How French courses rank their holes: 601 stroke indexes, counted

Every scorecard ranks its holes from 1 to 18, and almost nobody reads that row. It decides where your handicap strokes fall, and it is set by the club rather than by a formula. We counted it on 601 French 18-hole cards — the ones carrying a complete, unambiguous ranking — and the most common thing about it is a convention nobody explains on the card itself.

What the stroke index actually ranks

Not difficulty. Separation.

Stroke index 1 marks the hole judged hardest for a bogey golfer relative to a scratch one — the hole where the weaker player most needs the shot. That is a different question from which hole plays hardest outright, and it explains a pattern that otherwise looks like an error: a fiddly 150-metre par 3 over water is hard for everybody, so it separates the two players hardly at all, and it tends to carry a high index.

The counting bears that out. Among the 601 cards, the hole carrying stroke index 1 is a par 4 on 417 of them, a par 5 on 122, and a par 3 on 62 — one card in ten. At the other end, the hole ranked 18 is a par 3 on 318 cards, more than half.

The convention that decides which nine looks harder

Here is the finding that changed what this article is about.

406 of the 601 cards — 67.5 % — allocate stroke indexes by alternating between the nines. Odd numbers on one half, even on the other. It is a distribution rule: it spreads the strokes a player receives across the whole round rather than bunching them in one half.

The split is not symmetric. 305 cards put the odd series on the front nine, 101 on the back — three to one in favour of making the outward half carry stroke index 1.

That asymmetry produces a statistic worth being careful with. Across all 601 cards, stroke index 1 sits on the front nine 67.9 % of the time — which looks like a strong finding about how architects rank holes, and is mostly an artefact of the convention. Among the 195 cards that use no alternation at all, stroke index 1 is on the front nine on 103 of them: 52.8 %, which is a coin flip.

The real finding is the convention itself, and the three-to-one preference inside it.

Where stroke index 1 actually sits

Hole	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Cards	26	37	43	53	61	58	39	36	55

Hole	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18
Cards	21	20	19	27	26	31	22	18	9

The peak is flat — the fifth carries it most often, at 61 cards out of 601, barely ahead of the sixth and the ninth. What is sharp is the avoidance at both ends. The eighteenth carries stroke index 1 on nine cards, the rarest position by a distance, and the first on 26.

That is a deliberate choice rather than an accident of terrain. A match decided on the last hole by a shot given is the outcome clubs design against, and the same logic keeps it off the first, where a stroke is handed over before anyone has played golf.

Length explains a third of it

Ranking holes is a judgement, but it is not arbitrary. Measured against the back tees on 10,692 holes, the correlation between stroke index and length is −0.35 — the lower the index, the longer the hole.

Within a single par category it is much stronger. Among par 4s alone the correlation reaches −0.55, which is what you would expect: once par is fixed, length is the main thing separating a hole a bogey golfer can reach from one they cannot.

Stroke index	Average length, back tees
1 to 6	351 m
7 to 12	308 m
13 to 18	251 m

A hundred metres separates the holes where you receive your first strokes from the ones where you receive your last.

Which nine is judged harder, once the convention is removed

Add up the nine stroke indexes on the outward half and a perfectly balanced card gives 81. Higher means the front nine carries easier holes.

Across all 601 cards the average is 83.9, which the convention drags around. Among the 195 free-form cards it is 85.1 — so where clubs rank holes without an alternation rule, they judge the back nine marginally harder. It is a small effect and a consistent one.

The nine-hole case, briefly

French nine-hole cards do not inherit the odd-even problem. Of the 452 we hold, 449 number their holes 1 to 9 rather than borrowing an odd or even series from an eighteen. Only three do otherwise.

That matters for anyone allocating strokes on a nine-hole card by hand: the ranking is almost always self-contained, so the hardest hole is index 1 and not index 1 of a series you cannot see.

What we counted, and what we did not

The perimeter is 601 of the 1,124 French scorecards in our database: those describing 18 holes and carrying a complete ranking from 1 to 18 with no duplicates. Cards with partial indexes, duplicates or gaps are excluded rather than repaired — a ranking with a hole missing is not a ranking.

Stroke indexes are set by each club and revised rarely. They are a judgement about a course, recorded on a card, and this article counts those judgements. It does not check them against how the holes actually play, which would need scoring data by hole that we do not have.

Related guides

• The hardest golf courses in France, ranked by slope
• The anatomy of a French golf course: what 469 scorecards say
• Work out the strokes you receive, and where they fall