20% handicap for scrambles. Thoughts.

Our club this year has gone to 20% handicaps for Californian and Texas scrambles? What your thoughts on this one. Not heard of any other club doing this anywhere else. I can say that I think scrambles do tend to favour the lower handicaps but where do you draw the line at trying to make it a level plating field for all? We have some mid handicappers who came in a full 4 shots below everyone else the other week. Feels like me and my mates have to make at least 4-5 birdies just to get on terms with the rest, and shooting more than that requires us all to be on top form just to have a shout now at being in the prizes.

ours is 10% of the combined hcap for the 4 players. we came in 2nd in a scramble earlier this year with a gross 62 nett 57.2 (par 72). our combined handicap was 48 (5, 8, 15, 20) = 4.8strokes. The winners were on 63 nett 55.9 and had a combined handicap of 71 = 7.1 strokes, so we'd have needed 2 more gross birdies to beat them.

Whats a Californian Scramble? Never heard of that.

Ours is 10% and there are not many scores that come in over par.
20% seems very generous!

A Californian scramble is where the the person whos ball you selected to play the next shot from is not allowed to hit in that series of shots. Bit of a pain in the backside that you cant then play a second shot into the green if the team decide your ball is the one selected. Its also the same scenario once you reach the green. I think our club plays it as they thought it would eliminate players from those teams who had a particually good driver or iron player in them. They forgot that each team (3 players) need also to get 5 drives in each, so made it pretty much irrelivent.

I think this came about because we do not have many low (sub 10) handicap players in the club. The low guys are all mates and would all normally play in the same teams. I think this upset alot of the old boys and mid handicappers who have not got that competitive spirit that we all seem to have, plus they did not like the fact that we were winning probably one in every three scrambles. Our take on it was that these were the only comps we had a fair chance of winning (off 10%) since the full Handicap rule by CONGU came into force for the single comps and in general the low handicaps have not won anything much were full handicap differance has been employed.