The legendary United States Disc Golf Championships are on their way in Rock Hill, NC and this year there's been some changes in the format. Instead of playing for the best overall score the competitors are playing against their personal projected score based on their ratings. Each player has their own projected score and the winner of the competition will be the player that beats their projected score by the biggest margin.
Although some of the touring pros have considered this change somewhat unwelcome, it is great chance for the AM's out there to be able to compete against the best players in the world with handicap. So instead of rewarding the player who does the best overall score, this scoring system awards the players who are able to play above their own level.
Scoring cheatsheet by discmania.net
There's been some messages around the interwebs complaining that the live scoring and leaderboard are hard to interpret, so we decided to prepare a cheat sheet for checking your favorite players score:
USDGC Scoring cheatsheet - Click to enlarge.
In addition to the projected scores, there's also personal projected pars for each player on every hole. So for example for 1040-rated Dave Feldberg the par on hole number 1 is 2, whereas the personal par for 888-rated Darrel Zimmerman the personal par on the same hole is 4.
Team Discmania taking part in the action
There's also three Team Discmania players taking part in the action this year and all of them on the pro side of the field. Juho Rantalaiho from Turku, Finland is currently standing at tied 19th place with his handicapped +1 score. Juho's total score was 70 while his projected score was 69. Not too far behind are Jussi Meresmaa (handicapped score +3) and Seppo Paju (handicapped score +4). Jussi's projected score is set at 65 and Seppo's at 67.
What needs to be remebered here is that although the system is theoretically fair for everybody skill level aside, it is definitely harder for a touring pro to improve his/her already high rated game comparing to an up and coming AM or Junior, who's ratings are not yet at the same level his/her game already is. With that in mind it's actually quite surprising to see Dave Wiggings Jr and Dave Feldberg in the lead, Feldberg's raw score of 56 being one hot round!
Follow the live scoring and updates from the tournament at USDGC.com