Handicap Shoots

AJBrady

Active member
I think it was Kernowlad who said the other day that it was very quiet on here, so I thought I should write something.

As I have to take the Trophy to be engraved, I thought I'd boast about winning our Club Indoor Handicap Championship last year with a very honest adjusted score of 1441. All that means of course, is that everyone else shot worse than usual that night, and I just scraped my usual average score.

However, I was at a Tournament a few years ago where the winner of the handicap prize had an adjusted score of 1750+, which is a suspiciously high improvement over your previous best! In some sports you are disqualified from winning on handicap if your score/time is more than X% better than expected. Do you think we should have a similar system?
 

dvd8n

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
Our club used to have a year long competition with a handicap system designed to reward the best improver. It always struck me that the system would be really easy to game by deliberately aiming for the white and moving the aiming point a little inwards every session. I never did it, though :D
 

ArcheryFox

Active member
Ach, I have a real bee in my bonnet about Handicap Shoots!!

The premise is sound - trying to find a way to somewhat level the playing field so that everyone can compete together, especially when there can be a lot of variety in skill and bowstyle - but the implementation is flawed!
Admittedly we will never have a perfectly fair system to every person, but the current system could be made better.

Rather than cap performances that are above an expected amount I have a different suggestion.
I propose that handicap competitions should be awarded based not on handicap-adjusted scores, but instead on the number of handicap points a score improves by.
Each handicap point represents an increase in accuracy of 3.6%*. Therefore, to assess which archer has truly outdone themselves the most at a shoot we should be looking at who has had the highest percentage increase in accuracy.**


To illustrate this take the following example of two archers shooting a Portsmouth handicap shoot.
Archer A:
- Handicap: 79
- Expected Portsmouth score: 207
- Allowance on a Portsmouth: 1233
- Score on day: 243

Archer B
- Handicap: 12
- Expected Portsmouth score: 594
- Allowance on a Portsmouth: 846
- Score on day: 598

If we go on adjusted scores then archer A wins 1476-1444, a solid 32 points ahead.
However, archer A's score on the day gives them a handicap of 76, 3 points or 11% more accurate than their average.
Archer B, on the other hand, has a handicap of 7 on the day, an improvement of 5 points or 19% more accurate than average.

Clearly archer B is the one who has most outperformed their expectations - almost twice as much as archer A! - but they lose out due to the flawed system.
(NB The handicap equations can be used to give intermediate scores e.g. at handicaps of 13.0, 13.5, 14.0, 14.5, etc. if required for solving ties.)

In addition to this clubs should enforce the rule that archers must submit properly calculated handicaps based off three scores from the past year, and do not use just one out of date score to get a handicap from archers who cannot do this - this is often how these '1750+' scores come about. The rules clearly state that if you cannot calculate a handicap on the day of the shoot then you are treated as having a handicap of 0.


This topic is a particularly sore point with me because one of my clubs runs a handicap shoot every month that gets great engagement, but I am always destined to come low down as a decent compound archer, beaten by scores of juniors and beginners. The same is also true at our county end of year shoot.

PS - I am not trying to diminish your achievement in any way AJBrady. In this case the system happened to work since, as you say yourself, you were the only archer who shot better than average on the day. ;)

*For a low-on-the-maths explanation of how handicaps work you may find this link useful.
**It is worth noting that AGB handicap improvement medals are awarded based on the largest handicap points change over a year. Why should the same logic not apply to handicap competitions.
 

KidCurry

Well-known member
AIUK Saviour
In a way I can see your point but in my medal collection I only have one handicap medal, from my very first tournament. It's the only medal I ever wore on my quiver. Winning that medal was great. I remember it today. I have won medals since but I only remember a very few and only two as clearly as that first one.
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I am more than happy to leave the handicap system and medals to those new archers if it inspires them to shoot more tournaments as it did me :)
 

ArcheryFox

Active member
A very valid point, and I will concede that to see a new member or young junior awarded with the monthly bag of sweets, grinning ear-to-ear, and inspired to keep working on their shooting is always nice. This sort of thing is hugely important to the sport and grassroots club dynamic, and needs to be there in some shape or form.

What I object to, I suppose, is when it is claimed that everyone is put on a fair field, or when a serious shoot is run using the scheme.
Even with the new system I propose above I suspect that the less experienced archers would still come out on top as they are far more likely to have a large performance jump on the day compared to a consistent and experienced archer who is toiling towards their plateau.

RE: Medals, it's a strange thing, but I have a similar story - one of my most treasured medals is a bronze (and a team medal) from YAA NCAS vs. EMAS at Wetherby around 2009. I have won silvers and golds, but shot out my skin that day, beating a number of people I knew as good archers. Knowing I'd done well to earn that model makes it extra treasured compared to others.
I'm also very envious of your older and much cooler MB badges!
 

