December 5, 2006
Point Target Moves to 60
LOS ANGELES, CA — PostStats LLC, the premier amateur sports entertainment website, announced today the Poststats Point System has been updated and ready for distribution on January 1. This change is a noticable as the target of 35 points will be elevated to 60 points per round.
The change will act on several member suggestions for the 6-year old system. "We are very open to suggestions," said Brian Long from his apartment in Westerville, OH. "These changes will provide many great improvements to the system."
The rise of target to 60 points was published months ago. The new point system was introduced at Golfapalooza X.
The upgrade is expected to further eliminate aggressive and conservative point assignments. (i.e. one point for bogey and one point for par AND zero points for bogey and four points for par). The change required an overhaul of the point distribution table that now exceeds 300 different handicap point combinations.
"The 300+ assignements do not include 1 point for double bogey and 1 point for bogey," said Long. "In addition, we eliminated all very aggressive combinations including assignments increasing by 4 points. This included 0 points for bogey; 4 points for par and 1 point for bogey; 5 points for par as examples.
In fact, we are striving to eliminate 0 points for bogey; 3 points for par and 1 point for bogey; 4 points for par. These new changes are sure to tighten the handicapping considerably."
The elevated target will also provide additional flexibility for long putt points as they can be moved to 1, 2 or 3 points per putt made. Sources close to the Carl Spackler Open Championship expect the long putt points to stay at 2 points, however drop in value by 30 percent due to the increase of target.
The elevated target will also provide additional room for golf course difficulty structure. The difficulty rankings increase by 80 percent including very difficult courses receiving as much as 35 bonus points.
The new target of 60 points will be used for golfers with handicaps higher than 20 strokes. The bogey golfer and even more skilled golfers will be granted higher targets to help adjust the improvement scale. "There is no doubt Jeremy Myers has more room to improve than Ravinder Bakshi," said Long. "We need to capture that in the point target and overall system. Although final research and testing is not entirely complete, Mr. Bakshi could see a target as high as 70 points."
Jason Ridgeway is expected to receive points for bogey, which also awards Jon Munksgard 3 points for triple bogey.
The personal feel will be found in the point system analyzer in each of the golfer profiles late this December. Golfers will begin to experience the change on January 2 with the new point assignments for the 2007 Virtual Tournament.