handicap, in sports and games, method of offsetting the varying abilities or characteristics of competitors in order to equalize their chances of winning. Handicapping takes many, often complicated, forms. In horse racing, a track official known as the handicapper may assign weights to horses according to their speed in previous performances; the presumed fastest horse must carry the most weight. In trotting, horses sometimes start at different points; the horse thought to be the best in the race has to run farther than any other. In golf, two unequal players may have a close match by allowing the poorer player a handicap, a certain number of uncounted strokes based on earlier performances. The same system applies to 10-pin bowling. In sailboat racing, dissimilar boats compete under handicapping formulas that add time to the faster boats’ actual elapsed time for a race; thus, the winner of a race may be not the first to finish but rather the boat that performs best in relation to its design.
In the United States the term handicap also denotes the process of setting the odds for two teams in a baseball match, or for the horses in a race, and so on. These odds are assumed to properly reflect the respective winning chances, with a built-in profit margin for the bookmaker or casino accepting bets according to them. A professional oddsmaker is often called a handicapper in American gambling parlance.