Stableford

[Anthony Butler]

Stableford is fun, but I think it is totally pointless if it is 1 point for bogey, 2 points for par, 3 points for birdie etc. Then we are just reversing the scoring (plus is better instead of minus) and eliminating anything over a bogey. Might as well just play regular golf and take no more than double. It should be more like 1 for bogey, 2 for par, 4 for birdie, 8 for eagle.

You're missing the element of getting strokes on certain holes... and the pressure of making a par on par 5s to boost your score. Unlike the pros, they are generally rated within the hardest 9 handicap holes...

[Brent Hutto]

Stableford is fun, but I think it is totally pointless if it is 1 point for bogey, 2 points for par, 3 points for birdie etc. Then we are just reversing the scoring (plus is better instead of minus) and eliminating anything over a bogey. Might as well just play regular golf and take no more than double. It should be more like 1 for bogey, 2 for par, 4 for birdie, 8 for eagle.

You're missing the element of getting strokes on certain holes... and the pressure of making a par on par 5s to boost your score. Unlike the pros, they are generally rated within the hardest 9 handicap holes...

Exactly. At my club we are all playing basically gross Stableford then we add the team's total handicap strokes on at the end. Since there are players on any given week ranging from 4 to 28 handicaps, this is very different than net Stableford. It is in fact simply net stroke play scoring except with a maximum of double-bogey on any hole. For the 4, 5, 6 'cappers it works out about the same. For me at 20-ish it works out very differently. I ought to be putting out for double (net bogey) on every hole and for triple (net bogey) on a couple of the Par 5's.

But the one time the guy running the game suggested that we allocate strokes and play it as Stableford I thought some of the guys were going to poop their drawers. Oh my god, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over having to actually keep track of who gets stroke on which hole. Even the guys who are CPA's pitched a fit.

The club I'm in nowadays is better in every conceivable way from the one other club of which I've ever been a member. Save one thing. At the old club the guys in the proshop printed out scorecards every Saturday morning for the dogfight. It had the random draw of teams done and pips on each hole for each player's strokes. So we could play net games with no bookkeeping effort to speak of. I wish we could get that in our dogfight games now.

[Bill Gayne]

The course I used to play every day in Colorado did a Monday Stableford/Skins game.  Each players' handicap determined their point quota, and the player with the most points above their quota was the winner.  High and low handicappers could compete just the same.  It was a ton of fun.  Best part was after double bogey you just pick up, so lesser players could enjoy themselves as well, along with keeping the pace of play moving.

Our weekend morning group plays the exact same game in combination with a skins game.

[Mark Pearce]

The course I used to play every day in Colorado did a Monday Stableford/Skins game.  Each players' handicap determined their point quota, and the player with the most points above their quota was the winner.  High and low handicappers could compete just the same.  It was a ton of fun.  Best part was after double bogey you just pick up, so lesser players could enjoy themselves as well, along with keeping the pace of play moving.

Our weekend morning group plays the exact same game in combination with a skins game.

But that isn't Stableford.  It doesn't differentiate between double and treble bogey for the player who would have been receiving a stroke on a hole and produces a different result than true Stableford scoring.

[Brent Hutto]

The course I used to play every day in Colorado did a Monday Stableford/Skins game.  Each players' handicap determined their point quota, and the player with the most points above their quota was the winner.  High and low handicappers could compete just the same.  It was a ton of fun.  Best part was after double bogey you just pick up, so lesser players could enjoy themselves as well, along with keeping the pace of play moving.

Our weekend morning group plays the exact same game in combination with a skins game.

But that isn't Stableford.  It doesn't differentiate between double and treble bogey for the player who would have been receiving a stroke on a hole and produces a different result than true Stableford scoring.

In my experience, often a substantial difference.

It leads to the situation where higher handicappers are perceived, perhaps rightly, as dominating among the winning scores. If you minimize the points penalty for bad holes from a high handicapper and combine that with the fact that (gross) scores tend to have greater variability as the handicap goes up it always seems to work out in a mixed group of low-single-digit through high-double-digit players that every week's winner will be one of the high markers.

I received much abuse from some of the low-markers in our group a couple years back for a round in which I need only 14 gross points (22 handicap) which I achieved by being two over par after six holes, followed by ten double-bogey (or worse) holes in a row followed by a birdie and a bogey on the final two holes. One guy basically said I shouldn't be playing in the game if I was going to make that many double-bogeys. My team had a couple of players who did very well and combined with my making my allotment of points we won most of the pot that day.

I quit playing the game as frequently after that. Yes, it was unfair for a round like that not to cost my team. But I'm not the one making up the scoring with no regard for what happens when a bogey-or-worse golfer has a boom or bust round like that. If we'd been playing true Stableford there would have been two or three holes in there when I was in my pocket and it would have cost me a several more points.

[Tony Ristola]

Another thread made mention of the pencil, scorecard and the necessity of posting scores.

I was wondering how many of you ever play a round using the Stableford format? Quite possibly the most fun way to hold an informal joust with a group of of keen competitors. Non American players do it all the time.


Bob 

The good thing about this game is a golfer can make a mess out of a hole or three and still be in the game. It's faster too, and allows architects to create more interesting, challenging courses in developing nations.

Ian Andrew's thread about growing the game... this would be one aspect North America could change. A move away from stroke play to match play and Stableford.

.

