How to beat the System 36 golf handicap system
Casual tournaments run on declared handicaps, and declared handicaps are fiction. System 36 fixes that on the day. Here's how it works, and whether it can be gamed.
Published September 13, 2017
Originally published on Medium, September 2017.
"Sandbagging" is the colloquial term for manipulating your handicap to gain an unfair advantage. In golf, that usually means artificially raising it. Most of the time, players do it on purpose. Sometimes they're just negligent.
The rules of golf are complicated and most golfers don't know all of them. It surprises me how many people who have played all their lives don't know what Equitable Stroke Control is, or how it should be used when calculating a handicap.
In a nutshell, Equitable Stroke Control (ESC) is a method for weeding the outliers out of your scorecard, so a couple of bad holes don't artificially raise your handicap.
To make the problem worse, most "casual" golfers don't have a real handicap at all. Real handicaps are strictly controlled — by the USGA, the R&A, a golf club, or an organization running a competition. Players hand in their entire scorecards to a handicapper, who calculates the number using the complicated system those organizations devised.
Casual golfers usually don't belong to one of those organizations, so nobody who knows what they're doing ever sees their cards. Instead they use a free online handicap app. The problem with those apps is that they often don't take scores hole by hole. ESC needs the score for every hole. Most people just enter their total for the round. That inflates the handicap.
Houston, we have a problem
A friendly (or not so friendly) tournament with colleagues and friends is a fun way to spend a weekend. I've played in maybe 10–15 of them, both the casual kind and the serious kind. In the serious ones, a new player has to establish a handicap, and that player's scores are monitored by a dedicated handicapper. Those handicaps are very accurate.
In the casual ones, players "declare" a handicap based on some mix of:
- How much they want to sandbag
- What they remember their average score being
- What a free online handicap system says
All of these are inaccurate and misleading, for different reasons. The course you play — its slope and rating — has to be taken into account. ESC has to be taken into account. I'd call myself a golf addict, and even I don't track that stuff. I leave it to the handicappers. A casual player is not going to account for any of it.
So you end up with a field full of inaccurate, misleading handicaps.
System 36 to the rescue
Other people have had this problem, and systems have been devised to normalize handicaps for casual golfers in casual tournaments. System 36 is one of them.
System 36 calculates your handicap on the same day, from the round you just played, using points:
- A double bogey or worse is worth 0 points
- A bogey is worth 1 point
- A par or better is worth 2 points
Add up the points at the end of the round and subtract the total from 36. That's your handicap for the day.
Take a perfect bogey golfer — someone who bogeys every hole. Eighteen bogeys is 18 points. 36 minus 18 is 18. Their handicap is 18 for the day, and they finish with a net score of even.
Now take a perfect scratch golfer who pars every hole. Eighteen pars at 2 points each is 36. 36 minus 36 is 0. Zero handicap, net even.
Now say Jordan Spieth shows up and birdies every hole because the course is short and easy for him. His handicap is still zero — and he's 18 under, with a net 54.
Can System 36 be gamed?
To game the system you have to be able to make birdies on command. If you're already at that level, you probably aren't playing in a tournament where nobody has a sanctioned handicap. But let's see whether it can be done.
Since birdies and eagles are at a premium (as they are in any system), the strategy would be to artificially inflate your handicap on the holes where you can't make birdie.
To simplify, narrow it down to two par 4s. Two holes at 2 points each means we're working with "System 4." How do you maximize your score on those two holes?
| Two holes | Handicap | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2 holes-in-one | 0 | 6 under |
| 2 eagles | 0 | 4 under |
| 2 birdies | 0 | 2 under |
| 1 birdie, 1 par | 0 | 1 under |
| 2 pars | 0 | Even |
| 2 bogeys | 2 | Even |
| 1 bogey, 1 double bogey | 3 | Even |
| 2 double bogeys | 4 | Even |
| 1 birdie, 1 double bogey | 2 | 1 under |
| 1 birdie, 1 bogey | 1 | 1 under |
If you can produce any of the first three on command, you're wasting your time hustling a casual tournament.
That leaves the 1-under options. Of those, birdie-plus-bogey is the easier one — same net score, and you keep a safety margin: if you miss your planned bogey and make double, you're still 1 under. Just in case. ;-)
Apply that across 18 holes. Say it's 18 par 4s and you deliberately make 9 birdies and 9 bogeys. That's 27 System 36 points. 36 minus 27 is a 9 handicap. The 9 handicap cancels the 9 bogeys, and you're net 9 under.
You could push this further on the par 5s by going for eagles. But anyone who can execute that is already a scratch golfer and has very little to gain from it.
The point is that System 36 is extremely hard to cheat.
Mathematically it's sound for golfers from 0 to 36 handicap, assuming an even stroke distribution across the holes. Blow-up holes that produce triple bogeys are very bad — but that's true of every system. Other than that, I can't think of a downside.
What about System 36 plus Stableford?
Take our 9-birdie, 9-bogey golfer. System 36 gives them a 9 handicap, which means one Stableford stroke on each of the 9 hardest holes. To game it, they'd have to maximize Stableford points on exactly those holes: be aggressive and go for birdie, and if it isn't on, dump a stroke and take the bogey instead.
If that sounds straightforward to you, you're either a PGA superstar or you've never played golf.
So yes, the system can be gamed — if you're Dustin Johnson or Jordan Spieth. You're not. That's why you're reading (or, in my case, writing) an article about how to sandbag. =)
So if it's that even, who wins?
In pure stroke play, the player with the most birdies and the fewest triple bogeys wins. Consistently aggressive, but safe. Better golfers have a better chance, but only slightly. The system is even enough that whoever is genuinely playing well that day wins. Which is how it should be.
Use Stableford scoring together with System 36 and you're rewarding aggressive play while capping the damage from a triple or worse. That evens things out further for the higher-handicap players: more chances to go for birdie, less penalty for the blow-up hole.