O/T Fair Formats

[Adam Clayman]

One of the most educational periods I experienced was when I was a member of the "club" at Pacific Grove. The patriarch of playing by the rules held fairness above all.

Now that I'm in a different kind of Kingdom, I find myself wanting to help spread this fairness to the formats I'm running into here in real Cowboy country.

Specifically, scrambles. It seems to be the tourney du jour week in week out. Currently the formula for determing flights is done after the fact drawing lines where the groups of numbers fall. In my estimation this isn't fair because it potentially pays a better team that played poorly.

Issues of individual handicaps for this case are moot.
They aren't used and teams sign-up as teams.

I seem to recall a format where team handicaps can be determined by performance on specifc holes.

Is that format called a "Blind Peoria"?

How many holes should the blind format be based on?

Is there a mix in difficulty of the blind holes that works best for determing proper handicapping?

Apologies for using this forum, but it just so happens to be the most resourceful.

Thanks.

P.s. I have another tourney scenario that also needs tweaking. If someone is willing to share their knowledge perhaps we could take it off board?

[JohnV]

Adam,

Here is a link to a description of the Peoria system.  I've never used it so I don't know how it works or if it would work for a scramble.

http://golf.about.com/cs/golfterms/g/bldef_peoriasys.htm

[Gary Slatter]

I have been involved in many Scrambles and developed a handicap system that works quite well.
The first thing is try to get all four handicaps around the same total (i.e. say its 70, a 10, 15, 20 and 25 handicapper).
The most important player is the lowest handicap-take 30% of their handicap.  Take 20% of the next lowest; take 15% of the next and 10% of the highest handicap. The sample team would have a 11.5 handicap.  Use the fractions.
Say a team has all 4 players with 10 handicap, total of 40. Their handicap will be 7.5, but they'll still have the advantage, it works better if you can get all the teams around the same totals.
Last week we had 24 teams and they averaged 64 total handicaps, using the system they ended up within 4 strokes from best to worst.
Another way to make it fair is to say whoevers shot is used cannot hit the next shot, unless its on the green.
Anyone else have Scramble systems?

[Stan Dodd]

Adam,
As one who plays with the 8 o'clockers at PG.  I am curious about your post.  It is a fun game but I don't knowif it is fair to a higher handicapper.

I laugh about the game as it reminds me of elementary school and who is going to be the last one picked for kick ball.

[Adam Clayman]

Stan- The 8 O'clock game is truely the best group game I have ever seen. I don't see how it is unfair to higher handicappers. It wasn't part of the club's tourney formats that I was referrencing. I tried to ask ol' Jim Kennaday about it, but since we never played scrambles he was as lost as expected.

Gary, I treid to tell you handicaps aren't used. So, taking a percentage of someones isn't viable in this case. People play who don't have them.

The structure I called the blind peoria involved selecting a number of holes and then handicapping the team off how they played those holes. So, if a team birdied all of the selected holes, they would have that number of strokes added to thier score. If a team had bogied all the selected holes they would then get that number subtracted from their score.
This would remove the flighting, allowing payouts to approx. a third of the field.

JV, I haven't look at the system yet, but thank you for finding it for me.

[tonyt]

A bit O/T in an O/T thread, because Adam indicated that teams enter as a whole.

For outings and other days when a Scramble is played and yet organisers can form the teams, the best and by FAR the fairest format of all can be had. It relies on knowing at least in principle the approximate standard of the participants.

Seed the groups so that they are even. If there are say 10 groups, have the 10 best players each in one group. The same goes for the next 10 players and so on. Obviously, the better one top player over another, the more the latter will need a better "#2" player in his group. I'm sure you get the idea.

Then, send them out for a scramble playing off the stick, no handicaps (the handicaps aren't irrelevant because you've used them to form the groups in the first place). Now here's the best bit. The difference between the team coming first and the team coming last or second last will likely be a maximum of 4-5 shots!! In seven years of running up to half a dozen of these a year, there's NEVER been a huge disparity in scores.

[Adam Clayman]

Tony, The luxury of making up the teams is not there.

The A,B,C & D grouping would be ideal and is basically how the 8 o'clock game gets distributed. The most important aspect of this is that the newer players learn from the better ones. Everything from swing mechanics to ettiquette. When only the better players want to play with eachother, no one learns anything.