GC Advantage Doubles Trial

16 people signed up to play in the GC Doubles Tournament on 9th May – many of them perhaps curious to see how Advantage GC differed from ‘Extra-turn’ GC in terms of handicapping. Not all of them preferred Advantage, judging from comments invited afterwards, but everyone seems to have found it pretty straightforward and commented in particular that the scoring was much simpler than they had expected.

Fortunately Lawn 4 had become playable that week, though the new grass made it extremely slow, despite having been mown that morning. So we were able to use all four lawns and thus avoid double-banking. Despite this, one game took 82 minutes! However there were two at 35 mins and one at 30 mins. The average was 50 minutes; I think it would have been significantly less for singles. The higher-handicapped pair won in four of the games, and the lower-handicapped pair won in eight of them.

The format was two American blocks of four pairs, in which all played all. Pairings were self-selected, and blocks were filled in the order that people signed up. Mean handicaps ranged from 6-12 and were remarkably evenly represented in each block.

In the end every pair had at least one win, which was pleasing. In Block A Timothy Cantell & Brenda Fisher (GC9) won two out of three games and became block winners by beating Lyndon Hughes and Anwen Owen (GC8) after a long hard tussle on Lawn 4. In Block B Elaine Morrison & Miriam Bolger (GC7) emerged as block winners, having won all three of their games that morning.