Understanding Your Handicap on theStick

If you have a GHIN index

Connect it once and theStick pulls your current index automatically — no manually typing in a number before every round, no "I swear I'm a 14 now" conversations. It stays in sync going forward, so the handicap applied to your rounds is always your real, current index, converted to a course handicap for the tees you're actually playing that day.

If you don't have a GHIN index

theStick calculates its own rolling handicap for you from your own round history, using the same underlying method the official World Handicap System uses (a best-N-of-your-last-M rounds average, with the same adjustments the real system applies at low round counts). You don't do anything to make this happen — play rounds, and the index builds itself in the background, visible in Settings once you have enough rounds posted. It only uses 18-hole rounds for this calculation; a 9-hole round doesn't have a comparable rating to build a differential from.

Your Simulator Handicap is kept completely separate

If you play both outdoor rounds and simulator rounds, theStick tracks two separate rolling indexes — your regular theStick Handicap from outdoor rounds, and a distinct Simulator Handicap built only from rounds you've marked as simulator play. They never mix. A hot streak on a simulator doesn't nudge your real-course handicap up or down, and vice versa — each is computed independently from its own pool of rounds, using the same formula. You'll see the Simulator Handicap appear in Settings once you've logged at least one sim round (it needs three to actually produce a number, same minimum the outdoor index uses), and any round you mark as a simulator round gets a small "SIM" badge so it's always clear which bucket it's feeding.

Why you never have to do the stroke math yourself

A handicap number by itself doesn't tell you which holes you actually get a stroke on — that's determined by the course's stroke index, a 1-through-18 difficulty ranking printed on the scorecard. theStick applies this automatically and correctly: your handicap allowance determines how many of the hardest-rated holes you get a stroke on, and if your handicap is over 18, the hardest holes start getting a second stroke once the first pass is used up. This is genuinely one of the easiest things to get subtly wrong doing it by hand or in a spreadsheet — a slightly-off stroke allocation is where most golf-betting arguments actually start — and it's the entire reason to let an app own this instead of a mental approximation mid-round.

Different games use your handicap differently, and that's normal

A low-net game applies your full handicap. A team format like scramble or four-ball applies a percentage of it (because pairing two handicaps together creates a statistical edge the format has to account for). A head-to-head match play game applies the *difference* between two players' handicaps rather than each one individually. If a setting looks different from the last game you played, that's the format doing its job, not an error — each game's setup screen shows exactly what percentage and basis it's using before the round starts.

The bottom line

Whether you connect a real GHIN index or let theStick build one from your own rounds, and whether you're playing outdoors or in a simulator, the number gets computed correctly and applied correctly without you doing any of the underlying math. That's the whole point — you should be thinking about your next shot, not your stroke index.