A study of fairness in fourball golf competition

Abstract

The golf handicap system is designed to be fair in single player games. The same system is also applied to team games with two or more players per team. In this study the fairness of the particular team golf game known as fourball match play was analyzed as well as measures to improve it. By using historical player data, software was produced to simulate games. The level of fairness was estimated given the handicaps of the players. It was determined that: • Players with high handicap have high variance and therefore also an advantage. • Teams should seek to optimize the spread in handicaps by pairing with someone as close to 11 or 29 handicap strokes apart and as far from 0 or 18 as possible. • The handicap allowance introduced by the United States Golf Association to penalize high handicappers in team golf is not an effective tool to handle the unfairness. • The tiebreaker rule is a simple way to lower the general unfairness by roughly 70%. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.