Skins

Win the hole outright — ties roll the pot

The basics

Every hole carries a price. Lowest score takes the hole outright and wins the skin — any tie for low and nobody gets it.

Works with 2, 3 or 4 players, everyone on their own ball, net or gross. It's the game the Sunday-morning money crowd has played forever.

The carryover

A tied hole rolls its money into the next one, and pots snowball until somebody wins a hole clean. Nothing changes a round like standing on a tee worth five holes of cash.

Prefer sudden death per hole? Switch carryovers off and ties simply kill the skin.

Set your own stakes

One dollar amount for every hole by default — or flip on custom amounts and price each hole individually. Double the 18th, fatten the par 3s, make the island hole the big one.

Battle Tees shows the total money on the course before you start, and the hole screen always shows exactly what the hole you're playing is worth — carried money included.

⚡How to actually win it

Carries change the whole calculus. A tied hole rolls its money forward. By the time three holes have carried, one green is worth four holes of money — and that is exactly when you take on the pin instead of playing safe.

Win outright or don't bother. There is no second place in Skins. Halving a hole with the leader gains you nothing; it just fattens the next pot. That makes it the most genuinely aggressive game on the board — safe pars win nothing.

Watch the board, not just your ball. If everyone else has already made bogey, a two-putt par wins the skin. If someone has stuffed it to three feet, your twenty-footer is the only shot that matters. Knowing which situation you're in should change what you're trying to do.

Handicap strokes on carried holes are enormous. Getting a shot on the hole where four skins have piled up is the single luckiest thing that can happen to you all day.

🔥Why one hole can pay for the round

Skins is the purest form of golf gambling: every hole is its own cash prize, and there is no such thing as being out of it. You can play sixteen terrible holes, birdie the 17th while the pot is riding, and drive home a winner.

The tension of a carried pot is unmatched. Everyone knows exactly what the hole is worth, everyone can see the money on the line, and the group gets quiet in a way it doesn't for any other format.

It's also the easiest game in golf to explain to a newcomer: lowest score wins the hole, ties push it forward. Thirty seconds and they're playing.

💰The wager

Skins is the one game here that is priced in dollars directly, not points — you set what each hole is worth and the app tracks the pot in real money.

Friendly · $1 / holeStandard · $2–5 / holeGrown folks · $10+ / hole

Every skin is collected from every other player, so at $2 a hole in a foursome each skin is worth $6 to the winner. With carries on, a typical round produces 8–12 paid skins and one or two monsters. You can also set a custom amount per hole — cheap on the opening stretch, expensive down the closing four, which is how a lot of groups build tension into the back nine.

Mixed handicaps? Play it net.Skins takes strokes off the low man, and it is the most dramatic handicap effect in the app — the player getting a shot on a hole where four skins have carried is holding the best ticket on the course. Battle Tees computes every player's course handicap from their index and the tees they actually played, then keeps gross and net side by side, live, on every phone — so the scratch sees their real number while everyone bets the one that decides the money. It is the difference between a group that bets and a group that talks about betting.

Battle Tees never touches the money. The app scores it, applies your handicaps, and shows exactly who owes whom at the end — one clean list, no arguing on the tailgate. You settle it in the parking lot, the way golfers always have.

Settling up

Your group, your point structure.Every group has its own house rules, and the app bends to them instead of the other way round. In Skins that means the dollar amount per hole, whether ties carry the pot forward or the skin simply dies, and — if you want it — a custom amount for every one of the 18 holes, with a running total so you can see exactly how much is on the course. Change any of it in setup before the round — the scoring, the standings and the settle math all follow automatically, and the numbers ride along to every phone in the group.

Each skin is collected from every other player. The Settle screen nets it all out pairwise — who pays whom, to the quarter — with no dollars-per-point math because the game is already in dollars.

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⚔️ Play Skins in Battle Tees — request beta access Battle Tees — thirteen golf games, one scorecard, settled before the parking lot