Difference of Handicap Index vs Course Handicap

Difference Between Handicap Index and Course Handicap

When viewing your scorecard or schedule, the handicap might not match what's in the player list because your league is set to calculate a Handicap Index for a player, which is based on the rating/slope for the tee box the player is playing. When you do that, your Handicap Index is converted to a Course Handicap for the round.

Why does it work this way? Because your "Handicap Index" has been calculated to adjust for the tee box you played. In the simplist terms, if you shot 45 from the back tees, you would end up with a lower handicap index than if you shot 45 from the forward tees, because the back tees are more difficult. This allows your handicap index to "travel", either from course to course or from two or more tee boxes on the same course. That way you have a way to equally compare your Handicap Index to another player who plays on a different course or a different tee box.

My Handicap on the Scorecard or Schedule Doesn't Match What's in the Player List!

Correct! The scorecard/schedule uses the Course Handicap. It HAS TO, because it's adjusted for whichever course/tee box the player is assigned to.  That's the whole point of the system, to adjust for different tees being played.

Handicap Index vs Course Handicap Example

Why is this calculation done in the first place?

It's done because your "handicap index" is not a measure of scores for any specific course, it's a measure of the player regardless of the course being played. That's the beauty of it, it "travels" to other courses. It's an objective measure of a player's ability no matter what course they play, or which tee boxes they play from.

To show how and why this works this way, let's take an example of two players who always play different tees, and they each shoot 80, 20 rounds in a row. Their calculated Handicap Index, which takes the best 8 out of 20 differentials (or whatever you set Golf League Tracker to) would be as follows:

This should make sense. Bob played the harder tees, shot the same score as Chris, therefore his Handicap Index should be lower. It should be lower because an "80" from the Blue tees is a "better score" than an "80" from the White tees.

Now let's say Bob and Chris were to play a match. Again, Bob is going to play the Blue tees, and Chris the white tees. If we used the "index" value it wouldn't be fair to Bob, as he would be giving Chris 7 strokes, even though they shoot the SAME SCORE each time they play. So what do you do? You convert the Index back to a Course Handicap based on the tees they are playing.

The Formula

The formula for converting a player's Handicap Index to a Course Handicap is:

Course Handicap = (Handicap Index * Slope / 113) + Course Rating - Par

Then the course handicap is rounded to the nearest whole number

So Bob would be: 

CH = (10.4 * 121 / 113) + 68.9 - 72 = 8 (we round to the nearest whole number)

Chris would be:

CH = (17.6 * 109 / 109) + 63.0 - 72 = 8

So you might ask yourself why go through this when we could use the player's score relative to par and come up with the same number. That ONLY works if these two players always play the same course, and each play the same tee box EVERY TIME. But what happens if they go to the course across town, which is a more difficult course (in general)?  What does that look like?

Travelling to a Different Course

Bob and Chris are going to the course across town. Again, Bob will play the Blue tees, and Chris the white, however the course rating and slope is different from their home course they normally play. So we must take each player's Index and convert it to a Course Handicap based on the tee box each will play. We take a look at the scorecard and find the info for each tee:

Blue: 72.1 / 130, par 72
White: 67.5 / 125, par 72

The first number with the decimal (the number which is closest to the "par" of the course) is the course rating, and the whole number is the slope. Let's plug in each player's info into the above formula to calculate a Course Handicap for them, like we did above:

So Bob would be: 

CH = (10.4 * 130 / 113) + 72.1 - 72 = 12

Chris would be:

CH = (17.6 * 125/ 113) + 67.4 - 72 = 15

In this example, Chris would now get 3 shots from Bob for their match. If playing match play, he would get 1 stroke on the 3 hardest holes.

As you can see, if we had only used PAR as the calculation for our handicap, we couldn't take into account the difficulty of each course and tee box the players are playing and it would result in an unfair number of strokes being given. By the way, this won't always favor Chris, as it completely depends upon the course rating, slope, and par each player is playing from their respective tee box.