The four Banker arguments that stop a round.
Banker is simple until money is on it. Then somebody asks who banks the next hole, somebody else tries to press one guy and not the other, and a par 3 turns a $5 bet into something nobody can agree on.
Here are the four, what the sources say, where they genuinely split, and what our engine pays.
Who banks the next hole?
This is the one that actually derails rounds, because both camps are right and neither knows the other exists. It also changes the game materially: an earned bank hands the biggest exposure to whoever is playing best, while a fixed rotation spreads it evenly no matter what.
Whichever you use, agree it on the first tee. It is not a detail — it decides who is carrying three simultaneous bets on the hardest hole on the course.
Genuinely split. Two standards are both properly documented: a fixed rotation agreed before the round, or the bank being earned by whoever won the last hole.
Fixed rotation: Texas Golf Association — the player who tees off last banks, rotating each hole; Tampa Bay Downs describes the same. Earned bank: The Fried Egg — “the banker is always the person that holed out first with the lowest score on the previous hole,” with the longer made putt breaking a tie. The Left Rough agrees with The Fried Egg.
What our engine does: Fixed seat rotation — the banker on hole number h is players[(h−1) mod N], the TXGA standard. Nobody can gain or lose the bank by playing well.
Can the banker press just one player?
The asymmetry is the whole design. Each opponent picks their own stake and can double it on their own, which means the banker faces three separate bets at three separate amounts — and the only lever the banker has is one that applies to all of them at once.
Letting the banker pick a single target would turn a game of nerve into a game of picking on whoever is having a bad day.
No. Opponents press individually, but the banker presses everyone or nobody.
The Fried Egg: “the banker can only press everyone or no one.” TXGA: “if the Banker presses, they are doubling the bet against all three players regardless of whether those other players pressed.”
What our engine does: All or none, exactly as written. An opponent's press doubles only their own bet; the banker's re-press hits every pair on the hole.
Somebody pressed on a par 3.
This is the most expensive rule in the game and the one most often discovered retroactively, in a parking lot, by someone who owes $45 on a hole they thought was worth $5.
The composition is what gets people. Two multipliers stack: your press and the banker’s re-press. On a par 4 that’s ×4. On a par 3 it’s ×9.
A par-3 press multiplies by three, not two — and it has to be called while the ball is in the air.
The Left Rough: “To press on a par 3, the ball must be in the air and the press isn’t doubled… it’s tripled!” The Fried Egg and TXGA carry the same rule.
What our engine does: ×3 on par 3s, and it's toggleable. Because presses compose, an opponent press plus a banker re-press on a par 3 is ×9 — a $5 bet becomes $45.
The banker ties one player, beats another, loses to the third.
Worth stating plainly because the intuition is that a hole has one winner. It doesn’t. With four players the banker is in three separate matches, and the hole’s outcome is three separate answers.
If B bet $10, C bet $15 and D bet $5, and the banker beats B and D but loses to C: banker collects $10 and $5, pays out $15, and finishes the hole exactly even.
All three settle independently. Collect from the ones you beat, pay the ones who beat you, and the tie is a push. Carryovers are optional and not standard.
Per-pair structure per The Fried Egg and The Left Rough. On ties, The Left Rough: “Carryovers from tied holes are optional.”
What our engine does: Per-pair settlement with pushes on ties, and no carryover. Zero-sum by construction — a banker can finish a hole up on one bet, down on another and level on a third.
Why you should believe any of this
We wrote the rules down before we wrote the engine. Every ruling above traces to a named source, and where the sources genuinely disagree — argument 1 — the page says so instead of picking a side and calling it the rule.
Then we wrote assertions against that sheet and made the engine pass them. The same suite covers Vegas and Banker, and it runs on every push.
Run it yourself:
node scripts/verify-vegas-banker.mjs→ 60 passed, 0 failed (as of August 2026)That suite covers Vegas too — the count is for both games together.
A money game runs on trust, and trust in a scorer is unusual: you can’t check its work mid-round, and by the time you’d notice it was wrong, everyone has already paid up and gone home. So the rules are public and the tests are yours to run.
Score your next Banker round on it.
Free, no account, no install. Per-hole bets, presses, the par-3 triple and the settle-up are all handled — and the triple toggles off if your group doesn’t play it.
Open the scorer →Also worth a read: the four Vegas arguments →