Our annual Handicap Portsmouth will be held as usual at Pool Academy sports hall, slightly later this year on 1st December.

Handicap shoots add an allowance onto your score depending how well you normally shoot. Top archers have low handicaps and low allowances and novices have big handicaps and allowances. The idea is that if everyone shoots exactly to their normal standard the everyone ends up with the same score. The winners are those who manage to do better than normal on the day, rather than those with the highest score. Handicaps are usually worked out through the season by your club’s records officer, so you go into a shoot knowing what your handicap is.

That’s a problem if you haven’t got one or don’t know, so we do ours a bit differently. We shoot half a Portsmouth (2 1/2 dozen arrows) in the morning, then we work out handicaps from that score. We then shoot a whole Portsmouth after lunch and we apply the allowances from the morning to that score. The trophy then goes to the person who improves the most on the morning score. There are awards for total scores as well.

Download an entry form here.