Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get at golf through daily training, practice and playing. Read more from his “Late Scratch?” series here.

My ultimate goal—let’s call it more of a dream—is to become a scratch golfer, and I’ve put in a lot of work in the gym and on the course to get better. But part of me has wondered if there’s a way to game the system when it comes to my Handicap Index.

When I first met with Quaker Ridge head pro and Golf Digest Best in State teacher Mario Guerra last fall, I mentioned I might test out whether playing easier or tougher courses would help my number come down quicker. He didn’t hesitate in saying going the easier route would be a no-brainer and even suggested I play rounds from forward tees to get used to shooting lower scores. It was a method Bryson DeChambeau has said he utilized growing up, though I doubt he was ever concerned with his Handicap Index.

Without a country club membership, however, and living in an area where it’s extremely difficult to get a decent tee time (No “Grow the game” issues around here!) I don’t have the luxury to be too picky about where I play. But that doesn’t mean I still can’t draw some conclusions on this topic. I’ll get to what I found, but first, let’s back up to get a better understanding of the numbers that are actually affecting your Handicap Index.

Lucky for us golfers, we don’t have to figure this out on our own. Your local Allied Golf Association has course raters who have calculated all this, and you can find those numbers on the course’s scorecard or on the GHIN app. What numbers are we talking about? Primarily course rating and slope rating.

As a brief refresher, a course rating is the score a scratch golfer would expect to shoot from those tees “when they play well,” according to the USGA. And the slope rating is a way of calculating the relative difficulty of the course for non-scratch golfers.

These numbers are important because they are used—along with a golfer’s score from that day—to calculate a Score Differential. It’s this number (Shown below where it says “Differential:”), and not your raw scores, that directly factors into calculating your Handicap Index (Sign up here to get a Handicap Index).

Why? To put it simply, not all 72s or 82s (or 102s) are the same based on how difficult a course is or what tees you played from. (We went more in depth on this and other Handicap Index-related questions recently.)

To calculate Score Differential, there’s a very wonky mathematical formula that factors in score, course rating, slope rating and something called a playing conditions calculation. But you don’t really need to worry about that because the GHIN app takes care of all that in measuring just how well you performed that day. You just need to enter what course you played at, what tees you played from and your score.

OK, now let’s address how all this factors into your Handicap Index.

That is the question. In theory, this should all even out. A golfer should shoot a better score on an easier course, but they also won’t get as much credit for shooting that score as they would from the back tees or on a more difficult track.

Since we know the course and the tees you play from will have a significant impact on your Score Differential for a round, I wanted to see if there’s any clear pattern among my rounds. So, I took a dive into my most recent 20 scores counting toward my Handicap Index by averaging both the course rating and the slope rating for those 20 rounds. I got 71.19 and 131.85, respectively, and then broke my rounds into easier and harder categories using those numbers. The results were … interesting.

In those 20 rounds, I played 13 rounds on “harder” courses and seven rounds on “easier” courses. Five of my eight counting rounds—my lowest eight Score Differentials—came from the harder courses while three came from the easier ones.

That means that 38 percent (five out of 13 rounds) of the time I played a harder course during this time period it wound up counting for my Handicap Index. And when I play an easier course, that number jumps up to 42 percent. Not a huge difference, but a difference—at least, for this relatively small sample size (I”ll try to continue to keep tabs on this as the season goes on).

Taking it one step farther, my average Score Differential on hard courses is 5.63, but it drops to 4.34 on easier courses. And my best scoring differential on my card, by far, a -0.1, came on an easier course. So, it feels like there’s more potential to shoot an exceptional score (likely a lower one) on an easier course.

Looking at those average Score Differentials is also a reminder that your Handicap Index is always going to be significantly lower because that’s based on your eight best scores—or the playing ability you show on your better days. But if I’m ever going to get close to scratch, I’m going to need to turn my exceptional low score into more of a regular occurrence.

My conclusion, therefore, is that Mario was right and that playing easier courses (or playing from shorter tees) is better if your sole goal is lowering your Handicap Index. However, it doesn’t seem to make a huge difference—at least, it hasn’t for me this year—a testament to course raters and the World Handicap System working as designed.

There is at least one other way of potentially gaming the system, however, to lower your Handicap Index. A study by The Grint in 2024 found that a scratch golfer posts a Score Differential that’s a full two shots lower on their home course versus a course with which they’re unfamiliar. And suddenly, I really wish I had a home course. (The USGA confirmed there’s a home-course advantage to Golf Digest, but didn’t believe it to be that big.)

So, my best strategy for lowering my Handicap Index would actually be not just playing easier courses, but picking one easier course as a home base to keep playing over and over again. That doesn’t seem like a fun way to chase this dream, but it’s good to know if I ever get desperate enough.