KidCurry

Well-known member
AIUK Saviour
What I object to, I suppose, is when it is claimed that everyone is put on a fair field, or when a serious shoot is run using the scheme.
I guess a way around that is to have a tick box on the application that asks if you wish to be entered in the handicap part of the shoot, with a summary of the requirements. It may also save a lot of calculating handicaps for those not interested.
I'm also very envious of your older and much cooler MB badges!
Good old GNAS :)
 

Geophys2

Active member
AIUK Saviour
Handicap shoots never really appealed to me and I've never shot in one. But I can see the appeal they could hold especially to people just starting out in archery. In fact I was involved in running a county wide shoot each year called the Springboard, that only archers who had never made Bowman could enter, which was run on a handicap.

In my old club we did have a local league that had a pure score and a handicap score element. The club teams were decided on the scores made but the handicap team always ended up coming from the high handicap archers, (2nd- 3rd class) and the pure score from the lower handicap archers (1st-MB). As Bowman or MB according to which bow I used I was only ever in the pure score team.

In target rifle very rarely is there a handicap shoot, no handicap tables are produced. Instead, shooters are divided in to nation-wide classes according to their average competition score, with promotion and demotion from class to class. So you were always competing against shooters of roughly the same ability as yourself. Classes went from D up to A with a separate 'X' class for the top 100 shooter in the country, this was invitation according to national and regional major shoots. National teams were selected as a mix of National Squad shooters and from trials shot by the rest of 'X' class so that current 'hot' shooters not in the NS would get to shoot in national teams. The 2 national championship meetings ( fullbore and smallbore) at Bisley each year would each get about 2000 people shooting for the whole week, with prizes in all classes. TRy running a handicap shoot for 2000!
 

little-else

Supporter
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AIUK Saviour
To encourage newer or lower ability shooters to enter tournaments having a prize for best handicap adjusted score should be a lot more common than it is. It would require entrants to submit their handicap for consideration for this prize or you get a handicap of 1, which still wouldnt necessarily rule any archer out of winning.
Another alternative is a prize for best novice, ie under a year's experience or consider anyone who hasnt won a prize previously a novice. This would only really apply at county tournaments as checking the veracity would otherwise be difficult.
Competitions run specifically for lower classification archers havent proved to be as popular as one would hope, I suppose that as they are relatively few and far between it is difficult to persuade people to travel to them. I know many archers who will share travel to events but from where I am not many want to go further afield than the next club so such an addition to the entry form still wouldnt motivate them.
 

Geophys2

Active member
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Competitions run specifically for lower classification archers havent proved to be as popular as one would hope, I suppose that as they are relatively few and far between it is difficult to persuade people to travel to them. I know many archers who will share travel to events but from where I am not many want to go further afield than the next club so such an addition to the entry form still wouldnt motivate them.
This was not true in the case of our Springboard shoot described above, year after year it was the most oversubscribed shoot in the county. We were limited to 80 archers taking part and every year had to run a waiting list. It was organised by the county's club coaches and widely promoted to all new and lower ranked archers throughout the county as a great introduction to tournament archery, and one where they could actually win a prize.
 

gearfiddler

New member
I think it was Kernowlad who said the other day that it was very quiet on here, so I thought I should write something.

As I have to take the Trophy to be engraved, I thought I'd boast about winning our Club Indoor Handicap Championship last year with a very honest adjusted score of 1441. All that means of course, is that everyone else shot worse than usual that night, and I just scraped my usual average score.

However, I was at a Tournament a few years ago where the winner of the handicap prize had an adjusted score of 1750+, which is a suspiciously high improvement over your previous best! In some sports you are disqualified from winning on handicap if your score/time is more than X% better than expected. Do you think we should have a similar system?
Back in the day when the earth was young I was in a York competition where there was a Western Round competition being run at the same time. This was restricted to, I think, the then classification of no higher than “third class” archers. A reasonable score for a Western by a third class archer then was, as I recall, around 525 to 550. The Western competition was won by a gentleman with a score of around 770. Being of an enquiring mind, I congratulated him on his very good score and asked him how he was still a third class archer and he told me that on his club’s ground they could only shoot a maximum distance of 60 yards so all the gentlemen could qualify only as third class archers, no matter how well they shot. This, I felt quite reasonable explanation, did make me view open competitions based on classifications somewhat quizzically from then on!
 

AJBrady

Active member
Some interesting thoughts there. I've never known of anyone purposely keeping their handicap high, which seems to be a bit of a 'thing' in golf. In our club you have to enter all of your scores into the database, which updates your handicap, but also records scores for your Classification and club records; as most people are keen on getting their badges this keeps the handicap honest too!

As ArcheryFox says, the current system (which allegedly is intended to equalise adjusted scores regardless of handicap or the round shot) does no favours for the experienced archer, as shown in his example where archer B can only get an adjusted score of 1446, even if he/she shot a perfect 600. There's a lot to be said for his suggestion of basing the results on handicap points improvement as with the AGB Handicap Improvement medal.
 

CJ2014

Member
I think it was Kernowlad who said the other day that it was very quiet on here, so I thought I should write something.

As I have to take the Trophy to be engraved, I thought I'd boast about winning our Club Indoor Handicap Championship last year with a very honest adjusted score of 1441. All that means of course, is that everyone else shot worse than usual that night, and I just scraped my usual average score.

