Sorry for this insanely long post...

So Thursday, I got this great email from Jacob:

You see, every week this year I have been entering the scorecards into my spreadsheet, posting everything to the website, and then Jacob enters those scores into the Golf League Guru app and let's me know where all of the discrepancies are. I then spend sometimes several hours tracking those down and figuring out why the two don't match, making them match, and republishing everything. This week for the first time, they matched.

As I've mentioned, the issue usually isn't that one of the two systems is wrong. It's mostly that they calculate things differently. We had a lot of old legacy rules that the app doesn't adhere to or doesn't have a way to implement, so I have been changing the formulas in my spreadsheet (that I wrote 14 years ago and have long forgotten their logical structure) so that they match. And as I've promised, here is the list of those:

HANDICAPS: Your handicap is the average of your strokes over* par for your last 6 rounds.

1. Previously we would round that number down to the next lowest whole number. GLG rounds it up or down depending on the decimal part. A 13.8 used to be 13 the old way, now it's 14. I think this make more sense.

2. A new player's HCP used to be calculated as 80% of their strokes over par for their first round. It's now 100%. So in essence, if you are playing against a new player, you are playing against your own HCP rather than getting an artificial bonus. I think this makes more sense.

3*. A round of under par used to count as 0 in the HCP calculation. It now counts as what it is - a negative number. So, theoretically, someone could have a negative HCP. I think this makes more sense.

4. We used to have a rule that said, based on HCPs, you cannot be given more than 2 strokes on a hole or 18 for the round. That rule is gone. If your HCP is 29 and your opponent is 8, you get 21 strokes, including 3 strokes on the three highest handicap holes. I think this makes more sense, or is at least easier to keep track of.

OTHER CHANGES:

5. We used to have a rule that said if two players on a team have the same HCP, the player who was 'A' last week, remains 'A' this week (and the 'B' remains the 'B'). We still have that rule, but it takes the decimal part of the HCPs into account. If one player is 12.8 (13) and the other is 13.2 (13), the player with the 12.8 is the 'A' regardless of who was the 'A' last week. I think this makes more sense.

6. We used to have a rule that said if two players tie on net score, the player with the fewer number of P's wins the 4 points for the match. That rule is gone. If two players tie on net, they each get 2 points regardless of how many P's they each had. I think the old rule made more sense but that's now how GLG does it so we have to conform.

OTHER APP NUANCES:

7. The GLG app calls P's, X's. So if/when we get to a point where you are entering your own scores into the app, you will enter X instead of P. I don't think this make sense at all. I like calling them P's and will continue to do so. Old habits die hard.

8. Even though the app allows you to enter an X for a hole (which is actually a P) and treats that as 4 over par in the calculations, it also allows you to enter a number higher than that, like entering a 9 on a par 4. It doesn't give you a warning about it. I also can't find a setting to prevent you from doing that so we'll just have be careful. I not only think that doesn't make sense, but it's a flaw in the app. When it gets to a point where it annoys me (or Jacob) enough, I'll send a message to tech support and ask then to consider changing that. But right now, I've got bigger fish to fry.

If you don't have the app, please download it so you can follow along. You should have gotten an email before the season with a link. If you've lost that, let me know. If enough people let me know, maybe I'll send out another mass invite. The next step in the evolution of this will be to replace the reports I post on the website with posts we can download out of the app. After that (next year?) I'll stop with the spreadsheet and just use the app as the official scoring and scheduling mechanism.

Thanks for reading!