A couple of members have raised a question about the ‘fairness’ of converting a Par Event score to Equivalent Stableford by adding 36 points. This method was used in the June Bonus Trophy Event and is also used in the GolfLink handicapping system.
The basis of the question is along the lines that if the player picks up as soon as he loses the hole to Par he might still have scored a Stableford point and is therefore potentially missing out on a ‘scoring’ opportunity.
However, the way to think of it is that, by adding 36 points, you are getting two extra points per hole so every minus is accruing one Stableford point, every square is accruing two Stableford points and every plus is accruing three Stableford points. So, in actual fact, where you miss out on points are those holes where you would have scored four Stableford points or more – and how many of those do you see in an average round. On the other hand, you score an effective Stableford point on every hole that would have otherwise been a gash and it is pretty certain that these are much more common that four or five pointers.
Putting it another way, if you were either bad enough or unlucky enough to score minus 18 in a Par Event, you would still be credited with 18 Stableford points but it is highly likely that in accumulating such a score you could very easily have made fewer than 18 points if the same event had been scored as Stableford and certainly would not have scored more.
So rather than being ‘unfair’, on balance, the method for converting Par to equivalent Stableford is rather more generous (on average) than it should be.