BL Cutthroat

Bogey Logger's house format for groups where everyone plays for themselves. Win a hole outright or don't win it at all — a tie spoils the hole for everybody.

How it works

Every player for themselves, any group size. On each hole, the sole lowest score wins that hole. If two or more players tie for the low score, nobody wins it — the hole is spoiled. Whoever wins the most holes takes the round.

The tie-spoils rule is what makes it cutthroat: matching the leader's score is worth as much as winning the hole yourself, because you've robbed them of it. Sitting on a two-hole lead? Everyone else at the table is now playing to spoil, not to win. It turns a casual round into 18 small knife fights.

Hole 7:  Aaron 4 · Blake 4 · Cam 5
Aaron and Blake tie the low → hole spoiled, no winner.
Cam is quietly thrilled.

Gross or net

Play it gross (raw strokes, no handicaps) or net, where handicap strokes are applied hole by hole using each player's course handicap and the scorecard's stroke index. Net keeps mixed-handicap groups honest — and it comes with a choice:

• Full handicap (default) — everyone takes all of their course-handicap strokes against the course, the way skins games usually run. A 10-handicap gets a stroke on stroke-index holes 1–10.
• Off the low player — the group's lowest handicap plays at scratch and everyone else takes only the difference, classic match-play style. Handicaps of 8, 10 and 15 play as 0, 2 and 7.

Both are fair. What changes is which holes the strokes land on — and that can flip a hole from won outright to tied-and-spoiled, which in this format is the whole game.

When to pick it

Three or five players and nobody wants teams? Cutthroat. A foursome that finds match play too polite? Cutthroat. It also pairs beautifully with skins, since both reward winning holes outright.