With the Three Wise Men coming up next weekend, I thought it would be useful to handicap players based on the relative handicap value to their teams. The first year I participated in a scramble at MG, it was a bit of a deer in the headlights situation not only with not knowing many of the players but also not knowing how the team handicaps were worked out and who to bet on in the para-mutuals. The bottom line is that the A flight player has much more to do with the team handicap than the B and C flight players do. This year our lowest possible handicap team of Yardley/Begg/Watanabe would have to give up a whopping 8 strokes to the our highest potential team of Rogers/Hooper/Hughes. This would mean if both teams came in at -10, the low team would remain at -10 and the high team would come in at a combined -18. The knack will be to choose players that can contribute well together (driving/approach/putting – forget about getting up and down, if you are chipping you are done) and selecting players that you guess will contribute more than the cost/gain of their handicap effect. Here are the numbers which have been rounded and do not consider the cumulative rounding effect of multiple selections. Also, certain combinations of indexes may round-up to the next playing handicap while others will round down so don’t shoot the stats guy if this is the case for you. (-) players are costing your team strokes, (+) players are giving you strokes.
A Flight (total variance 5 strokes)
Yardley -2.5
Rice-Jones -2.0
Stone -1.5
Lineker -1.0
Walton -0.5
Roy/Thompson/Leck +0.5
Altenried +1.0
Frew/Burke +1.5
Fordyce +2.0
Rogers/Koriath +2.5
B Flight (total variance 1 stroke)
Begg/Nishi/Grant/Dunsire/Anderson/Sundvick/Lafleur -0.5 Guzzo/Copland/Yamamoto/Coppin – 0.0
Levene/Koriath/Hooper +0.5
C Flight (total variance 2.0 strokes)
Watanabe/Tonn/Nishihata/Hollett/Omaye -0.5
Tossavainen/Anderson/Hara/Shapendonk/Viani/Ennis/Gill/Gandesha – 0.0
Hughes +1.5
Make sure to be at the club after Men’s Club play next Saturday if you want to be a captain. There will be 4 or 5 captains from each tier, names will be drawn from a hat if more players are on hand than needed from a given tier. Numbers are drawn to determine pick order with the reverse order for second picks.