The Ambrose format is very popular as it allows all standards of golfers to mix and play together with equal enjoyment irrespective of ability.

The Ambrose system was named by the secretary-manager of the Victor Harbour Golf Club South Australia in honor of Richard and Mary Ambrose from Michigan, USA, who lived in the area in the 1960s where they had pastoral interests. It was also called the shotgun game. The Ambrose’s brought the game from their home club of Spring Valley Country Club in the US where it was called a different name, most like the shotgun game.

The secretary of the Victor Harbour Club named the Australian version after Richard and Mary and it caught on when it was first played in a National Ambrose Competition at the Liverpool Club in Sydney in March 1974 for a prize of $5000. One of the winners of the first event was the professional Lindsay Sharp who had a chain of golf shops which he later sold to Ray Drummond.

What is a good 4 Man Ambrose score?

An ideal 4 man Ambrose team should comprise 1 player under a 10 handicap, 2 between 10 and 20 and 1 over 20. Female players in a team also impact favourably on the handicap adjustment made at the end of the round.

Ambrose Golf – a form of the popular scramble

The Ambrose scramble format is fairly straightforward. Everyone on the team – usually 2, 3 or 4 players – tees off. The team then picks the best shot amongst their team players’ shots and all play from that spot. Each teammate must place the ball within a hand’s length of the chosen ball’s lie. On the putts, they must putt from the same spot. Each team records just one score per hole.

With Ambrose golf rules you use a team handicap. Generally, the formula for the team handicap is as follows:
Team Handicap = Total of all team members’ handicaps ÷ (Number of team members x 2)
For example, on a 4-person team with handicaps of 5, 13, 18 and 25 you would calculate as follows:
Team Handicap = (5 + 13 + 18 + 25) ÷ (4 x 2) = 61 ÷ 8 = 7.625 or, Team Handicap = (5 + 13 + 18 + 25) x (100 ÷ (4 x 2))% = 61 x 12.5% = 7.625

The tournament committee can decide whether to round up 7.625 to 8, truncate to 7 or something in between.

Another twist that is sometimes added to the Ambrose golf format is a requirement that each team member’s drive must be used at least a certain number of times. The tournament committee can select whether that is one, two, three, four or more times depending on the size of teams. That puts pressure on drives towards the end of the round, so you want to make sure if you’ve got a beginner or high handicapper that you avoid pressure situations for their drives late in the round.

The Ambrose format is very popular as it allows all standards of golfers to mix and play together with equal enjoyment irrespective of ability.

The Ambrose format is very popular as it allows all standards of golfers to mix and play together with equal enjoyment irrespective of ability. It also helps to promote teamwork as one score is recorded per hole and generally minimises the amount of time looking for lost balls.

The Ambrose format may vary according to the competition but a general, popular format is the main feature of this method of scoring.

Example

Groups of two players (2 person ambrose) or four players (4 person ambrose) work as a team. Each player hits off the tee, the best shot is selected and all other players pick up their ball and place it, within one handspan, alongside the best ball. Each person then hits a second shot from the same spot. The best shot is again selected. This continues until the ball is in the hole. On the putting green the best ball is marked and the other balls are played from this position.

One score is thus recorded on each hole. This is the sum of the best shots used throughout the hole.

In an ambrose format, you would expect your gross score to be under or very close to the par of the course. This is because the best shot from the team is chosen for each shot. In other words, your group has four chances to hit a good shot. It certainly takes the pressure off the less skilled golfers and is a good team-building format.

There is often one additional requirement. During the course of the round, all player’s drives must be used on a set number of occasions. Generally, this is three. So if you have a beginner golfer in your group it may be prudent to use their drives early in the round so as to not put pressure on them as the rounds conclude.

Key Features of Ambrose

• The minimum number of drives per player may vary according to the specific format you are playing. A minimum of 3 drives is common and fair without being too onerous. If the golfers in your competition are more beginner than intermediate a relaxing of this rule to 2 drives (or even 1) may be appropriate
• If your best ball is played from within a hazard then each of the player’s balls must be played from within that hazard
• If you are in a team of 3 players (for 4 person ambrose) then most formats will allow a fourth putt to be taken by any of the team members
• Your end score is adjusted for the handicap of the players in your team
• If you are in a team of 4 golfers (playing 4 person ambrose) then the combined handicap of all players is calculated and divided by 8 to arrive at the team handicap. This is then subtracted from the Gross Score of the Team to arrive at the Net Score
• If you are in a team of 3 golfers (playing 4 person ambrose) then the combined handicap of all players is calculated and divided by 6 to arrive at the team handicap. This is then subtracted from the Gross Score of the Team to arrive at the Net Score
• If you are in a team of 2 golfers (playing 2 person ambrose) then the handicap of the team is calculated by combining the handicaps of the 2 players and dividing by 4 to arrive at the team handicap. This is then subtracted from the Gross Score of the Team to arrive at the Net Score
• A typical winning score is in the mid 50s as a Net Score. It is rare (but possible) that a winning score is under 50
Positives of Ambrose
• It allows golfers of all standards to participate in the day without feeling intimidated by other players in their group who are better than them
• It promotes teamwork as every player has a chance of contributing towards the team score

Their popularity can’t be questioned, but are Ambrose events as fair as they could be?

