The Rivalry Rating

A handicap measures your scoring against par. It says nothing about whether you beat the man standing next to you, which is the only question this app is about.

The Rivalry Rating answers that one. Everybody starts at 1,500. You gain for finishing ahead of people and lose for finishing behind them, and how much depends on who they are.

Why not just count wins

Because you and Dave can both win half your rounds and not be anywhere near as good as each other. If your half came against the two best players in the group and his came against the two worst, the win count says you're level and everybody who plays with you knows you aren't.

Meetings aren't even, either. Over a few hundred rounds, one of you will have played the strongest man in the group forty times more than the other has. The rating takes account of who you actually played. That's the entire reason it exists next to a perfectly good win column.

It's worked out, not totted up

The rating isn't a running total that ticks up and down after each round. It's the number that best explains every head-to-head result you've ever had, worked out fresh from the record each time you look.

That distinction is the whole thing. Four friends who beat each other somewhere between 46 and 54 per cent of the time sit a few dozen points apart. A single foursome is three results and could swing a running total by seventy. So a running total in a group this size wouldn't measure who's best — it would mostly report who won last month, and reorder itself every few weeks.

Worked out from everything instead, it can't flip on one Saturday, and it can never disagree with the head-to-head board sitting next to it.

You can argue with it

A rating nobody can derive is a rating nobody can argue with, which in a group of friends is the failure, not the feature. Tap yours and you get the workings: every opponent, your record against them, what they're rated, and what share of your meetings you take.

Where it is

Standings on the clubhouse has a rating column alongside money, wins and rounds. Your player card shows yours, where you sit in the group, and which way it's moved over your last ten rounds.

It needs a few rounds against the same people before it means much. A thin record is pulled towards the middle on purpose, so nobody is crowned on the strength of one good Thursday.