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Sorry guys the slope rating is not something we use downunder....... maybe because our greens are all bent and arealways fast........
How is it determined?

Brett
By the way can any body work out what NITBY stands for?

Wow, you asked a tough question there. It is basiclly a system that rates a course based on difficulty from each tee box. They give holes points based on where certain hazards are at each distance, width of fairways, number of hazards on a hole, etc. Add up the points and you get the slope. The purpose is for handicap adjustment from one course to the next. For example, if you were a 12 at your home course, and it had a high slope rating, you may only get 10 strokes at a course with a lower slope rating. Hope I got all of this right, if I missed something I'm sure there is someone in here that can help.

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That's basically the concept - it's different from the course rating you also see on the score card. My understanding is that the course rating is based on more of the playing abilities of a scratch golfer, while slope ratings take your handicap into consideration. Any slope over 140 is considered difficult, with about 120ish being 'average' in difficulty. Hopefully when you play a new course, you look at the slope rating to choose what set of tees you play from, assuming there are are 4 or maybe even 5 tees to hit from. My course from the tips has a slope of 142, so I don't even put out the tee markers anymore to discourage people to play from there. I have seen very few golfers out here that could actually play to their handicap from those tees. The next set of tees up from the 'championship' tees plays to a slope of 133 and that's hard enough for the vast majority of golfers.

FYI - the course setup has as much influence on the slope as much as the layout itself. Since the number of hazards and length of the course is in most cases are set from year to year, the cut of height in the rough and the speed of the greens can make the slope vary a lot. Initially, my course only had a slope of 135 from the tips and too many hackers were slowing play too much from playing the back tees. So I requested a new slope from our state golf association, put in an intermediate cut of rough to make it fair, but raised the cut in the primary rough, let more areas grow natural (ala Shinecock) and increased the greens speed from stimping 8 to 10.5. That got us over the 140 mark and discouraged people from playing the tips, so I just removed the tee markers entirely. If you want to play from the tips here, go ahead, you just won't have markers, that's all.

You won't have many balls left either! It's a jungle from "back there".

You mentioned in an earlier post that you played here in '98. The rules have changed since you played here. It used to be that if you hit in the naturalized areas, you received a free drop where the ball first went in the "jungle", which was considered ground under repair. The USGA authorized this policy, but I hated it. To me if you hit in the long stuff, you either find it and hack away, or hit a provisional and take a lost ball penalty. The pro here at the time was understandably more interested in the speed of play than playing golf strictly by the book, so he always referred to the USGA ruling on letting naturalized areas be considered ground under repair. In 2000, I finally got my way, and now for tournament play, there is no ground under repair rule for the naturalized areas, so there are a lot more lost ball penalties. That policy, along with the greens being much faster, alllowed us to get the slope up to where it should be and more accurately reflects the true difficulty of the course. The problem with my course is that it just doesn't look hard - we don't have any overly intimidating holes, but it is in reality much more difficult than it looks. The slope now I think is right on the money.

"By the way can any body work out what NITBY stands for?"

I do not think there is much I can add to the discussion on slope ratings but I would like to take a crack at NITBY, years ago I worked with a guy from down-under. Would it be used to describe a despondent player or golfer?

No Halk good attempt though have another go.

Hint: It could be something to say to an opponent in match play if you want to wind him up approaching a green with bunkers to go over....... i've said too much already!

Yoshiemaster do not say a word!!!

NITBY - aka Brett

Well this was going to be my original guess but having work with a fellow from down-under I know their are some strange twist to phrases just like here in the Southland of the U.S., so here goes "Not In The Bunker Yet"