The biggest thing with handicapping individual games is the volatility of game scoring (as Jeff mentioned). It's impossible to create a handicapping system that works for all games with the vast breadth of games with linear scoring versus those games with more dynamic scoring opportunities.

As far as PEPGA goes (PAPA's handicapping system back in the day), it developed a handicap based on league points earned, so the outcome of each game was normalized no matter what the game played happened to be.

You can check out the old Flipside magazine (http://legacy.papa.org/flipside/v1i1.pdf) page 18 has some league standings from 1992 with the PEPGA averages for each player during the season.

This would lend itself towards handicapping a group of players in a league by comparing their performance versus their expected performance.

If there's a 40 game season, and Steve Epstein has a PEPGA of 5.33, there's an expectation that 213.20 would be his season total.

You could then look at Tim Post who had a PEPGA of 3.56, and there would be an expectation that 142.40 would be his season total.

PAPA could then use PEPGA to declare Tim the 'handicapped' winner of the season if he finished with 150 points, while Steve finished with 215 points.

Let's be clear that the increase in participation is happening on the tournament scene already. It's debatable how much of an impact a handicapping system would actually have on increasing attendance (especially because handicapped events wouldn't be endorsed by the IFPA).

Here's the last 5 years worth of players that have played in at least 1 IFPA event for that given year:

2011 --> 6179 players
2012 --> 7658 (up 24%)
2013 --> 9819 (up 28%)
2014 --> 13,329 (up 36%)
2015 --> 16,385 (up 23%)

I wish I could show a chart of income growth like that to my boss

If Johnny nobody plays a game and leaves, he has no impact on the value of that event or the points distributed in that event.

Only "Rated" players impact tournament values and point distributions (rated being having played in at least 5 IFPA endorsed events).

So Johnny could do that every year for 5 years . . . and on the 6th year he would count.

Prior to 2015 the number of people had nothing to do with the value of an event, the base vale was the same for all events (25 points).

But it's possible most of our growth isn't real, you never truly know

Updated for growth based on players that have played at least one event over the preceding 3 years:

2015 (up 29%)
2014 (up 24%)
2013 (up 24%)
2012 (up 23%)
2011 (up 48%)