What Are Sunningdale Rules In Match Play... Could This Be The Answer To Your Next Handicap Dispute?

Sunningdale Rules is a little-known handicap system for match play. One of the advantages of Sunningdale Rules is that it does not require the players to have official handicaps, nor conduct calculations using percentages based upon slope and course ratings and so on. Another is that, by its very nature, it tends to provide for close matches.

I first came across Sunningdale Rules when playing in a 12-a-side hickory match played in foursomes.

Quite what the participants’ hickory handicaps would be goodness only knows: some of those taking part had never hit a ball with a hickory club before; others were experienced and proficient in their use.

One player, it turned out, regularly played with hickory clubs in his own club competitions and said he scored as well with them as with modern clubs.

A neat solution was proposed by the day’s organiser: Sunningdale Rules. Unfortunately he announced this without explaining what it was.

Many conversations later, most tending to run along the lines of “What are Sunningdale Rules?” and getting replies, such as “Oh, I was hoping you could tell me,” the assembled players finally got an answer.

In Sunningdale Rules the players start off playing level, so no handicaps are involved. But whenever a team is two holes up in the match, their opponents get a shot on the next hole.

This method has a natural tendency towards tight matches as it prevents one team easily pulling ahead in a match. It also prevents those sometimes tedious gripes about other people’s handicaps, as no handicaps are involved.

We happened to play it in foursomes, but it suits singles match play just as well; or indeed the fourball better ball format.

A similar principle of handicapping is employed by the system credited to CJY Dallmeyer, who was club captain at the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, which is based at Muirfield, in the 1950s.

Known as Colonel Dallmeyer Rules, or sometimes by another variation using his name, in this handicapping system, when a team goes 3 up they give a shot on each hole hole to their opponent until their opponents are only 1 down.