Enough maths to make your head hurt...

I did an interesting thing recently. I had a look at my eclectic best and worst rounds (Scoresaver 2 allows you to look at what round you could cobble together with your worst and best performance on each hole). It made for interesting viewing. Now I wonder if I was Einstein could I manipulate the figures to enable me to identify the root of all my problems.

So my nightmare round... It kicks off with a mind boggling 8 followed by a 15. Quadruple and quintuple bogeys before a nice big fat 13. Then things improve a bit with four consecutive triple bogeys. It's the back nine that makes me want to weep. 12, 10, 10, 10, 10, 9 OUCH! But the good news is that for the most part the really big numbers are one offs. Occasional nightmare holes that plague most high handicappers, well maybe that 15 just makes me special. That said since I started playing I have had a total of 46 disasters.

By contrast my eclectic best not only demonstrates what I am capable of but I have hit those scores on those holes relatively often. Over the same time period I have scored 45 pars and 2 birdies. I've had 102 bogeys and 109 double bogeys and 81 triple bogeys. Theoretically, if I eradicate the disasters that would make my average score per hole +1.65. multiply that by 18 = 29.8. So that would mean I would score on average 100.8 as opposed to 108.1. While that does reduce my score it still leaves me playing off 28. Mmmmm.

So I looked at the most recent data set my play over the last couple of months. So now my eclectic best had gone up to 79 but my worst had come down to 137 (I told you there were lots of one offs)! There has also been a shift in the balance of power. 2 birdies, 15 pars, 48 bogeys, 38 doubles, 25 triples and 12 disasters. Average score 104.7. Take the disasters out of the equation and average score per hole is down to 1.54 meaning I would score... 98.7 still at 28 (our CSS is 69).

That's not very good either. How about I work on better conversion. Let's start with 20%. So I convert 20% of each score in each category to a lower figure by shaving off one shot in five. We'll convert all the disasters as triples. For my play over the last couple of months that would lead to 5 birdies, 22 pars, 46 bogeys, 35 doubles and 32 triples. This would give me an average score per hole of 1.55 it's gone up, how did that happen? Ah yes I've added back in the disasters...pants.

The moral of this rather long winded story is that I need to spend more time practicing and playing and less time analysing my statistics...albeit in the name of good fun!

For your amusement my eclectic best and worst scores:

Eclectic Worst
161 (71)

8(3), 15(5), 7(3), 9(4), 13(5), 6(3), 8(5), 7(4), 7(4), 8(4), 6(3), 12(5), 10(4), 10(4), 10(4), 10(4), 9(4), 6(3)

Eclectic Best

73 (71)

3(3), 5(5), 3(3), 5(4), 5(5), 3(3), 5(5), 4(4), 4(4), 3(4), 2(3), 6(5), 4(4), 5(4), 5(4), 4(4), 4(4), 3(3)