[JEFF4i]

What bothers me is the un-reliability of it. Okay, here's a situation I'll be going through. Before I'm 30 I am going to need knee surgery. Now, obviously, I won't be playing at all that winter.

Supposedly I'll be golf-worthy by the next summer (will be having it around Oct-Nov) but I'm betting my swing will be off and my scores will reflect that.

Say I play in a tournament and I've only played 10 rounds since the surgery, and they are all in the mid-80s. Previous to that say I keep up what I'm doing and shoot low 70s.

I go into the tournament with little or no handicap, but shoot 15 strokes over it?

That is sooooo far from practical.

What they should do is take your most recent 10(maybe as low as 8) scores, take the 7 best from those, and then take 3 from the other 10. Why? 10 is enough rounds to have a feel for your current and recent game and the handicap will reflect that accurately. However, if you play 20 rounds in 5 years, well, it'll still reflect how your game has changed -for better or worse-, and won't effect it terribly much.

I've thought of this in depth before. A similar situation happened. I was shooting about 6 over my last year of high school. I got in a motorcycle accident that just ruined my left knee and broke my collar bone. My handicap went up 10 strokes, but, since I never had time for golf before one tournament because I was going to a doctor and doing a little physical therapy, I did shoot mid-80s in a tournament with a 4 handicap. How can you tell me that is accurate?

The big picture problem with this rule is that it is largely regressive, where it should be progressive, as in the solution I gave.