“We’ll play skins” means two different bets.
Skins isn’t really a format — it’s a side bet that rides on top of whatever you’re already playing. Which is fine, until you notice there are two common ways to run it, and one of them caps what you can lose while the other doesn’t.
Nobody agrees on the tee which one they meant. Here are both, with the actual numbers — plus the third question that changes them again: does a skin belong to the man who won it, or to his team?
The pot
Every man antes the same amount — individually, teams or not. At the end, the pot is divided by the number of skins actually won.
Most you can lose: your ante.
Per hole
Each hole is worth a set amount. Win it outright and every other player pays you that amount.
Most you can lose: as many holes as there are.
How much is one skin worth?
This is the part that catches people. In a pot, a skin has no fixed value: four men in for $5 makes a $20 pot, and if only one skin is won all day it is worth the whole $20. If nine are won they’re worth about $2.22 each.
Two identical rounds, same $5 ante, different results:
$5 each · $20 pot · one skin won all day, by a pair playing as a unit
| Winning pair | took the only skin | +$5 each |
| Other pair | lost their ante | −$5 each |
$5 each · $20 pot · two men win, sweeping 9 carried skins between them
| Al | 5 skins | +$0.56 |
| Bo | partner | +$0.55 |
| Cy | 4 skins | −$0.55 |
| Dee | partner | −$0.56 |
Same pot, same ante, and the second round barely moves a dollar — because the winnings got spread across nine skins instead of concentrated in one.
In the pot version you don't know until the round is over — it's the pot divided by however many skins ended up being won. In the per-hole version it's whatever you set, every time.
What do carryovers actually do?
The distinction matters and it’s the opposite of most people’s intuition.
In a pot, the money is already on the table. Carryovers don’t create more of it; they change how few hands it ends up in. A round where everyone halves the first fourteen and one man birdies the fifteenth is a round where one player takes the lot.
Per hole, carryovers really do inflate the bet: a hole carrying four skins is collected from every other player, four times over. This is how a friendly $5 game turns into a $60 hole on the 17th, and it is worth agreeing on before you tee off rather than after.
A tied hole rolls its skin onto the next one. That doesn't add money to a pot — it concentrates the same pot into fewer, bigger skins. In the per-hole version it genuinely does add money.
Nobody won a skin. Who pays?
Verified rather than assumed: a round where all eighteen holes are halved settles at exactly zero for everyone. The antes are held, not collected.
$5 each, all 18 holes halved
| Everyone | antes returned | $0.00 |
Nobody. Ties push, and if no skin is ever won the antes are simply handed back — no money moves.
We're playing as teams. Does a skin belong to the man or to his side?
You still pay in individually. Being on a team never changes the ante. Four men at $5 is a $20 pot whether they’re playing as two pairs or as four singles — the pot is built per man, always.
What the team changes is the otherend: who wins a skin, and how it divides. The side competes on its best ball, the side wins the skin, and whatever that skin turns out to be worth is split evenly between the two of you — so a partner who made a seven on the hole still shares in it, because his side won it.
The two settings pay very differently. Same hole, same $20 pot, one man alone at the low score with a partner who wasn’t close:
Team skins — the side wins it, the side splits it
| Al — made the low score | +$5 |
| Bo — his partner | +$5 |
| Cy | −$5 |
| Dee | −$5 |
Every ball for itself — the low man keeps the lot
| Al | +$15 |
| Bo | −$5 |
| Cy | −$5 |
| Dee | −$5 |
Bo played identical golf in both rounds and finished $10 apart. That is the single biggest swing on this page, and it comes from a setting rather than from anybody’s ball, so it is worth saying out loud on the first tee.
Team skins turn on wherever the sides are fixed for the round — best ball, scramble, Nassau and Vegas — and the app also handles the awkward case where the sides change every hole, as in C.O.D. or Split Sixes: there it works out which side actually won each hole and splits that skin accordingly.
To his side, by default. The team wins the skin, and that skin's money is divided evenly among the players on that team. One setting flips it so the low man keeps the whole thing.
Does a hole count if somebody didn't finish it?
Everyone has played the hole where a man walks in with a triple and doesn’t bother writing it down. If that hole counted, the next-lowest score would win a skin nobody actually competed for.
No. A hole only counts once every competing unit has a score on it — which keeps a picked-up ball from silently handing somebody a skin.
Can we run skins during a match, or a scramble?
A skins pot runs happily during a team match, a 6-6-6, or a scramble. On holes where a pair plays one ball, that ball is the pair’s skin score — the same ball the match itself is being played with, so the two can never disagree about what was shot.
This is the ordinary way groups play it: a match or a format for the main event, skins running underneath for the whole field.
Yes — that's what makes it a side bet rather than a format. It settles alongside whatever you're playing, not instead of it.
Where these numbers came from
Every figure above was produced by running the scoring engine on the scenario described and reading what it paid — not by describing what we assumed it did.
That is not a slogan; it is the only reason this page is right. The first run of these scenarios was configured with the wrong key name, and the engine correctly paid out nothing. Had we written the page from what we believed instead of from what it printed, we’d have published a page saying skins pays zero — confidently, and in our own voice.
Scenarios re-run and confirmed September 2026.
Or stop arguing and let it do the math.
Free, no account, no install. Turn skins on next to whatever you’re playing, and the carryovers, the splits and the settle-up are handled to the cent.
Open the scorer →