If you want to take the pulse of the golfing populace, Reddit is a pretty good place to go.
The digital platform brims with online communities, or subreddits, devoted to all manner of golf-related topics. Simulators. Swing tips. Architecture. Etiquette.
Name an area of the game and you’ll likely find a subreddit for it. Handicapping? Yep. It’s a popular topic, too.
Just ask the folks at the USGA.
Earlier this year, the governing body hosted a Reddit AMA on handicapping. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything.
The questions came fast and furious. One, in particular, was posed repeatedly — what’s the deal with handicapping 9-hole scores? Inquiring minds wanted to know.
Which makes sense. Nine-hole rounds have been on the rise, especially among newbies to the game. In recent years, 9-hole loops have accounted for more than 45 percent of scores posted by female beginner golfers, and around 21 percent of scores posted by male beginner golfers. Experienced golfers log lots of them as well. Of the 300 million scores recorded by the governing body since 2020, when the World Handicap System (WHS) was established, around 45 million were for 9-hole outings.
Over that same time, the WHS has evolved in response to the growing popularity of 9-hole rounds.
The upshot is: The system has gotten more accurate. The big change came in 2024.
Before then, a score from a 9-hole round could not be posted in isolation. It either had to be combined with an existing 9-hole score, or set aside until you played another 9 on another day, maybe even on another course — factors that introduced all kinds of variables. Research has shown, in fact, that combining 9-hole scores from separate days produced handicaps that were artificially low. In other words, golfers who played a lot of 9-hole rounds were put at a competitive disadvantage.
That needed to change.
On Jan. 1 of last year, as part of other changes to the WHS, modifications were made to the handicapping of 9-hole rounds.
Thanks to those updates, when you play a 9-hole round on a course that has been assigned a Course and Slope Rating, there’s no need to wait to combine your score with a score from another 9-hole round. You can post that score immediately, and, using that score, the WHS will automatically produce an 18-hole tally based on your “expected score” for the 9 holes you didn’t actually play. As the term suggests, your expected score is what a player of your ability — based on your handicap — would be expected to shoot on a course of standard difficulty.
The result of the automatic calculation is a more faithful indicator of how a player would perform over 18 holes on a given day than you would get by combining 9-hole scores from different days under different conditions.
But don’t just take our word for it. Check Reddit, too.
Don’t have a handicap? You can sign up for one here.
