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Many people assume that your golf score is simply the number of times you hit the ball to get it in all the holes. The truth is a little more complicated than that, but actually much fairer. Imagine yourself, as a golfing beginner, playing against someone who’s played for years. You’ve borrowed some golf clubs, bought yourself a dozen lake balls to practise with & you feel a bit uncomfortable in those bright pink new trousers. Your friend, meanwhile, practises in her office when nobody’s looking, visits the driving range after work & the golf course at least once a month for the last five years.

If you’re just counting strokes, there’s no way you’re going to win. What’s the point of even playing? For your partner, there’s no satisfying challenge, while you feel sheepish at best. Instead of forcing beginners to practise alone until they’re good enough, golfers use “par” & “handicap”, official numbers which are used to calculate each golfer’s overall score at the end of a match.

Par applies to the golf course, & is a benchmark used to measure each golfer’s performance. The term can describe an individual hole or the entire course.

A hole’s par is the number of strokes that a 0 handicap (ie, pretty damn good) golfer should take to sink the ball. It usually includes 2 strokes for the putt & up to 4 (very occasionally 5) to get from the tee to the putting green.

A golf course’s overall par is the par of all its holes added together.

Factors affecting the assessment of par include the tee’s distance from the hole, the angle (steepness) of the ground, & hazards (eg bunkers or lakes) in between the tee & the hole.

Handicap applies to the golfer. The convention allows amateur golfers of different abilities to compare scores with some level of equality.

You can work it out informally, but to get an official handicap you submit your score for at least 5 rounds to the golf club, having announced your intention to do so before each round. The club calculates what’s known as a “differential” for each of your rounds & uses it to work out your handicap.

So that your handicap reflects your best potential (& ignores days when you really fell apart), the lowest differentials are used to calculate your handicap. The calculation also factors in the “slope rating” of the course(s) you played on - this rates how difficult the course is to play based on its average gradient, & hazards.

The lower your handicap, the better you are, & vice versa. So a golfer whose handicap is 7 is better than one whose handicap is 15.

Having played a round, each golfer subtracts their handicap from the number of strokes they took to play all the holes. This (plus points given for any penalties) is their final score. Now when you compare scores with your partner, your playing ability & experience have been taken into account.

You might score 88, while your partner scores 83. However, your handicap is 10, so your final score is 78. Your partner, on the other hand, has a handicap of 4, so she scores 79. You’ve won - this time.