Golf Betting Games for Twosomes and Threesomes
Almost every golf betting format you'll find written up assumes four players. Wolf needs four. Best ball needs four. Six-Six-Six needs four.
But a huge share of actual rounds are twosomes and threesomes — the Tuesday evening nine, the guy you talked into leaving work early, the threesome the starter never filled. Those rounds deserve stakes too.
Here's what works when you're short a player.
Twosomes
Nassau (heads-up)
The default, and it's the default for good reason.
Three bets: front nine, back nine, total eighteen. Play it straight up if you're close in ability, or with strokes if you're not.
Why it works with two: the three-bet structure means the round never dies. Lose the front by four? The back is a fresh match. You're never walking the 15th tee with nothing to play for.
Add: automatic presses at two down. Declare them on the first tee so nobody has to ask.
Match play with junk
Best when one player is clearly better.
Standard hole-by-hole match play, plus a side pot of small fixed bets: birdies, sandies (up-and-down from a bunker), greenies (closest on a par 3), and barkies (par after hitting a tree).
Why it works with two: junk is skill-agnostic in a way the match isn't. A 20-handicap can lose the match 4&3 and still win the day on two sandies and a barkie.
Bisque match
The best-kept secret in heads-up golf.
Instead of receiving strokes on assigned holes, the weaker player gets a pool of strokes to spend wherever they choose — but they must declare before teeing off on the hole.
Why it works with two: it turns handicapping into a strategy game. Do you burn a stroke on the hard par 4, or save it for 18? And it makes the stronger player sweat, because they never know when it's coming.
Threesomes
Threesomes are the genuinely awkward number. Team formats don't divide. Someone's always the odd one out.
Nines (also called 5-3-1)
The standard threesome game.
Nine points are distributed on every hole based on finishing order:
| Result | Points |
|---|---|
| Outright low score | 5 / 3 / 1 |
| Two tie for low | 4 / 4 / 1 |
| Two tie for high | 5 / 2 / 2 |
| All three tie | 3 / 3 / 3 |
Settle at the end on the point differential — say, a dollar a point. Nobody's ever fully out of it, and the middle finishes still earn.
The catch: you need someone tracking it, because the tie rules are exactly complicated enough to forget by hole 12.
Two-against-one, rotating
Wolf's little brother.
Each hole, one player is alone against the other two, whose better ball plays as one score. Rotate the solo spot every hole, so across eighteen everyone gets six.
Because the solo player is at a structural disadvantage, they win double when they take the hole. That's the whole balance mechanism and it works well.
Skins with carryovers
Best for wildly mismatched threesomes.
Every hole is worth a skin; ties carry. Three players tie more often than four do, so carryovers stack fast — and a stacked skin is exactly the kind of pressure a threesome usually lacks.
Why it works with three: one good hole can pay for the day. That keeps the worst player in the round genuinely live all the way to 18.
The problem all of these share
Look at the list. Every format above resolves at the end of a hole. You hit your shot, they hit theirs, you walk to the green and then find out what it was worth.
With four players there's enough happening that the gaps fill themselves in — there's always someone in trouble, someone with a look at birdie. With two or three, the round has long dead stretches. Two pars and a bogey on a nothing par 4 is a hole where nobody felt anything.
What Flip It adds to a short group
Flip It doesn't replace any of the formats above — it runs on top of them, and it happens to fix exactly the thing small groups suffer from.
After any shot, any player can call a flip: a coin toss that, if it lands your way, forces that player to hit it again. You start with two, earn one for every birdie, and get a guaranteed no-coin-toss redo for an eagle.
The reason it suits twosomes and threesomes specifically:
- Team size doesn't matter. Flip It doesn't need even numbers or partners. A twosome is just two teams of one.
- The drama is per-shot, not per-hole. A dead par 4 becomes live the moment someone flips your approach.
- It's skill-neutral. A flip is a coin toss regardless of who holds it. No strokes to negotiate.
- It gives the trailing player a weapon. Down four with three to play, flips are how you manufacture a swing.
In a threesome, it also solves the odd-man-out problem without any bookkeeping: everyone can flip everyone. There's no team to be left out of.
Quick picks
| Situation | Play |
|---|---|
| Two players, evenly matched | Nassau + auto presses |
| Two players, big skill gap | Bisque match, or match play + junk |
| Three players, similar games | Nines |
| Three players, one ringer | Skins with carryovers |
| Any short group, dead round | Add Flip It on top |