Your handicap isn’t strokes. It’s the number.
Quota is the one format where you never take a stroke on a hole. You play every hole gross, you earn points for what you make, and your handicap shows up in exactly one place: the total you have to reach.
Scratch chases 36. A 9-handicap chases 27. Whoever finishes furthest above their own number wins. That’s the whole game — and it is not Stableford, however much it looks like it.
36 − handicap
Over eighteen holes. Halved and rounded for a nine.
| Eagle or better | 8 |
| Birdie | 4 |
| Par | 2 |
| Bogey | 1 |
| Double or worse | 0 |
Note the shape of that table: every step up is a doubling. That is the entire character of the game.
Isn't this just Stableford?
The confusion is fair, because the shape is the same: count points, most wins. But Stableford pays a birdie 3 and an eagle 4, where quota pays 4 and 8. Doubling versus adding one.
Two cards, both scratch, so both chasing 36:
| Quota | Stableford | |
| Al — 3 eagles, 15 pars | 54 | 42 |
| Bo — 7 birdies, 11 pars | 50 | 43 |
| Winner | Al | Bo |
Same two rounds, opposite results. Al’s three eagles are worth 24 points in quota and 12 in Stableford. Quota pays you to go at it; Stableford pays you to keep making pars.
There’s a second difference in this app worth knowing: quota is scored off gross, Stableford off net. In quota the handicap is already spent on your target, so taking strokes as well would be counting it twice.
No. Same idea, different table — and the tables pick different winners. Quota doubles for birdies and eagles; Stableford doesn't.
We're playing straight up. What's my quota?
This one catches people out, and it’s worth being blunt about the reasoning. In most formats “straight up” means you stop taking strokes on holes. Quota never gave you strokes on holes in the first place — it gave you a smaller number to chase.
So if a straight-up round left a 20-handicap chasing 16 while everyone else chased 36, it wouldn’t be a gross round at all. It would be a handicap round with the handicap moved somewhere less visible. Straight up, everyone chases 36 and the low ball wins.
Scratch vs a 20-handicap who makes eighteen bogeys
| Quotas | Result | |
| Handicaps on | 36 / 16 | the 20 is +2 and wins |
| Straight up | 36 / 36 | the 20 is −18 and loses |
36. Everybody's is 36 — that's what straight up means in a format where the handicap is the target rather than strokes on the card.
What's my quota for nine holes?
Halving an odd handicap leaves you half a point, and half a point decides a quota game about as often as anything does. The target rounds:
| Handicap | Nine | Eighteen |
| 0 | 18 | 36 |
| 9 | 14 | 27 |
| 18 | 9 | 18 |
Half of it, rounded — so a 9-handicap chases 14, not 13½. Quota deals in whole points.
I made a nine on the par 5. How far does that set me back?
That asymmetry is why quota rewards going for it. A birdie is worth double a par; the double bogey that comes from trying is worth the same as the triple, the quadruple, and walking in. Once a hole is gone it can’t get any more gone.
Which is the practical advice the format gives you: if you’re short of your number with three to play, take on the pin. The downside is capped and the upside doubles.
It doesn't set you back at all — it just earns nothing. The table stops at zero, so a blow-up costs you the points you'd have banked, never points you already had.
Who gets paid — just the winner?
Three men in at $10, one clear winner:
| Winner takes all | Split | |
| Al — 1st | +$20 | +$15 |
| Bo — 2nd | −$10 | −$5 |
| Cy — 3rd | −$10 | −$10 |
The split doesn’t make second place profitable — it just softens it. That’s usually the right call in a bigger group, where finishing second out of eight is a genuinely good round.
Your choice. Winner takes the pot, or first and second split it roughly 83/17.
Why this page took a day longer than it should have
Every number above came out of running the scoring engine, which is how the other pages here are written too. On this one it stopped being a formality.
We couldn’t write the page, because the app couldn’t answer what a birdie was worth. Quota is implemented in three places, and two of them used the doubling table above while the third used Stableford’s. Trips and home rounds therefore crowned different winners on identical golf — across 800 randomised rounds, the wrong man was paid in 30 of them. Two quieter versions of the same thing went with it: the nine-hole target rounded differently in different places, and a straight-up round still handed high handicaps a smaller number to chase.
All three are fixed, and each is now pinned by a test that was checked to fail without the fix. We publish this because a money game runs on trust, and the only trustworthy version of “our math is right” is one where you can see what we got wrong and when.
Scenarios re-run and confirmed September 2026.
Or stop arguing and let it do the math.
Free, no account, no install. It sets everyone’s number, counts the points hole by hole, and shows how far above or below it you are as you play.
Open the scorer →Also worth a read: Skins → · 6-6-6 → · Wolf → · Vegas → · Banker →