2026 Tournament Competitiveness
One question the board gets asked often is about the fairness of our tournaments, the Cinnabar Cup points race, and our end of season Match Play tournaments. In addition to following all USGA guidelines and policies for handicapping our tournaments to ensure everyone has an equal chance of winning (regardless of handicap), in 2025 we began tracking and compiling data from all our tournaments to confirm that was actually happening.
Below you’ll find a summary of the analysis we’ve done. The first section provides the year-to-date analysis of the tournaments played thus far competitiveness as well as the Cinnabar Cup race. The second section focuses on our end of season Match Play tournaments from 2024 and 2025 (Club Championship, NET Championship, and our “Ryder Cup” style Cinnabar Cup tournament)
While our personal experiences don’t always line up with the results we’d like to have, given our analysis, the Board is very confident in the fairness of all our events and find they are well within the expected results (based on USGA published data).
2026 Regular Season and Cinnabar Cup Points Race
The table below summarizes the 2026 year-to-date results from all our tournaments. It tracks how each member finished in each tournament based on their Tournament Index (handicap). The column labeled “Field” shows the percent of all rounds played by members in each handicap group this season. The other columns show the percent of rounds where members of each handicap group either won the tournament or finished in the Top 3, Top 5, Top 10, or Top 20 respectively.
Assuming every member has an equal chance of winning every tournament, then over time (e.g. by the end of the season) we would expect the percentages in each “finishing column” to roughly equal the percentages in the “Field” column
For example, members with TIs between 0.0 and 4.9 have played 15% of the total rounds year-to-date and have placed in the Top 5, 20% of the time. Thus, this handicap group (so far) is currently doing slightly better than we would expect them to do by season end. Likewise, members with TIs between 5.0 and 9.9 have played 25% of the total rounds year-to-date but placed in the Top 5 only 22% of the time (slightly underperforming what we would expect).
The board reviews the above data at every board meeting (by tournament and by YTD) to ensure the formats and handicap allowances offer every member an equal chance to win; and by the end of the season we expect any differences in the different groups (especially between the “Field” and “Top 5” columns to narrow further. You can find future updates to the above table on the CHMGA website at: Tournament Competitiveness.
In addition to the above, we track how each handicap group is doing in the Cinnabar Cup Points Race. The table below summarizes the results for the points race thus far and shows how many players we would EXPECT (given the number of playing members in each handicap group) in the Top 10 and Top 20 of the Cinnabar Cup standings compared to the number that are currently in the Top 10 and Top 20.
2025 Match Play Tournament
To analyze our Match Play results, we reviewed all matches played during 2025 (and 2024). For each match we looked at who won (the lower HC player or the higher HC player), how many strokes they were given/received based on their handicap, and how many strokes they won the match by. Note: matches where there were no strokes given/received were not included in the analysis.
The USGA recommends a handicap allowance of 100% for match play matches, so both members in the matches played with their full handicaps. Thus we would expect the lower HC and higher HC players to win ~50% of the time each.
The first column in the table shows the number of times the lower HC and higher HC players won in each match. To the far left you see how many times the lower HC beat the higher HC player as a percentage of total matches played. As you can see, lower HC players beat higher HC players n the 2025 Match Play tournament, the 2025 Cinnabar Cup tournament, and the 2024 Match Play tournament 54.5%, 52.2%, adn 48% of the time (all close to 50%). The exception is the 2024 Cinnabar Cup tournament where lower HC players only won 28.6% of the time.
Of interest, lower HC players won more in the 2025 Match Play tournament than the 2024 tournament by more strokes (3.3 to 3.1) while giving up more strokes (6.6 to 3.1).
In looking at the 2024 Cinnabar Cup detail, there is no clear pattern as to why the results skewed so heavily toward the higher HC players. Given the overall win percentage for the lower HC players, across all four tournaments is 46.2%, the most likely explanation is that it is simply an outlier year, and not the norm.
We will continue to track the match play data in 2026.