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Walking into your first betting round can feel like everyone else is speaking a different language. None of it is actually complicated once you hear it explained plainly — here's the vocabulary you're most likely to hear in your first few rounds.
Three separate match-play bets folded into one round: one bet on the front nine, one on the back nine, and one on the full 18. Scored hole by hole — whoever wins more holes on the front wins that bet, independent of what happens on the back. This is why you'll hear someone say they're "2 up" or "down 1" mid-round.
🔱Full rules for NassauA new bet started mid-match, usually when someone's down by a couple of holes. Instead of accepting they've lost the front-nine bet, a player (or the group) can "press," starting a fresh bet from that hole forward — a way back in without waiting for the next segment.
A rotating-partnership format: on each hole, one player is designated the "wolf" and gets to choose a partner for that hole after watching the other players tee off — or go it alone against everyone else for a bigger payout. Reshuffles every single hole.
🐺Full rules for WolfGross is simply the number of strokes you actually took — no adjustment. Net is your gross score minus the handicap strokes you're entitled to on that hole (a 6 on a hole where you get a stroke becomes a net 5). Net is usually what decides betting formats, since it lets players of different skill levels compete on roughly even footing.
🧮Full rules for Low NetSometimes called handicap index on the scorecard — each hole on the course is ranked 1 through 18 by difficulty. Your handicap allowance determines how many of those holes you get a stroke on: a 9-handicap gets a stroke on the nine hardest holes (stroke index 1 through 9). Past a handicap of 18, players start getting a second stroke on the hardest holes.
How many strokes a player's handicap actually translates to for a given format and hole layout — determined by stroke index. This is the mechanical heart of fair betting golf, and exactly the part that's easy to get subtly wrong doing it by hand.
Each hole is worth a "skin," awarded to whoever has the outright lowest score on that hole. If two or more players tie for low score, nobody wins the skin that hole — instead it carries over, adding its value onto the next hole.
🪙Full rules for SkinsWhat happens to a skin (or other per-hole bet) when the hole ties and nobody wins it outright — its value rolls forward onto the next hole, which can make a single hole suddenly worth two or three skins' worth of money if there have been a couple of ties in a row.
Simple bonus bets layered on top of everything else — score a birdie (one under par) or an eagle (two under) and you collect a small fixed amount from everyone else in the game, regardless of how the main bet is going.
🔴Full rules for DotsShorthand for anyone who's currently in a winning position across whatever's being bet — up money on the nassau, holding skins, ahead on points. Less a formal term than a phrase that gets shouted (half-jokingly) on the back nine when someone's had a good run of holes.