However, I was at a Tournament a few years ago where the winner of the handicap prize had an adjusted score of 1750+, which is a suspiciously high improvement over your previous best! In some sports you are disqualified from winning on handicap if your score/time is more than X% better than expected. Do you think we should have a similar system?
Congratulations on the win, I have one trophy like that where the weather was hideous and I was unlucky enough to be shooting alongside my coach, so I didn't fall back into bad habits, as I felt he was watching me throughout. I shot above my handicap.

I like the idea, however, you do have to be careful though of new archers who can have these improvements as they are not shooting AGB handicap rounds but achievement awards such as the 252's or metric rounds that AGB still hasn't provided handicaps. So yes they are far better than their handicap says, but that has been no intention.

At one County handicap tournament, I assisted, the winner of one category with a surprisingly high adjusted score got a shock when their fellow archers pointed out that the archer had shot several new County records that year when these were looked at their the scores were readjusted accordingly and the category had a new winner.
 

AJBrady

Active member
Congratulations on the win, I have one trophy like that where the weather was hideous and I was unlucky enough to be shooting alongside my coach, so I didn't fall back into bad habits, as I felt he was watching me throughout. I shot above my handicap.

I like the idea, however, you do have to be careful though of new archers who can have these improvements as they are not shooting AGB handicap rounds but achievement awards such as the 252's or metric rounds that AGB still hasn't provided handicaps. So yes they are far better than their handicap says, but that has been no intention.

At one County handicap tournament, I assisted, the winner of one category with a surprisingly high adjusted score got a shock when their fellow archers pointed out that the archer had shot several new County records that year when these were looked at their the scores were readjusted accordingly and the category had a new winner.
We've been discussing the advantages that beginners etc have under the current system, but that example is just blatant cheating!
 

Howi

Member
yes! the system is flawed, but i doubt you could find a system that everyone approves of.
handicap shoots were designed to encourage up and comming archers and give them a confidence boost.
Going back quite a few years I won the handicap medal at the Derbyshire chjampionships, came out of the blue and I was chuffed to bits,
Many years passed under the bridge and I decided to enter my clubs yearly handicap shoot (don't normally bother), well! everyone asked me why I had bothered entering as I had no chance of winning due to number of beginners/improvers we had shooting.
Yes! you guessed it, I won, proving what the gentlemen above have said, I really enjoyed the gloating though :)
 

geoffretired

Supporter
Supporter
I like to encourage newer archers to compete against each other and against others in the club who have more experience.
I don't bother them with handicaps charts. Each archer can just look at their normal dozen score for a particular distance. Compare that to the dozen scores of anyone else in the group. The highest scoring archer shoots with no allowance and the rest get an allowance that matches the gap between their dozen scores and that of the best. Each archer can add that number to every dozen they shoot and all will know what position they are in at the end of each dozen arrows shot. No waiting for any results to be processed. In the last dozen, every archer knows where they are in the order of things and that can be a real challenge to stay focussed.
 

lbp121

Member
Whilst the handicap system is designed to provide an even field, it does seem biased in as much as a newbie will benefit over someone who is an experienced archer.
In our club we ran two groups, A and B. The handicap level was set at 45 to shoot in A or B so that less experienced archers would shoot in one group, and the others would be in the other. The nice thing about this was that archers in either group could compete at differing distances at the same event.
 

little-else

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
If your club does almost nothing but handicap comps then yes, the better archers wont get much of a look in but giving people something to aim for does encourage participation. A handicap syste like the one we have when mixed with a very flawed classification scheme will inevitablly create more problems than it cures but I disagree that beginners have a built in advantage, it is down to the difference between averages and standard deviations. A novice shooter may average a score that for exampe is 3rd class but the scores may range from close to missing all of the time and then getting a first class score. The standard deviation of the scores is massive whereas the better shooter's score will vary very little so on a good day will only beat a field that has average or poor days in a handicap comp and if there are enough competitors the odds of everyone else having an off day is small.
The sooner AGB has classifications for each round the better. More badges to weigh you down, more participation by people who have limited distances as they can either achive something or compete on a level playing field when shooting elsewhere.
Geoff's system will work well for a club shoot, we used to use the same for our rifle and pistol club shoots using the average of the last 10 cards shot at that discipline for example. We also used to use a system where if you shot above your average by more than a certain amount the you started to count backwards so shooter A with an av of 95 may be the scratch score to beat and shooter B with an average of 90 had an allowance of 5 added but if his score was more than the allowance, say a 97 then his adjusted score would be 98 ( so score plus allowance of 5 but minus the excess above the max of 100). Other variations were published by the NSRA as suggestions as well as their normal handicap tables
 

English Bowman

Well-known member
I do think that a handicap system benefits the newer archers, and personally I think that this is a good thing. The more experienced and better an archer is the harder it will be for them to find the improvement needed to win a handicap shoot, but surely that's offset by the fact that they are more likely to win a medal at a non handicap shoot. I see it as a way of encouraging new archers into competition, those who have never entered a shoot as there's no point because they're not good enough. Once they've entered the shoot they can see what competitive shooting is about and that it can be fun even if you're not in the running for a medal.
 
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