My CC is just about to start a hcap tourney and I have been playing around with a lot of ideas to come up with something that keeps the field as tightly bunched as possible.
What I have put in place for the first run is to set a base score of 60 which is subtracted from the players average and set the handicap at 75% of that figure.
That is to say a player with an average of 70 will get 7.5 strokes 70 - 60 * 0.75 No idea if it will work, but the simulations I ran through excel looked promising.
After trying a few things, my CC settled on something we call the "True Average" and calculate handicaps around that. We arrive at this average by looking at a player's stats and taking their par3,4 and 5 averages and multiplying them out according to the make up of the course. For example, take St andrews, 14 x par 4, 2 x par 3 and 2 x par 5, if the respective averages were 4.1 , 3.2 , 4.9 we would do
(4.1*14)+(3.2*2)+(4.9*2) = 73.6 then subtract the par of 72, so this player gets 1.6 shots. Conversely if the outcome was 70, then that player would have 2 strokes added to his/her score. It might look complicated but after the initial setting up in Excel it works a dream.