Course rating is what a scratch golfer should expect to shoot on a normal day and a bogey rating is a rating based off of a golfer who would normally shoot 90 where a scratch would shoot 72, slope is the difference between the bogey rating of the course and the (scratch) rating of the course multiplied by a factor (I will admit, they didn’t give us the factor, but I looked it up and it is 5.381 for men and 4.24 for women). So if the (scratch) rating of the course is 74 and the bogey rating is 95, (95-74=21) you take 21 and multiply it by a factor (for a man) of 5.381 and you get 113 (which happens to be the standard slope like 72 is for rating). Slope is solely for comparing golf courses, unlike the rating which can be used to compare to a player’s score as well as use for comparing courses.

@@justwondering1967 that makes so much more sense. Especially since the bogey player will more likely mess up more on a harder course (in a compounding sense) than a scratch will on a harder course. If a scratch is likely to take 4 more shots than normal, then a bogey golfer will likely take something like 12 more than normal.