To add some additional info, when you go to USGA.com, you’ll search for an official club in your area (usually specific to a golf course or occasionally a general area/interest group). Most will have two tiers of membership, a full member which makes you eligible for their club tournaments and etc. and a cheaper associate membership for keeping your handicap. Which one you go for really depends on what you want out of it.
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I have one course that is always adjusted to be a stroke down than the rating because the black tees never all the way back to the scorecard distance.
I can’t get an official handicap, as all my rounds this season are solo. But, according to the SwingU app, when I submitted my round scores, it has me at a 5.2 handicap which I find incredible, it doesn’t seem to mind at all, my awful scores, generally in the putting. But it sure makes me appear to be a good golfer! I’ll be telling future partners, I don’t have an official handicap, so they won’t be disappointed! At least I play fast…UPDATE: apparently it doesn’t deal with 9 hole scores, wasn’t obvious to me! So results meaningless.
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Hi Jon, I can’t see the point. Surely you have to pay to enter a qualifier. So you are poorer and have a round not in keeping with the event. Or is it the prestige of getting to play on a championship course and you don’t care if you hack it?
I don’t see the point either. I think people just want to say they played in a U.S. Open qualifier 
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I wasn’t aware that this was done by the system. I had two tournaments that I played this year one with pcc +1 and +3 on the other. I thought in my head the state association manually put it in since they saw the conditions. Good to know though! Those are the only two posted scores I have with a pcc adjustment.
I’ve now received my WHS handicap… and I’ve been cut to 13.0, from 16.7 on the old CONGU format.
A bit lower than I was expecting but it’s an accurate measure of me playing well (it’ll give me 15 shots when adjusted for my home layout). The cards that went in for the handicap (only 8 so far, rather than the full 20) all had a blowout hole or two, so once they were adjusted it seems bang on really.
We’ve been on lockdown with courses shut ever since WHS went live (not related I’m sure), so it’s frustrating not being able to get out there and put a few more scores in!
The PCC has been in effect here in the US all year. However, I’ve played in 30 MPH winds and rain a few times and have never seen an adjustment (my friend has had one). Your course doesn’t report adverse conditions. Seems the PCC adjusts only if others are playing at the same time and report abnormal scores. So if you have groups that are lax with the rules or generous all day with 6 foot “gimmes” because of the weather or don’t report their score, then you’re hosed.
Once again, the PCC is calculated based on scores posted for the course on that day, and only based on scores posted on the day of play. The PCC has absolutely nothing to do with weather, or course conditions, or pin positions, its based only on the scores. There must be at least 8 scores posted on the same day of play to even consider calculating a PCC. The PCC is calculated based on posted scores as compared to “anticipated scores”. The more scores posted, the smaller the deviation from normal must be to cause a PCC.
But are you “hosed” when your differential isn’t lowered by the PCC? The absence of a PCC on really difficult days tends to make your handicap higher, which is a plus when you compete in a net event. Of course, if you’re looking at a lowered handicap as a specific goal in itself, you ARE hosed, but to me that’s not the purpose of a handicap.
As someone who has recently started playing club events, I’m happy to see my number starting to climb a bit 
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That’s going to be me for sure
Then I’m totally confused. I thought the PCC was based on weather / course conditions for that day. Living in the south we can get afternoon pop up showers in the summer that can totally change how a course plays.
This little video might explain it a little better.
https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/videos/2019/10/03/golf-world-handicap-system-playing-conditions-6091782589001.html
Weather and course conditions affect scoring, there’s no doubt about that. But how would you quantify the effect of the weather and course conditions? Would it be preferable to have someone in the pro shop make a subjective judgement, and then type that number into the system? Could that procedure possibly be consistent across a region, or an entire country? Really, the only way to consistently evaluate relative difficulty is by looking at the actual scores, which is what the PCC calculation does. This is similar to the systems used in Europe (EGA) and Great Britain and Ireland (CONGU) to determine their daily scoring adjustments under the previous systems.
(http://www.ega-golf.ch/sites/default/files/epub_hcp_booklet_2016_3.11.2015.pdf look for Computed Buffer Adjustment, and https://www.congu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2018-CONGU-Manual-2019.pdf look for Competition
Scratch Score)
If you go to the actual Handicap Rules (Section 5.6 here https://www.usga.org/handicapping/roh/2020-rules-of-handicapping.html) you can see that there’s an option to allow different PCC calculations within a single day, although the procedure is not specifically defined. That could be appropriate for the situation you describe with afternoon pop-up showers.
The PCC is a nice attempt at adding variables to the handicap. In reality it is going to have little or no affect on anything overall.
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I disagree, and I agree. The entire WHS attempts to take the best aspects from each of the handicap systems previously in use around the world. Three of those six systems had some type of daily evaluation of playing difficulty. The framers of the WHS apparently thought there was value added by having a daily evaluation included. Its not simply an “additional variable”, its an attempt to reasonably evaluate the effect of difficulty variations on handicap.
Having said that, I attended a VSGA Handicap Seminar late last year, in preparation for the WHS. We were told that we were likely to see the PCC invoked no more than about 10% of the time, and that was assuming that enough players actually posted scores on the same day as they played. Thinking about it, most scores on those days are going to be higher than average (or else there would be no PCC), and so it would be really unlikely that a PCC-adjusted score would be in one of the player’s 8 best. So yeah, it’s unlikely to make a significant difference to most of our handicaps.
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I think it’s pretty cool to be able to have this type of technology in the handicap system. I doubt it will have a ton of effect in general like you said. It does give players some strokes for tough conditions indirectly. The day when there was pcc +3 was added to the round, the guys that play a basically scratch handicap we’re shooting 78 or so. The winning score for the tournament was 73. I shot in the 90s as a 7 handicap. So the field made the pcc go into effect. The conditions were 38*F at tee time, raining and 15 mph wind on average. Somehow the greens were still lightning fast too. Just tough conditions overall. So the conditions and the scores go hand in hand making the pcc indirectly related to the tough conditions for the day. That’s pretty much just reiterating what you said. I just wanted to add my anecdote to the conversation.
I think this is exactly the situation the PCC will come into play. When you have an event where a large number of scores are going to be posted the same day and played under some sort of affecting condition. For players who have a lot of their posted rounds in competition, it could wind up having a big impact. For regular players just out on a normal round? Not so much.
I agree that a 3-stroke change is big, but its also going to be very rare. Even a single stroke PCC is pretty rare. And looking at what @dpierson83 wrote, scratch players were shooting 78 (net 75 after PCC), which probably isn’t going to be in the 8 scores counted in handicap calculation for that player. The PCC doesn’t “correct” scores all the way to the anticipated “normal” distribution, it only moves them part of the way. The player most significantly affected will be the guy who goes out and has a great round on a really difficult day, his great round will look even better when the PCC is applied.
One thing I just got a notice about was my home course changed its rating and slope for the winter.
Slope increased to 131 from 130
Rating increased to 71.3 from 70.9
Did they move some tees around, or maybe get the entire course re-rated recently? Did the ratings change in the USGA database (I assume you’re in the US, please tell me if I’m wrong)? This just seems odd to me.