[wink]

How do you overcome a wrong observation of a local maximum though (e.g. in your club maybe)?

I only experienced something like this once, late 90s. We thought of ourselves as pretty ok StarCraft players until we got some visitor to a lan party who basically demolished everyone. This was pre-ladder iirc so you only played a handful of games online.

[bruce511]

In golf the handicap system is "global". Each player has a handicap index, which then translates into a course handicap. It's not perfect (different players have different strengths and weaknesses, which means some courses "suit" a game more than others) but generally the system is at least reasonably accurate.

Tennis of course is harder. You can only be as good as the people you are playing with.