![]() Stroke play, in which the player with the fewest strokes wins the match or tournament, is the basis for professional, high-level amateur golf and some club competition. In stroke play (also known as medal play), a player’s score is the sum of his/her scores on the individual holes. Golf competitions typically take one of two formats: stroke play and match play. Together, these simple changes can improve fairness in match play golf and improve generalizability to other courses. Our two primary findings are: 1) fair matches can be achieved by giving the weaker player 0.5 extra strokes, which corresponds to a tie-breaker on a single hole 2) giving both players their full handicap makes the fairness results robust to different hole rankings. Then, we investigate the impact of three potential changes to stroke allocation: modifying the hole ranking giving both players their full handicaps instead of using handicap differential awarding extra strokes to the weaker player. ![]() Using a bootstrapped simulation of over 70,000 matches based on 392 rounds of golf, we first show that the standard stroke allocation method and course-defined hole ranking favor the better player in 53% of matches. In match play, the standard way to allocate handicap strokes uses the “course-defined hole ranking”. In amateur golf, lower handicap players “give strokes” to higher handicap players based on their handicap differential to make head-to-head matches fairer.
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