Seniors 9 Hole Competitions
Explanation of Playing Handicaps & Stroke Indexes
| Note: When you sign in to a competition, your PLAYING handicap will be shown on the screen |
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N.B. you can also lookup your 9 hole Course Handicap using the MyEG app on your phone. To calculate your Playing Handicap just apply the playing allowance percentage (e.g. 95% in most singles competitions).
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To determine your handicap when playing a 9 hole competition you do not simply halve your existing handicap. Handicap Master applies a more complicated calculation.
If you are not too interested in how your handicap is calculated, simply look at the table below and apply the revised Stroke Index (SI) to your score card and determine your stroke allowance accordingly.
When playing a 9 Hole competition the Stroke Indexes need to change to represent Stroke Indexes 1 to 9 …. as shown in the following table.
| Stroke Indexes (Front 9) |
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| Men | Ladies | |||
| Hole | 18 Holes | 9 Holes | 18 Holes | 9 Holes |
| 1 | 12 | 6 | 12 | 5 |
| 2 | 14 | 7 | 15 | 7 |
| 3 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| 4 | 2 | 1 | 8 | 4 |
| 5 | 10 | 5 | 14 | 6 |
| 6 | 16 | 8 | 16 | 8 |
| 7 | 8 | 4 | 6 | 3 |
| 8 | 18 | 9 | 18 | 9 |
| 9 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
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Playing Handicaps
When an official Seniors competition is set up for playing just 9 Holes, it is done in accordance with England Golf mandatory guidelines.
When you Sign In to the competition your Playing Handicap will be displayed.
Intuitively most members might expect the Playing Handicap to be simply half that it is for 18 Holes. However this is not the case.
Every course has a separate Course Rating & Slope Rating for 18 Holes, Front 9 Holes and Back 9 Holes. All these ratings are on the scorecard.
For 18 Hole competitions the Course Handicap, and therefore the Playing Handicap, is calculated using just the Handicap Index and the Slope Rating.
For 9 Hole competitions the Course Handicap is calculated using the Handicap Index, the Slope Rating (for the appropriate 9 Holes) and additionally the Course Rating (for the appropriate 9 Holes) and Par for the 9 Holes.
In the case of the Front 9 Holes at Ramsdale Park the effect of this difference in the calculation formula is that for most members their 9 Hole Playing Handicap is less than half of their 18 Hole Playing Handicap.
Stroke Indexes
When playing a 9 Hole competition the Stroke Indexes need to change to represent Stroke Indexes 1 to 9. The system software takes care of this when you enter your scores.
However, we do not have scorecards that reflect this change in the Stroke Indexes.
Therefore members need to adopt a way to (mentally or write it on the scorecard) convert the existing 18 Hole Stroke Indexes into their equivalent 9 Hole values.
When playing the Front 9 Holes this is actually very easy (at least for the Men’s card) as all the 18 Hole Stroke Indexes are even numbers …. In which case you just half the number to get the equivalent 9 Hole Stroke Index.
An alternative way to convert the Stroke Indexes is to rank the existing 18 Hole Stroke Index values from lowest to highest. Then convert them to Stroke Index 1 to Stroke Index 9 in their rank order. This is the method used to convert the Stroke Indexes for the Ladies front 9 holes.