rounds on the Saturday and Sunday, then play in the Mon – Fri tournament, then another 3 qualifying competitions the following weekend, before heading back to London on the Sunday evening. Very tiring, but it gives me the opportunity to bookend my week long tournaments with 6 qualifying rounds.

In addition to this, I have already gone to extreme lengths to maximize the number of qualifying competitions I can play in. There is one particular weekend where I have a 36 hole competition in Scotland on the Sunday, followed by a bank holiday Monday competition at my home club. So I have bought a 7am flight from Dundee – Birmingham, then train to London, then underground train to my golf club, so I can get there by midday and play in an extra competition.

Secondly, the golf diary at my home club is a lot better for 2011 than it was in 2010. When I first joined this club I was baffled by the lack of qualifying competitions, 23 between April and September, next year there are 39, and are much better spread throughout the calendar. With these club competitions, and week long tournaments, I have already submitted my annual leave from work for 2011. Before the year has already started, I only have 2.5 days left from an entitlement of 28 days. So I’d better hope I don’t need any more time off work in the next year, as I’m not going to have the availability to take it. I also did a check of Friday afternoons, and from mid-April to end of September, I am going to work on 9 of them, and be off for the other 14. So if any work colleagues need me, don’t need me on a Friday afternoon!

Thirdly, I heard today that CONGU, the UK handicapping body, have made some amendments for 2011. In 2008 they introduced a system called Supplementary Scores, where players with a handicap of 6 or higher (i.e not me), who played less than 6 qualifying competitions in the previous year (i.e. not me), could submit up to 10 extra qualifying scores without a designated qualifying competition taking place. There are additional rules, such as a maximum of one per week, and you need to designate before starting that you are submitting a Supplementary Score. The good news is that as of 2011, they have opened Supplementary Scores up to players with a handicap of less than 6, and have scrapped the rule about having played less than 6 qualifying competitions in the previous year.

So that means that every player, including me, can now submit up to an extra 10 qualifying scores per year.

The end results of these 3 changes are that my diary now shows that I currently have 83 opportunities to play for my handicap in 2011. Even I have to admit that is quite a large number. It’s worth remembering that I played in 56 this year and didn’t reduce my handicap, so the number of competitions and handicap reduction are not directly correlated, but if the goal of my journey is to get down to scratch, then the vehicle that can help me get there is the number of qualifying competitions. And I’d rather be travelling in the Porsche of 83 competitions, than the Astra of 56.

Three Is A Guarantee

UK Handicap; 3.3 USGA Handicap; 2.0

As we get to the end of the season, everything seems to get a little bit more difficult. There’s only 9 hours daylight per day at the moment, limiting the amount of golf that can be played. The ground is a lot wetter, meaning the ball doesn’t roll so far. The temperature has reduced dramatically also, meaning that an 8 iron that would have travelled 150 yards just 6 weeks ago is now travelling about 135 yards instead.

The penultimate competition of the year yesterday resulted in a score of 36 stableford points – exactly on my handicap. Normally I would consider 36 points as a waste of 4 hours of my life, but yesterday it seemed like an achievement. There are 3 reasons for this. Firstly, as detailed above, with the more difficult conditions it is much more difficult to play to my handicap when the ball is travelling much less distance. Secondly, I actually recovered quite well. I was 3 over par after 6 holes and then played the last 12 in level par. Thirdly, keeping my handicap static and not increasing 0.1 yesterday means I will definitely be playing off 3 at the end of the year – not exactly my dream last April but certainly better than having to call myself a 4 handicapper for the next few months.

After the satisfaction of yesterday’s round, I played again this morning, unusually for me in a social game. It’s wasn’t a competition, nor a club match, just a game of golf for the sake of playing golf. Having played the first 9 half decent, I played very poorly in the back nine, and tailed off to a disappointing 79. Having said that, in the last couple of months my good rounds have been in the non-qualifying games and my poor rounds have been in the competition rounds, so I should be grateful that I scored 74 79 this weekend and not 79 74.

My US Handicap took a bit of a jump this weekend, as 20 rounds ago I had a couple of very good scores, and they are being taken out of the equation and replaced with my current rounds. Although this week it has taken a jump from 1.3 to 2.0, over the next 10 rounds it can’t go any higher than 2.9, no matter what I score. The problem comes after those next 10 rounds, as of my current 10 counting rounds, 9 of them are consecutive. When these scores stop being included in the equation my handicap has the potential to jump up dramatically, hopefully I can put in the occasional decent round over the winter to keep things respectable.