DaSquire

Not what we are seeing here. Players are intentionally regularly playing from tees more forward than their ability to play would indicate. When they do this their handicaps go up (this is not a theory, it is actually happening and it works, they know it and are continuing to do it intentionally and starting to tell others to do it) because the slope and ratings overstate the change in difficulty from shorter tees. This way they have higher handicaps and therefore get more strokes when play back tees. Since they are playing within the confines of the rules ("I can play any tee I want" is the defense, which is backed up by the USGA rules) it makes this difficult for even a committee to enforce. Basically they have discovered how to exploit the system in a new way to sandbag, so bring this up for others to start to look for this in other places.

This is all public play, so no committee beyond organizers of games. The fact that you and others mention things like: don't play for money against people you don't know, the system should take care of this, other means of adjusting handicaps, etc. show that there are flaws with the current system. This is just raising awareness of another way that folks have found to sandbag their handicap that is harder to detect and seeing if other people are seeing this yet in their area. So far it seems like this is a localized issue, but suspect it will grow to other areas over time. This will not work for all courses, but the courses in this area seem to have slope and ratings that are not in line with the actual differences in difficulty between the tee boxes (the differences in slope and rating are too great).

Please read the rest of the posts. This is not about a single round but consistently playing from forward tees as a means of inflating ones handicap so that when play events from "regular" tees, more strokes are received.

and can't imagine this is something that would only work here. I suspect it is something that could be done in more places, sounds like it is not something that has spread all over yet. I suspect it is coming though, keep on the lookout in your area. You have been warned, ha-ha.

It is happening, again I would not have believed it until I saw it and started to investigate and did the math myself to understand how. It is a real thing and it does constantly work here.

My experience in investigating this is that the course slopes are ratings here are consistently incorrect and over state the difference between the difficulty of the tee boxes. This is why this method works.

exactly cnosil

No, not calculating anything incorrectly. If you normally play from the blue and then you start playing from the white tees and score very similar or even just a little lower, your handicap index may go up if the slope and rating are not exactly correct. See the specific breakdown I did above that proves this for a course here (as an example seems this has worked on all the courses around here). Again this is not a question on if this is possible, real people are doing this and their handicaps are really going up.

Then sounds like course is properly rated and sloped, but can do the math based on how much different you actually score vs how much different you are expected to score. Again I did not believe this would work until I saw people doing it and defending themselves after they started to win disproportionally vs their known ability.

Slope and ratings used were 69.5/119 and 67.7/113

As far as a time frame I have only started seeing folks do this intentionally in the last 2 years or so. Wonder if it will become more widespread or not. Have asked Arccos if they could look into this within their great amount of data on players and rounds and write an article about if it is true in other places or not. Not sure if they will, but would be interesting.

Thanks for all of the discussion. Here is another way to look at this to help clarify as there is some confusions amongst some posters, so I must not have been as clear as I could have been initially. If we take 2 "robot" golfers who always shoot net 75 regardless of tee box, what would their index be after they played 20 rounds? If we take course handicap for the specific course from the example. From each tee box their course handicap is (assuming a starting point of 9.9 index): White-8 Gold-6 so to shoot 75 they need to shoot White-83 Gold-81 Which after 20 rounds would result in new handicap indexes of: White Player - 12.8 Gold - 13.3 So if they play an event from the white tees then: White Player - 11 strokes Gold player - 12 strokes So in the perfect environment a handicap established from the gold has an advantage of a stroke just by playing from the gold tees. Now I admit this is a bit of an anomaly due to the slope and rating of this course, but have seen this kind of anomaly on many course slope/ratings which is part of the crux of the question. Are ratings here just wrong or is this a more widespread issue? In reality we are not net scoring robots, so here is where the real juices comes from the system. If our players both shoot the same best 8 gross of 82 from the white and gold respectively their indexes are: Historical White tee player - 11.9 and Historical Gold tee player - 14.3 So if they play a tournament both from the white tees then the strokes are: Historical White tee player - 10 strokes Historical Gold tee player - 13 strokes (remember he is playing the white tee in this tournament) This is where the gap that sandbaggers are exploiting exists. Yes, if all golfers shoot net par their indexes will be very close to the same, but who does that? Most scores are a gross that results in a net above par. Even if the sandbaggers slip up and shoot say a 73, from the white this is a differential of 3.3 but from the gold it is 5.3 so less "harmful" to the handicap if their objective is to keep it artificially high. (for sake of this post I am totally ignoring the fact that when posting a sandbagger might intentionally "accidentally" post scores from a more forward tee in GHIN, which happens too, but is a different form of cheating and not for discussion here, but its the internet so someone will comment on it :) ) Again not talking about honest golfers here, but sandbaggers who have noticed that if they shoot about the same from a more forward tee this is how their handicaps go up by an amount that makes a real difference come time to play in tournaments or in cash games. And they can hide behind the "I can play any tee I want and handicap system accounts for it" defense when called out as the sandbaggers. So it's really a pretty good con and I sort of respect them for figuring it out, but not enough to keep giving them my money. Any sandbaggers want to comment on if they have noticed this or if they have tried it where they live and if it worked or not? Excellent feedback. Thank you for the input.

Exactly!

If you do not play tournaments or in cash games then not really the target audience for this post, but thank you for your contribution. But to use your comments as an example since they are posted. This "I can play whatever tee I want" is the logic the sandbaggers use to cover their intentional deceit. It is a pretty good argument that is hard to refute, this is why it is such a good sandbagging tool and why I am trying to bring this issue to the attention of USGA and others. This is a flaw in the world handicap system that is now actively being exploited.

It's not a logic experiment, we are actually seeing this be true. I also thought like you until seeing this first hand. I will post some more examples later to try to further explain. Exactly!!!