SOUTH Pembs Short Mat Bowls Association held it’s annual Handicap Fours competition on Saturday at the community hall adjoining St Johns Church in Pembroke Dock.

The competition is aimed at encouraging all clubs to enter as the handicap levels the playing field between the ability of the various clubs by way of awarding extra shots for each game according to that club’s position in last year’s final league position table.

The winners of last year’s league, East Williamston, had zero shots added to their totals, and the lowest club still playing in the league, Kilgetty, were awarded the maximum five shots.

As you can imagine, this means that the teams with a lower handicap need to score as many shots as they can in a game to win it, and the system encourages teams to think about scoring higher shot tallies rather than a more strategic approach they can adopt if they only need to win a game.

As they could only use two mats at the venue each game was restricted to five ends which made the job of winning a game even harder.

The teams were divided up into two groups with the winner of each group playing a final match to determine the winner.

In the first group Kilgetty, walked away with it and won every match.

In the other group however at the end of initial play, where every team had played four games, the scores were all even and the winner had to be determined by shot difference.

The upshot of which was that the second highest handicapped team, Cosheston, were the group winners.

This setup an exciting final with Kilgetty the eventual winners.

The trophies were presented by St Johns SMBC who had initiated the competition some years ago.

The individual members of both the winners and the runners up each received a decorated mug as their keepsake trophy.