Every birdie doubles what the next one is worth, and only the last birdie of the day pays. Make one early and all you have done is make somebody else rich later. Start at five dollars and a group that is rolling can end the afternoon three figures deep without anyone quite noticing when it happened.
One number that only ever goes up, and one winner at the end who takes it from everybody else.
Five dollars is the common start. That is what the first birdie of the round is worth, and it is the only number you set. Everything after it is arithmetic.
First birdie is worth the starting amount. The second is worth double. The third double again. At a five dollar start that is 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, and it keeps going. There is no cap.
An eagle counts as two birdies for the ladder, so it doubles the value twice. An albatross counts as three. The player who made it holds the bet at whatever rung he landed on.
Whoever makes the final birdie of the round collects its value from every other player in the game. Everyone else gets nothing, no matter how many they made along the way.
Doubling is not intuitive. This is the same table the app prints on the setup screen, so nobody agrees to a number they have not seen played out.
$5, then $10, $20, $40. Nobody is nervous yet. This is the stretch where players make one and think they have done something useful.
$80, $160, $320, $640. Somewhere in here the group stops joking about it and starts checking the number before every par 5.
$1,280, $2,560, $5,120, $10,240. There is no cap, so this is a real outcome and not a joke. Groups that make a lot of birdies should start well under five dollars.
That is per player, not a pot. A four-man group where the eighth birdie wins means the winner collects $640 from each of the other three. Pick your starting number with the back nine in mind.
If two players birdie the same hole, the ladder still advances for both of them, so the value doubles twice. But neither can win on a shared hole. The bet falls back to the last hole that had exactly one birdie on it. If every birdie hole was shared, nobody wins and nothing is owed.
A birdie is one under the par on the card. Handicaps do not apply here at all. The better players have an edge and that is the deal everyone agrees to at the first tee.
On a shotgun start the last birdie means the last one actually played, not the highest hole number. A birdie on 3 played at the end of the round beats a birdie on 17 played in the middle.
The doubling is the part groups lose track of, so the app keeps the live number on screen instead of in somebody's head.
Progressive Birdies sits on the Sides tab because its value moves while you play. The card shows what the next birdie is worth right now, every birdie that has landed and on which hole, and which one is currently holding the bet. When a shared hole knocks the win back to an earlier birdie, the marker moves with it, so the man holding it is never the man who just made one.
It is one group at a time. Progressive Birdies does not run across a multi-group session the way skins or Big Team can.
The other carry game. Skins builds its value on ties, Progressive Birdies builds it on birdies, and they stack on the same round without stepping on each other.
Read the rules →If Progressive Birdies rewards the one big moment, Dots pays out the small ones all day. Most groups run both.
Read the rules →FLOG tracks the ladder live, shows what the next birdie is worth, and settles it at the end with everything else you played for.