If you play seven holes and enter a 9-hole score, for the missing two holes, you would count par plus any handicap strokes that you would be due. So, let’s say that your course handicap is an 18, meaning that you get one stroke on each hole. So, on those two holes, you would give yourself par plus a stroke, or two bogeys for those two holes, and those scores would get added to your seven hole total.

The argument for being accurate in regards to handicaps is specifically for competitive purposes. Golf is intended to be a competitive game, even though we often play alone or just for fun. Take match play, for example, one of the fundamental forms of golf. It’s specific purpose is for competition with another player.

One of the reasons that blow-up holes don’t count heavily is that they’re supposed to be the exception, not the rule for better players. If a player has 10 blow-up holes per round, then they’re not really blow-up holes, as much as just reflections of the player’s ability, so that player’s handicap would reflect that. But even a professional might score a 10 once in a while and that doesn’t mean that he isn’t a good player.

But even more importantly, it helps deter cheating. It keeps a low handicap player from being able to stand there and hit ten balls in the water on one hole just to keep his handicap artificially high and call it a “blow-up hole”. Of course, he could play poorly on each hole, but that’s where the handicap committee comes in. These types of cheating should be reported to the committee and action could then be taken.

Handicaps are definitely used to include and exclude people from tournaments. For example, they wouldn’t want a ten handicapper competing in the U.S Open. But a handicap also lets an amateur player with a one handicap play against the best in that same tournament (where some pros who don’t have official indices might play to a +4, +5, +6 index). Or, at a club championship, handicaps let them set up flights where the best players compete against each other, the average players compete against each other, the not so good players compete against each other, and so on.

For example, when we say a 7 hole play should be scored as a nine hole, how do we average the total. Obviously if I could play seven holes and score it as nine, my handicap would drop precipitously.

Also, other than for competitive purposes, what is the argument for being so accurate regarding handicaps to begin with?

Seems like an awful lot of work and trouble to understand the relative strength of golfers if there weren’t a larger worthwhile purpose.

I’ve probably just committed a heresy, but, clearly, my handicap has little value to me since I am an atrocious golfer.

If I were better, are we saying that we want a standard way to know how good or how poor we are? And, if that is the case, why would a blow-up hole be discounted. After all, we count a hole in one, why not a 20?

Or are we saying that we use handicaps to include or exclude people from qualifying rounds of tournaments? Or all of the above? Beth