Improving fairness in match play golf through enhanced handicap allocation

Abstract

In amateur golf, lower handicap players “give strokes” to higher handicap players based on their handicap differential to make head-to-head matches fairer. In match play, the standard way to allocate handicap strokes uses the “course-defined hole ranking”. Using a bootstrapped simulation of over 70,000 matches based on 392 rounds of golf, we first show that the standard stroke allocation method and course-defined hole ranking favor the better player in 53% of matches. Then, we investigate the impact of three potential changes to stroke allocation: modifying the hole ranking; giving both players their full handicaps instead of using handicap differential; awarding extra strokes to the weaker player. Our two primary findings are: 1) fair matches can be achieved by giving the weaker player 0.5 extra strokes, which corresponds to a tie-breaker on a single hole; 2) giving both players their full handicap makes the fairness results robust to different hole rankings. Together, these simple changes can improve fairness in match play golf and improve generalizability to other courses.