Yah, I play with a group of about 16-20 guys 3-4 times a week and every couple of weeks the ball toss we do to determine who plays with who works out just right where all 4 or 5 in my group are 0-4 hdcp and we play a straight up (or very few strokes given) carry-over skins game plus something else with rotating/changing partners like a Vegas/Amigos game. If things go your way, you can win $100-$150 or lose $50-70 when they don’t.
6 point scotch game starting at $1/point is the standard. It’s not uncommon to get it up to 48 points per hole towards the last few holes before the rolls and umbrellas. It can get pricey but the low handicap has a pretty huge advantage since he tends to hit the most greens and make the most birdies. I’ve got a pretty regular partner in this game who is a 22 and we are deadly together in this one.
My dad used to play in a group that played for a dollar a yard. That could get nuts.
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I usually avoid the “motivation”. Once in a great while I’ll play $5 front/back/total.
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I’ve played for as little as 50 cent Nassau with auto presses with 25 cents junk to as much as $5000 with backers that wanted a piece of the action. To be quite frank, it’s more fun to play for fifty cents than it is to go high roller. At the end of the day my current group for the couple dollars that exchange hands, it’s about who has the needle for the week. When a single sometimes gets thrown in with us and we’re on the first tee and push one right and my partner goes, you sucked last week and you seem to still suck and I’m happy about that! They look at us like we’re nutz. Or you miss a putt, aww you missed why don’t you just hit again 3 more times with that aim. As we all yuck it up… people just aren’t used to the needle. 25 cents and a needle… PRICELESS!
We play that pretty much every week and also add “junk”. My buddy and I lost $3 last Saturday. It’s not about the money, but just for fun and hopefully extra motivation to make a putt or 2. It’s actually the only gambling I do. We have 2 large casinos in CT and I only like going there for the restaurants and shows lol.
Wow, some high roller in here. We just play quarter skins with 50 cent greenies. The most anybody could lose is $6.50, but it ususally comes out pretty even.
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Funny that this thread still has steam. I’m playing again with these guys on Thursday, but I told them no way I’m doing 50/50/100 again!
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After your first two rounds you posted, I would say you should bump it to $500/$500/$1k!
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It was a long story, but yes…$5000 bet on making a number at a very prestigious, private, difficult layout that I had never played in my life with no warm-up outta the car and total action on the bet was $5K. I won the bet and my take was $725 of it. There were over 15-17 people grabbing action both ways on whether I could make a number and I made the number by 6 shots.
All of life is advantaged play
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I’m curious @jon. As someone who’s played with a “bit” on the line (I never have), does it change your strategy? Are you more inclined to the 20% shot?
As a smart guy, I’m guessing not. But…
This past year of covid I only played “friendlies” with same group, nothing on the line, became experimental. “I bet I can play a high hook over that opening in the trees” sort of stupidity, 20% success rate.
Does the Riverboat mentality ever creep in?
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Id be willing to bet that most average golfers will try to chase birdies to “win back their losses”…
You could probably learn an interesting amount about how strategy changes scoring by comparing front and back nines for guys with money on the line.
I actually feel way more pressure in tournaments than for money of that amount. It doesn’t make me nervous, or change my strategy, but it mostly makes me uncomfortable because I’m just not interested in losing or winning a ton of money on the course 
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So I can get sandbagged??!!! 
Golf money aint real. It just gets passed around 
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I’m with you. I like playing for someone else’s money, not my own😉
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finally looked this up… Eddie Caminetti solves crime / geopolitics via golf??
My dad and his group (2-3 foursomes depending on day of week) would play two man team matches for $.10 a point, two points per hole - low ball and low team total. If you got skunked, you’re out $3.60. They had multiple matches going on, your cartmate would be your partner and your opponent.
After the dust settled, if you lost more than $5.00 you had a bad day. It took almost as long to settle the bets as to play the round. It was never, ever about the $$$ - it was always about bragging rights.
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Bingo, bango, bongo. Dime a point. Anything more is not golf.
Mike Caro’s, “Draw up a list of activities you’ve done, and divide it into ‘Good Gambles and Bad Gambles’”, exercise, helped change my life.
It helped me realize that while luck was never in my control, the activities I chose to engage in, and (most importantly) the preparation I put into those activities, was. Even if I lost, if I made the right decisions in doing so, but ended up losing anyway; eventually those ‘Sklansky Bucks’ could turn into real ones.
Golf is fun without the gambling element. So I don’t.
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