One of my friend played in a new golf course this week and did not know what was the slope & rating of this course. I think it is time to give a little summary of what is slope and rating for a golf course.
History
Slope was tested at six extreme courses in Northern California in 1981 and state-wide in Colorado in 1983. The USGA trained more than 4,000 volunteers from all 50 states to rate courses. Since then, Slope has been implemented nationwide in America and is in use at 10,000 golf courses by more than four million golfers. The portability error has been reduced to a level within the noise of sampling errors.
Quick Answer
The quick answer is that it's a single number indicating the difficulty of a golf course to an expert golfer, a "par golfer". The figure is used when calculating handicaps.
The Course Rating is a number, close to par for the course, and is expressed with a single decimal digit. For example: If par for a course is 72, it's Course Rating might be 71.4.
Rating values go up with difficulty.
Actually, for any given golf course, you can expect to see three (or even more) values for the Course Rating. Each value corresponds to a different tee.
For example: On this same course, the Course Rating for golfers who play from the men's blue tees might be 72.8. From the men's white tees, the Course Rating might be 71.0. The ladies' red tees may be rated at 73.3.
These figures are almost always printed on the score card.
Why are there two numbers to describe the difficulty of a golf course?
The Course Rating is simply the average score compiled by the par golfers. In most cases, it's 72.
Most course ratings will range from the upper 60s to the mid 70s.
The Slope is a measure of how much difference a course's difficulty is for the average bogey golfer compared to the scratch golfer.
The minimum slope is 55 and the maximum is 155 (slope does not relate specifically to strokes played as course rating does). The slope rating for a course of average difficulty is 113.
Did you say yardage rating?
Following are the obstacles factors considered by rating teams in determining the amount of adjustment of the Yardage Rating in arriving at the USGA Course and Bogey Rating along with the weighting factor applied to each obstacle value rated on a scale of 0 to 10.
| Obstacle | Scratch | Bogey | |||
| Topography | .10 | .12 | |||
| Fairway | .11 | .09 | |||
| Recoverability and Rough | .14 | .15 | |||
| Out of bounds | .10 | .09 | |||
| Water Hazards | .14 | .14 | |||
| Trees | .09 | .14 | |||
| Bunkers | .07 | .10 | |||
| Green Target | .09 | .06 | |||
| Green Surface | .11 | .08 | |||
| Psychological | .05 | .03 | |||
Keep Golfing!
No comments:
Post a Comment