This makes sense. The scarlet letter applied to so called sandbaggers in the old days was very rare before this change. I would say 50% of my golf group was under the oppression of the soft cap sometime this winter season. That’s just weird. None of them are “cheaters”. They just have injuries or are in a slump. Stupid.
Okay, I think it might be helpful if I brought up that a handicapping system probably needs to include some "unfairness" if we want it to achieve what most people expect from a handicapping system.
What even is the function of a handicap?
I would posit that the function of a handicap is, effectively, to reduce correlation between established playing skill and event victory. Why do we want this? To maximize the fun of all player involved. People like to win, it's fun, people don't like to lose.
However, when the entire point of a handicapping system is to increase the distribution of fun/victories to more players, we need a system that actually achieves this. When the system is game-able, say, by sandbagging, then the distribution of fun/victories stops being an even distribution.
However, even without concerning ourselves with sandbagging, we still don't want scores that even resemble sandbagging (results with high variance). We have ended up is a system that is weighted to reward consistency in results and punishes big swings in results, even though punishing big swings in results will punish some honest players, who have a style of play with high variance.
Why should we want to punish honest players with high variance? Well, even when people are honest, we must remember that the function of the system is to created a wide distribution of fun/victories. A playing style with extremely high variance will over-index for victories compared to the mean result. E.g. imagine three players: Steady Eddie, Wild Willy, and Extreme Emma. When playing their round results will look like:
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Steady Eddie (netting to average score): | -1 | 0 | 0 | -1 | +2 | 0 |
Wild Willy (netting to average score): | -5 | +2 | -1 | -2 | 0 | +6 |
Extreme Emma (netting to average score): | -20 | +21 | -18 | -17 | +19 | +15 |
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The problem with this scenario, is that
even if Extreme Emma is being totally honest and up to date about her scoring she has broken the system because her style of play ends up netting 1/2 of the fun/victories instead of only 1/3. Eddie and Willy will rightly whine because no matter how many Eddies and Willies play in these matches, Emma will consistently win 50% of the time.
Thus, even in a world where sandbagging doesn't exist, we still need a system in which high variance in scores are "punished", simply because our goal is a high distribution of winners.