Ambrose days are as common at most Australian golf clubs as duffed chip shots and three-putts. Whether two, three or four-player, we’ve all taken part in them and revelled in the team atmosphere and confidence-infusing format that wipes away the carnage of bad shots and instead focuses solely on the good ones. The game often referred to as a “scramble” is a great entry to golf for novice players, corporate events and once-a-year golfers.

Ever since Richard Ambrose at South Australia’s Victor Harbor Golf Club first coined the format, we’ve been using the same method for assigning Ambrose team handicaps: one-eighth the combined handicap for a four-player team, one-sixth for three players and one-quarter for a duo. It’s simple, easy to calculate and familiar to most golfers. But it’s also flawed and unfair, according to one Adelaide golfer who has put in the hours to prove it.

Denis Toohey suggested changes.

Sensing the system’s unfairness, Denis Toohey applied his chemical engineering and mathematical background. When it comes to Ambrose, he is golf’s ‘beautiful mind’ – our sport’s veritable John Nash. Toohey has spent countless hours experimenting with weightings for players in handicap order, charting results data, thinking through the logic and then using dozens of actual events to verify his findings: the way ambrose teams have been handicapped is flat-out wrong.

His 2e Method weightings for a four-player Ambrose total 75 (the sum of 40, 20, 10 and 5). Any individual competition allows for 100 percent of a golfer’s handicap. A two-player event conducted in the Ambrose format necessitates a reduced percentage simply because of the multiple shot options available to the pair. Moving to three-player events that percentage needs to be even lower due to the greater number of shot selection options, then lower again for four players. Toohey insists that’s a fundamental flaw of the traditional method, which uses half the team average regardless of team size. All teams should have proportionally increased handicaps, meaning higher handicapped teams gain more from this system than lower ones – which is why the latter win Ambrose events more often.

Numbers and data can paint a pretty picture for any learned person trying to prove a statistical point, but sometimes you need to also see the evidence at work. And we’ve all seen it happen: an Ambrose event where the handicaps of the players in some groups are more choreographed than your average ballet. Play in enough Ambrose events and you come to know which combinations of handicaps can exploit the system. Usually, it’s one or two very low markers gelling with a couple of high handicappers. (Unlike foursomes, for example, pairing ‘like’ golfers is a statistical no-no in Ambrose.) Yes, you’ve still got to play well, and putt well in particular, but the current method does provide an advantage to certain team compositions.

In some respects, changes have already been made to thwart teams who ‘stack’ their side. The Volkswagen Scramble is the largest and longest-running Ambrose tournament in the country and one that attracts thousands of entrants nationally every year. When it was still known as the Holden Scramble, the event first began stipulating a minimum number of each player’s tee shots be used (now also commonplace at most club ambrose events) while mandating a limit to the total aggregate of handicaps for each team and requiring a certain composition of handicaps. Later, the elimination format was introduced, which prohibited the player whose shot had been selected from hitting the next shot until the green was reached. Both alterations added a distinct strategy to the format but neither did nearly enough to rectify the numerical imbalance, and Toohey says his results prove it.

His crusade began in 2017 when Toohey analysed club Ambrose events. To verify his four-player method on a large sample, he obtained detailed results of 40 Holden Scramble events, comparing his method with the traditional (and also then USGA) versions. There might not be a better data sample available for such a number crunch.

“Little bit by little bit, pieces fell into place,” Toohey says. “Once they did, the logic became undeniable. But it’s a case of arriving at that, questioning it and thinking it all through.”

Toohey’s findings led him to compile a 13,000-word submission replete with graphs, examples and recommendations. Titled “Much Fairer Handicapping Methods for Scramble Events” he sent it to the powers-that-be at the USGA in August 2018 for their consideration within the forthcoming World Handicap System (WHS). A copy was also provided to the Golf Australia organisation (GA). In February 2020, the WHS released handicapping allowances for Ambrose events. These were a disappointment to Toohey – in more ways than one.

“After reading my submission, the WHS lifted their four-player model from 50 percent up to 70 percent, so all handicaps would increase by 40 percent,” Toohey says. “That was a distinct improvement but there is still a bias towards low-handicapped teams.

“But unbelievably, they ignored my ‘always unfair’ findings of the USGA two-player version and it remains at 50 percent, which doesn’t make sense. It would have to be a number between 70 and 100. In mine, it’s 85 after meticulous optimisation. That was some of my chemical engineering expertise at play – you do experiments and gradually move in on where the ideal point is.”

The WHS revision also lacks any method for three-player teams. How many times has a four-person ambrose taken place at your club and a team or two has lost a player so three golfers battle on instead. Now there is no formula to apply. In contrast, Toohey devised a three-player method by logically interpolating between his four and two-player versions, so his system is internally coherent.

Toohey forwarded a response to GA in the hope of forestalling implementation of what he saw as a flawed, incomplete and unfair WHS system. GA’s reply focused on maintaining global uniformity rather than having a different Australian version. While a fan of uniformity, Toohey did not want to see the promised ‘fairness’ of the WHS being compromised so blatantly. He was also concerned that those who proposed the system would not now change it because that would be an admission of their mistake in the first place.

References:

Golf Software
Australian Golf Digest
Sports Answers
Golf Select
Nelson Leisure PDF