Stroke play
Count every stroke on every hole. Lowest total over eighteen wins.
Penalty strokes count like any other stroke. One bad hole is never over. A ten on the card is a ten.
Most tournaments use it, and so do almost all posted handicap rounds.
Every way golf is scored, one card each.
Golf has a handful of scoring systems. Stroke play counts every stroke, match play counts holes won, and Stableford gives points per hole against par. This desk keeps one card for each, for anyone who has heard "we are playing Stableford" and nodded.
Match play
Hole by hole, against one opponent. Win the hole, go one up. Halve it, nothing changes.
The match ends when a player is up by more holes than remain. "Three and two" means three up with two to play.
A ten on a hole costs you one hole, not ten strokes, so pick up and move on.
Stableford
Points per hole, measured against par. Highest total wins. A wrecked hole scores zero and nothing worse.
- 0
- Double bogey or worse
- 1
- Bogey
- 2
- Par
- 3
- Birdie
- 4
- Eagle
- 5
- Albatross
Gross and net
Gross is the strokes you actually took. Net is gross minus your course handicap.
The strokes come off on specific holes, in order of the stroke index printed on the card. Hardest hole first.
A net competition lets a twenty handicap and a five play the same event with a straight face.
Reading a score
"Shot 85" is gross strokes for the round. "Plus thirteen" is the same round against a par of seventy two.
"Two over" on a single hole is a double bogey. "One under" is a birdie. Under is good. Over is Tuesday.
Side games
Skins, Nassau, Wolf, Vegas and the rest run next to the real card, not instead of it. Each keeps its own tally.
They usually borrow match play logic: a hole is won, lost or halved, and the value carries over or it doesn't.
Rule of the desk. Agree the game on the first tee, or the game agrees on you.
Every card on this desk, running at once.
The desk keeps the systems apart. Big Fairways runs them together. One card for the whole group keeps the stroke play score, while match play, Skins, Nassau, Wolf and Vegas run beside it in the same round. Teams and groups can overlap and the math stays clean. Fairways, greens and putts go on the card too. At the end, SettleUp shows who owes what and nets it into simple payments between players. It's free, and an account takes about twenty seconds. Take the whole desk to the course with Big Fairways.
Ask the desk
A system we missed, a card that's wrong, a regional rule with a strange name. Send it in.