What is a Roundabout Handicap?
Handicaps in golf are used to indicate player ability. This simple system allows two players of different ability to level the playing field and play against each other in a fair match, whether it be for fun or in competition. The new Roundabout Handicap is no different. Roundabout uses the latest World Golf Handicap calculations to assess your playing ability and give you an updated handicap after every round you play. Best of all, it is included for free with the platform. Simply start tracking your scores as you play and Roundabout will calculate your handicap.
How is Roundabout Handicap calculated?
Roundabout uses the latest World Golf Handicap algorithm to calculate your Roundabout Handicap. When you select your course and tee box to start a round, Roundabout gets the course rating and slope in order to calculate your Adjusted Score for the round you play. In other words, some courses are more difficult than others and your score needs to be adjusted based on the course you play. A 90 at your local municipal course from the forward tees is not the same as a 90 from the back tees at Bethpage Black. Adjusted Score takes that difference in difficulty into account and adjusts the score you input to properly reflect a ‘normalized’ score that can be compared to other players on other courses. In Roundabout, you can see the Adjusted Score for any particular round by selecting ‘Review’ from the home screen where you’ll see a list of every round you’ve played, the score you entered, and the Adjusted Score after course difficulty is taken into account.
Now that Roundabout has your adjusted scores, a handicap can be calculated. Handicap is a measure of ‘potential’. A common misunderstanding is thinking handicap is equivalent to your average score. However, the actual handicap calculation takes only the best of your most recent rounds. A quick example is that if you have played 20 rounds in the system, only your best 8 are used to calculate your handicap. Your 12 worst scores are thrown out. This eliminates any outliers and should stabilize the calculation from making wild swings if you have a bad round.
How can you use Roundabout Handicap?
Roundabout is an indicator of your playing ability. All of us are trying to improve at this sometimes frustrating game and monitoring your handicap trend is a good indicator of whether the practice or work you are putting in is translating to better performance. This is why we moved Roundabout Handicap right on the home screen and have it shown throughout the app. We firmly believe that if you use the Roundabout system to track your golf and utilize tools like Virtual Coach**, Virtual Caddie**, or even just our Post Round Summary*, that you will see that translate to lower scores.
To see your handicap trend by round, get a Birdie or better subscription and then go to ‘Analyze’ and click on your Strokes Gained analysis. Swiping through the data will take you to your handicap trend. Here you can see that I’m not just a developer of Roundabout, but a user and a believer. I dropped my handicap by 3 strokes while developing Roundabout and am below Scratch (+0.6) for the first time in my life!
When you set up your Roundabout account, you selected a typical score. We used this to choose your handicap reference for our Strokes Gained analysis. Once you’ve played a few rounds in the system, you will be assigned a Roundabout Handicap which is a good time to re-evaluate your handicap reference. We suggest making your Target Handicap (which can be adjusted in Settings at any time) to the next handicap tier below your current ability. Say you are a 14 handicap… We suggest setting your Target Handicap to 10. That way you can track progress and gaps to that next tier. Once you smash through a 10 handicap, you can adjust your Target Handicap to 5.
Wrap up
The Roundabout Handicap is a new feature for all users to help track improvement on a journey to better golf. Currently the Roundabout Handicap is not an ‘official’ handicap in the eyes of the USGA, but depending on your golf organization or tournament, it may be acceptable to get started with competitive play. We are looking into options for better collaboration with the USGA and GHIN integration in the near future.
In the meantime, get started building your Roundabout Handicap and don’t hesitate to hit us up in the chat with any questions.
** requires Eagle
*requires Birdie
Download Roundabout in the app store today and start tracking your golf performance like the pros.
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