Somebody always thinks a handicap is wrong. Change it here and watch what it actually does — to his shots, to the weekend's Stableford, and to a team match that was picked to be a coin toss. Nothing on this page changes a single real handicap.
Nudge anyone up or down. The playing handicaps move as you type; everything below catches up a moment later. The steppers go to the next whole or half number; type a figure if you want tenths. Don't dismiss a tenth, though — a tenth of a shot on one player has been enough to change the whole team draw before now.
| Player | Index now | What if | R1 Pines | R2 Challenge | R3 Pines | Pts now 3 rounds | Pts what if 3 rounds |
|---|
Three rounds of individual Stableford off 95%, played 20,000 times. Not a test of our arithmetic — a test of what these handicaps do once they are actually played.
Before anyone takes that as proof the handicaps are wrong: a handicap index is the average of your best eight rounds in twenty. It measures what you can do, not what you usually do, and everybody plays below it most of the time. The catch is that a wild player’s best eight sit much further above his ordinary round than a steady player’s do, so off best-of handicaps the steady players score nearer their number. Steady usually means short. That gap is built into the handicap system, not into this page — and it is the same effect that put Paul 40 points clear of Neil when last year’s trip was replayed on these figures. The team match on this page is the antidote: matchplay off the difference in shots cancels most of it, which is why it is the default.
Expected Stableford points off 95% of each player’s own handicap, the average of 20,000 simulated rounds. Where a handicap has changed you see the published figure, an arrow, and the what-if.
| Player | R1 Pines | R2 Challenge | R3 Pines | 3 rounds | Chance of winning |
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The published draw, replayed off your handicaps. The teams and the pairings stay exactly as the fairest teams page picked them — only the shots change, so you can see what your what-if does to a draw that was chosen to be even.
| Round | Team A | Team B | A’s chance |
|---|
The section above keeps the published draw. This throws it away and runs the whole search again on your handicaps: every one of the 3,036 possible matches played 20,000 times, then all 462 ways of splitting twelve into two and every draw for each. It is the same search the teams page ran, and nearly all of it is playing those matches, so it is cut into one slice per core: about fifteen seconds on a laptop, a minute or two on a phone. It runs in the background and the page stays usable, and you can stop it at any point.
Worth knowing before you press it. Running this search twice on different random cards moves a split's least even match by about 0.4 of a point and its event odds by about 0.018 — so differences smaller than that are the dice, not the golf. Measured against that, more than half of the 462 splits are tied on the least even match, and a couple of dozen are tied on both measures at once. The team it names is one good answer, not the answer: run it twice on the same handicaps and it can name two different sixes, both as fair as each other. So the useful question is not which six wins, but whether the published teams are still in the running — which is what the verdict answers. It is also why the teams page lets you add a constraint of your own: if several splits are equally fair, you may as well pick between them on grounds that have nothing to do with golf.
The same model as the fairest teams page, moved into your browser so it can be re-run on any handicap you like.
Want to pick the teams yourself instead? The Captains’ Room does that, on the published handicaps.