Match Play Handicaps: Understanding Stroke Limits & Tournament Rules

Question
Is there a limit to the number of strokes in match play.Recently in one of our tournaments a player got 44 strokes--sounds a bit unreasonable

Answer
Hey Irene,

My best answer for you is to say that I'm not sure, but like you, 44 strokes sounds, um...a bit excessive to say the least. I've pretty much never played in events that use handicaps. The only reason I even have one is that in trying to Monday qualify for events on some tours you have to have a handicap under 1.4 or so.

Typically, I think that if somebody was, say, a 12 handicap, then they might at most get a stroke on the 12 most difficultly rated holes on the course.  I think some tournaments also use a percentage system, where they take your handicap, take say 70 percent of it, then give you that number of strokes. In this case, a 20 handicapper would get strokes on the 14 hardest holes, etc.

Just ask your pro how the strokes are applied and he/she should be able to explain it better than I can.

Have fun!