Everybody antes. Then you spend the round earning playing cards for good golf and paying into the pot for bad, and at the end the best five-card hand takes the whole thing. It is the rare game where a scruffy front nine still leaves you live, because all you need is the right five cards.
Good golf earns cards. Bad golf funds the pot. Best hand takes it.
A fixed amount from each player, straight into the pot. It is not refundable. A man who never earns a single card has still paid his share, and that is the point: the pot is worth playing for.
A net birdie is one card and a net eagle is two. A one-putt for net par or better is one more. So is a made putt of twenty-five feet or longer, which is the only thing anybody has to record by hand, because nobody is out there with a tape measure. A chip-in counts as a one-putt.
Five dollars for a net double bogey or worse. Five dollars for any three-putt. Both go into the pot, which means the man having a shocker is quietly funding the prize for the man who is not.
At the end you take the cards you earned and make the best five-card poker hand you can. Best hand takes the pot. A tie chops it.
Thirteen cards is the cap, and reaching it is not the end of your round. It is the start of everybody else's problem.
Thirteen each across four players is fifty-two: exactly one deck. That is why the cap is thirteen, and it is why the game wants a foursome rather than a fivesome.
But you can keep earning after you have filled your hand, and this is where it gets good. Once you are on thirteen, every card you would have earned instead makes each of the other three put five dollars into the pot. You do not pay a penny. You have a full hand, you are favourite to win the thing, and every birdie you make from there costs the other three fifteen dollars between them.
A man on thirteen cards standing over a five-foot birdie putt is the most watched putt of the day, and none of the watching is friendly.
This looks like a fussy detail. It is the whole balance of the game.
Birdies, eagles and the double-bogey fine all come off the card: your full handicap, the way a normal net score works. The one-putt card is different. It comes off the low man, so only the strokes you get relative to the best player in the group count.
Groups who tried running the one-putt off the card too found the same thing every time: far too many cards get earned, hands fill before the turn, and the cap rule fires so often that the game turns into a fine-collecting exercise. Moving that one rule to the low man is what keeps a full hand something you have to actually earn.
Both are adjustable, because crews differ and the only way to find your own balance is to try it. But if you are starting out, start where everybody else ended up.
Nobody is required to reach five cards, and a short hand is not a dead hand. You are ranked on what you hold.
If you earned exactly one card all day and it happens to be an ace, and nobody else has a pair or better, your single ace beats their five-card king-high hand and you take the pot. If you have two cards and they are both aces, you have a pair, and a pair beats every high-card hand at the table no matter how many cards it is made of.
What a short hand cannot do is win on kickers. A bare ace loses to a five-card ace-high hand, because the other four cards you do not have count as nothing. So a thin hand needs to be pointed: one big card, or a pair, not a scattering of sevens.
Only if you want to. Plenty of groups deal real cards in the bar afterwards, which is half the fun, and in that case you just tell the app who won and it settles the pot. If you would rather not, the app can deal.
Because you can check it. The shuffle is worked out from the round's own id and the exact moment it was finalized, and the app shows you that seed. The same seed always produces the same deal, so anybody who thinks the app cheated can re-run it and see the identical cards. There is nothing to trust.
Thirteen cards times four seats is one deck exactly. With five players you could need sixty-five cards, so either the cap has to come down or you are dealing from two decks and duplicating cards, which changes the odds and the argument. Four keeps it clean.
An X counts as the double bogey it almost certainly was, so it pays the fine and earns nothing. Nobody picks up when they are one over.
Yes. A net double bogey with three putts pays both fines. It is a bad hole and the pot knows it.
No. An eagle is two cards, not three. It is worth double, not double plus one.
The other whole-group pot game. Skins rewards winning a hole outright; poker rewards a scattering of good moments across eighteen.
Read the rules →Another game where birdies are the currency, but here only the last one pays. Runs happily alongside poker.
Read the rules →FLOG works out every card earned, every fine paid and the whole pot, off the scores and putts you were entering anyway.