Solving the mystery of a golf hole's assigned handicap

Just found a good SHORT article from Golfdigest.com about Solving the mystery of a golf hole's assigned handicap

I give you a sample below:

"How can they call this the No. 1-handicap hole?

It's a question that confounds many golfers, but there's an easy explanation. The handicap ranking assigned to each hole on a course doesn't necessarily reflect the difficulty of making a good score there. The lower-numbered holes are where higher-handicap players most need a stroke to halve the hole when competing with a better player.

To rank each hole, the U.S. Golf Association recommends courses collect 200 scores from higher-handicap players and 200 from lower-handicap players and calculate the average score on each hole for the two groups. The holes with the largest difference in scores between the two groups get the lower-handicap numbers, says Dean Knuth, former senior director of handicapping at the USGA and creator of the Golf Digest Handicap.

Typically a course puts its odd-numbered stroke holes on the front nine and evens on the back to spread out the strokes and ensure that a player receiving an odd number of strokes gets one more on the front than on the back.

This helps make the end of the match more equitable."

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