[Sean_A]

The course I used to play every day in Colorado did a Monday Stableford/Skins game.  Each players' handicap determined their point quota, and the player with the most points above their quota was the winner.  High and low handicappers could compete just the same.  It was a ton of fun.  Best part was after double bogey you just pick up, so lesser players could enjoy themselves as well, along with keeping the pace of play moving.

Our weekend morning group plays the exact same game in combination with a skins game.

But that isn't Stableford.  It doesn't differentiate between double and treble bogey for the player who would have been receiving a stroke on a hole and produces a different result than true Stableford scoring.

In my experience, often a substantial difference.

It leads to the situation where higher handicappers are perceived, perhaps rightly, as dominating among the winning scores. If you minimize the points penalty for bad holes from a high handicapper and combine that with the fact that (gross) scores tend to have greater variability as the handicap goes up it always seems to work out in a mixed group of low-single-digit through high-double-digit players that every week's winner will be one of the high markers.

I received much abuse from some of the low-markers in our group a couple years back for a round in which I need only 14 gross points (22 handicap) which I achieved by being two over par after six holes, followed by ten double-bogey (or worse) holes in a row followed by a birdie and a bogey on the final two holes. One guy basically said I shouldn't be playing in the game if I was going to make that many double-bogeys. My team had a couple of players who did very well and combined with my making my allotment of points we won most of the pot that day.

I quit playing the game as frequently after that. Yes, it was unfair for a round like that not to cost my team. But I'm not the one making up the scoring with no regard for what happens when a bogey-or-worse golfer has a boom or bust round like that. If we'd been playing true Stableford there would have been two or three holes in there when I was in my pocket and it would have cost me a several more points.

Brent

At many UK clubs there are divisions so a 22 doesn't compete against a 5.  The handicapping system doesn't work very well with such a disparity of caps unless the wind gets up.  My solution to the disparity if there aren't enough iolks to create divisions is to make 18 the most shots one can receive.  To make it a bit more fair, I would probably go to 3/4 handicap.  That way the 24 capper is now an 18, but the 5 has been cut as well. 

Ciao 

[Paul Jones]

I just finished a Member/Guest tournament that was always setup with 5 Nine Hole matches - all match play.  This year, they switched to modified stableford system and everyone had target scores to hit each day (3 day tournament).  I did not like it and hope they go back to the match play format.

[Duncan Cheslett]

At many UK clubs there are divisions so a 22 doesn't compete against a 5.  The handicapping system doesn't work very well with such a disparity of caps unless the wind gets up. 

I'm not sure about that...

At my place we have a pro's comp three days a week and a school comp every day. All are pure Stablefords using full handicaps.

Winners come from right across the range of handicaps, meaning that anyone is in with a chance. A couple of weeks ago a 19 handicapper won with 46 points. He immediately became a 16 handicapper!

More often than not however, these comps are won by single figure players. The key, surely, is consistency - something most of us high 'cappers fail miserably at!

There seems to be some confusion in this thread as to how the system works. Little mention has been made of the crucial fact that players are awarded shots dependent on the difficulty of each hole - up to the level of that players handicap. Points are then awarded hole by hole on the nett score.  A 12 handicapper will get a shot on holes with a stroke index of 1 - 12 and so on.

Do you have stroke indexes in America?

[Brent Hutto]

Duncan,

We do have stroke indices written right on the scorecard in America. I can't speak for the others but in my case, it's that the people in our Saturday and Sunday 9:30AM blind draw game do not want to keep track of which holes they are getting strokes. I think that's a petty attitude, given that it pretty fundamentally screws up the competition among such a wide range of handicaps but there it is.

At the club I was a member of years ago, pre-printed scorecards were provided for each group so nobody complained about the strokes being allocated properly. Each group (team) keeps there on score in our current game and it's seen as way too much work (somehow) to make a little mark of your own to indicate the holes on which you get a stroke.

Which is why I brought up the handicap system in the first place. Single-digit handicap golfers in USA are conditioned to track their score in one particular way every single round, game, practice round, team competition or other time they are out on the course. They are taught to keep track of their total 18-hole score, counting nothing higher than double-bogey on any hole. So when we have a team game it is natural to make the scoring just total 18-hole team score, counting nothing higher than double-bogey on any hole.

Nobody calls it Stableford by the way. Which is good because it is not Stableford. They just call it "points". It is not a very good way of scoring but it has the one advantage that everyone in the game is going to be keeping that exact individual score anyway to type into the computer. Except of course those of us whose course handicap is 10 or greater. We do not apply the "double-bogey" rule to our computer scores.

It screws up the competition and leads to hard feelings on the part of the 6-handicappers who know intuitively that with my 21-handicap I should not get off so easily as picking up when I miss my bogey putt. Yet they would rather have the hard feelings than actually, you know, keep a scorecard like real golfers do. And its because they are conditioned to think there is something special about that ESC scoring system that they've used 100 times a year, year after year, for every round.

BTW, for a while they tried counting "minus one point for double bogey" to "fix" the perceived problem. The 8, 9, 10 handicappers hated it and we quit after a few weeks. The problem? Once or twice a round they discovered that their bogey putts would run 4-5 feet past the hole and they'd miss them coming back. These guys have spent years picking up instead of putting out for double-bogey (ESC, you know) and hated being called on it. So for a couple weeks they tried saying only high handicappers had to putt out for double-bogey but that was quickly (and rightly) shot down as patently unfair.

All so they don't have to use the stroke index printed right on the scorecard. Amazing.