Ahh,  the dreaded cutting events, feared by everyone taking part in them. Well, it's not that bad and it performs some important roles with the European Tour.

We run four cutting events a year, organised by the sitting tour committee, and the winner of the previous cutting event. These events are open to all the members and optional for everyone other than those going 'on tour' in Sepbember.

The first purpose of the Cutting Event is to validate the handicaps everyone has, and verify all the players have equal chances of winning the tour event. 

The supercomputer in the picture is the latest upgrade we've made that we use to calculate the handicaps of everyone and is a combination of classic stableford scoring, averaging scores, and number of blobs taken into account. I could go on more about it, but most of the time, everyone just switches off a bit, or starts spraying me with beer until I go away. Needless to say, it's not very exciting. This replaced the manual pencil and paper method with the 3 monkeys in 2020

The second purpose is to get everyone together four times a year, and keep in touch. This is especially for the newer joiners, so they get to meet everyone else before going on tour.

We also have a presentation night, at the venue of the reigning champion's choice, to toast the new champion in, establish the new committee, get provisional dates for the new tour, and location.

House rules for bets and prizes

To avoid any doubt, this is how we 'rule' any bets...

You can only win one prize for Winner, Second, NP, LD, so keep the list of them all just in case we need to give it to the second place and so on. 

If you have your name for multiple wins, you win them in the reverse order of the holes. So in this case it's 'Winner' first (as you get this on the 18th), then Second, then each NP/LD based on the hole. This means if you win both NPs and they are holes 15 and 6, you take the 15th prize, and forego the 6th which is given to the second best NP for that hole.

You can win the spoon, and/or the best 4-Ball irrespective of winning any of the other prizes. So you could win the spoon, the best 4-Ball and NP for example.

Ties for winners and spoons will go to countback, hole by hole, from the 18th back.

Ties for best 4-Ball will count-back on the person with the lowest score in each quad, hole-by-hole.

If there is a no-show for your 4-ball and you're a 3-ball, you double the second best score in your group.