Ready to Play Skins?
Settle Up Golf tracks every bet, calculates every payout, and tells you exactly who owes what — so you can focus on your game.
Every hole has a bounty on it. Tie it and the pot grows. Win it outright and you take home a skin. Pure, simple, and surprisingly tense.
A skins game is one of the most natural betting formats in golf: each hole is worth a set amount of money — a "skin" — and whoever has the lowest score on that hole wins it. If two or more players tie for low score, nobody wins the hole and the skin carries over to the next hole, making it worth more.
Skins is beloved because it rewards great individual holes rather than consistent scoring over an entire round. You can make a triple bogey on hole 3 and still win the round if you make two birdies when nobody else does. Every hole is its own mini-contest, which means there's something riding on every single tee shot.
The format became famous in the 1980s when the TV show "Skins Game" featured the top PGA Tour players competing head-to-head for escalating dollar amounts per hole — with carryovers that could make a single hole worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Your Friday four-ball version is smaller in scale but identical in concept.
Everyone plays the hole and you compare scores (adjusted for handicap strokes if playing net skins). If one player has the outright lowest score, they win the skin. If two or more players tie for the low score, nobody wins that hole.
What happens to unwon skins depends on your carryover setting (more on that below). At the end of 18 holes, you tally up how many skins each player won and calculate the payouts based on your wager mode.
This is one of the most important decisions your group makes before teeing off, and it fundamentally changes how the game plays.
Carryover ON: When a hole is tied and nobody wins the skin, that skin rolls over to the next hole. Now hole 2 is worth two skins. If hole 2 also ties, hole 3 is worth three skins. This is what makes skins genuinely exciting — when a string of ties builds up, the next clean winner takes a massive haul. That 220-yard par-3 suddenly has four skins riding on it and everyone's nervous.
Carryover OFF: Tied holes are simply pushed — nobody wins, the skin disappears, and the next hole starts fresh at its normal value. This version is simpler and more predictable. You can't have a dramatic five-skin hole, but you also can't lose a bunch of money on a single unlucky hole. Some groups prefer this because it keeps the risk more manageable.
In Settle Up Golf, carryover is a simple toggle when you set up the game. The app tracks all the carrying automatically — you'll see a "C" on carried holes and the accumulated value on the next won skin.
There are two common wager structures for skins, and they work quite differently:
Each player puts a fixed amount into the pot before the round — say $20 per player. With four players, that's an $80 total pot. At the end of the round, the pot is divided by the total number of skins won, and each player collects their share based on how many skins they won.
Example: Four players put in $20 each ($80 pot). Player A wins 3 skins, Player B wins 2, Players C and D win zero. That's 5 total skins, so each skin is worth $16. Player A earns $48 (3 × $16), minus their $20 buy-in = +$28. Player B earns $32, minus $20 = +$12. Players C and D each lose their $20 buy-in.
Pot mode is nice because your maximum loss is capped — you can never lose more than your buy-in. It's the default in Settle Up Golf.
Instead of a pot, each player pays a fixed dollar amount for every skin won by someone else — say $5 per skin. If you win a skin, every other player pays you $5. Win 3 skins in a foursome and you collect $15 from each of the other three players ($45 total).
Per Skin mode has more variance — your maximum loss depends on how many skins other players win. In a $5/skin game, if one player wins 8 skins, you'd owe $40. But wins are also bigger. This mode tends to reward aggressive play more.
Both modes work with carryovers. In Pot mode, a carried skin just means fewer total skins to divide the pot among (making each one worth more). In Per Skin mode, a carried skin with carryover ON counts as multiple skins — so winning a 3-carry skin collects 3 × your per-skin wager from each opponent.
Skins works for any number of players — two, three, four, five, or more. But the dynamics change significantly based on group size.
With two players, skins is essentially the same as a stroke play contest hole by hole. Any tie means a carry, but ties are less common because there's only one opponent to beat.
With three or four players, ties become more frequent and carryovers become more dramatic. The sweet spot is four players — enough for regular ties to build suspense, but not so many that clean skin wins are rare.
With five or more players, ties are very common and single players rarely go on long skin-winning streaks. The game becomes more about avoiding blowup holes than making birdies. Consider adjusting the skin value upward to keep individual wins meaningful.
One important note: in skins, only the outright low score wins. If three players tie at par and one player makes bogey, nobody wins — the tie among three players cancels the hole even though the fourth player lost. The skin carries regardless of who "lost" the hole.
Skins translates beautifully to multi-group tournament settings. Each player in the tournament competes across all groups — if you make the low score on hole 5 in your group, you win the skin only if nobody else in the entire tournament also made that score. Ties across groups also carry over.
This creates a fascinating dynamic where you're simultaneously playing your own group and competing against golfers on other holes. A birdie might not win you a skin if someone in group three also made one. Settle Up Golf's tournament mode handles cross-group skins automatically, which saves a lot of arithmetic after the round.
Check out the Wolf game if you want something else that works great in small groups — it's a different kind of individual-per-hole competition.
Play net skins if there's a handicap gap. A scratch golfer making par beats a 20-handicapper making bogey on a par-3 — but with handicap strokes applied, the 20-handicapper might get one stroke on that hole, making their bogey effectively a par. Net skins levels the playing field and keeps everyone invested.
Decide the carryover rule before you start. Will unclaimed skins at the end be cancelled or split? Does the last hole's carryover double its value? These small decisions make a big difference in how you play those final holes.
Don't forget skins pairs well with other formats. Most groups play skins on top of a Nassau — the Nassau gives you the nine-hole match competition while skins reward the best individual holes. The two games complement each other perfectly and don't interfere with each other's scoring.
Track it in an app. Skins are easy to mess up when you're trying to remember three holes of carryovers, whose stroke falls where, and who owes whom. Settle Up Golf tracks skins automatically — enter your scores and it handles the carryover math, net handicap adjustments, and final payouts.
Settle Up Golf tracks every bet, calculates every payout, and tells you exactly who owes what — so you can focus on your game.