You may have spotted Golf Ireland posting about the impending introduction of the World Handicap System on Facebook and Twitter. A few weeks ago I blogged on this topic, but I thought it would be useful to share some of the resources prepared by Golf Ireland, since there’s less than one month to go.
The first difference is that you won’t have a “handicap” any more – it will be a “handicap index”.
Ireland will transition to the WHS on Monday 2nd November 2020. The good news is that handicapping software will do all of the hard work and will calculate your new Handicap Index. Your existing scores will be transferred to the new World Handicap System and your best 8 scores from your last 20 rounds will be used to calculate your new handicap index.
Don’t worry if you’ve only got a handicap this year and you haven’t got 20 rounds under your belt. Your handicap will be based on the rounds you have completed and will be reassessed every time you submit a card so that you will get a “fully developed Handicap Index”.
In fact, everyone’s handicap index will be reassessed each time they submit a score card, since their “last 20 rounds” have changed.
I haven’t been playing to my handicap this year, so I’ve been going up by 0.1 regularly, however I reckon that my new handicap index will be significantly higher than my current handicap, but the official line is that it’s not possible to compare the two!
Your playing handicap will change when you travel to play difference courses, as each course has its own “slope rating” – but that’s for another week!
So, hopefully we’ve started to understand the basics of the new system. We’ll look at course and slope ratings another time! As I mentioned earlier, the computer will do all of the calculations for us – we just need to try to play to our new handicap indices!