How Often Should Golfers Play To Their Handicap?

We all think that we should beat our handicaps in every round, but how often do we actually manage it?

How Often Should Golfers Play To Their Handicap?

Most, if not all, golfers set out on a round of golf to beat their handicap – but how often do we actually achieve the feat?

We’re led to believe that getting 36 points is a once-a-month thing or perhaps only three or four times a year, but that doesn’t really account for competition and social play.

Most golfers will score much better in social play as oppose to competitions simply due to the pressure, so shooting your handicap most weeks in the roll up probably isn’t an exact representation of your game.

With a scorecard in hand and no gimmes, competition play is a completely different beast to a friendly knock with your pals.

With that in mind, we put out a tweet asking golfers how often they expect to play to their handicap, and the results were interesting…

How often do you expect to play to your handicap?

— Golf Monthly (@GolfMonthly) October 23, 2018

From the replies we got, with people giving us competition/handicap data, we saw a slight pattern…

Around 50% of competition rounds are above buffer zone
Around 25% of competition rounds are in buffer zone
Around 25% of competition rounds are below handicap

That equates to half of rounds above buffer zone and half of rounds being in the buffer zone or below handicap.

From a personal standpoint, here are my results from 13 competitions so far this year…

9/13 rounds over buffer zone
2/13 rounds in buffer zone
2/13 rounds under handicap

That works out to 31% of rounds in buffer or below, and 69% of rounds over buffer zone.

Those figures do not make for great reading and are below the average we found with our Twitter audience and probably well below the actual averages.

However, most of my good rounds have come outside of competitions like most golfers, as I struggle to play under the pressure of a competition.

Below, see a number of Tweets with our audience’s results so far this season…

Because I’m a geek and keep a spreadsheet; in my last 25 rounds I’ve either played to my handicap or better 9 times. Near enough 1/3 of my games. The 2/3 are WAY worse than my Hcap! I seem to either be exactly or -2 Max, or anything up to +20 on any given day

— Nath (@njt1986) October 23, 2018

I’ve hit mine maybe 4 times since April after getting done to 9.6 from 15, rapid decline seen me back to 12 then hit a 6 under Nett 62 Sunday 😳 pic.twitter.com/epUYPddsbg

— Tommy Earle Jnr (@Thomasearle1974) October 23, 2018

Expect to play to it every week but that soon changes after first tee shot. As the handicap charts tells pic.twitter.com/VELC2KZ0X7

— Steve Lee (@bowers133) October 23, 2018

21 comps this year, 12 over buffer, 5 in buffer and 4 below. Seems about right, but as always would like to have less .1's.

— Nick Garbutt (@Garush34) October 23, 2018