Nobody applies handicap strokes correctly hole-by-hole, reliably, in their head. Real stroke allocation means knowing which specific holes each player gets a stroke on, based on stroke index — and doing that correctly for every player, on every hole, for the whole round, while also playing golf, is a lot to hold in your head. It usually gets simplified into something rougher, and the rougher version is where "wait, I don't think that's right" starts creeping into the back nine.
Side bets get forgotten or misremembered. Skins, presses, dots — these are exactly the bets people mean to track carefully and then don't, because they're also trying to hit a golf shot. A press called on 11 gets forgotten by 15. A skin that should've carried over because of a tie gets paid out wrong because nobody remembered the rule. By the time you're comparing notes at the turn, two guys already disagree about what happened on 7.
The settle-up conversation takes fifteen minutes. "Wait, who owes who" is a real tax on every group that plays more than one game at once. Reconstructing four separate bets across 18 holes from memory and a scorecard with some numbers circled is slow, and it's the exact moment tempers get short after a round that was otherwise fun.
There's no record afterward. For a one-off round that's fine. For a group playing the same games across a whole season, there's nothing to look back on — no standings, no history, no way to settle a dispute about who actually won more skins this year.