Tour Skins: The Cascading Pot Explained

Updated 25 August 2026 · 6 min read

Most betting formats treat the 3rd like the 17th. Tour Skins doesn’t, and it isn’t close.

The 18th hole is worth more than the first six put together. More than half the pot sits in the last six holes. You can play the front nine like a man who has never held a club and still walk off with most of the money.

The ladder

Every hole belongs to one of four bands, and a hole in the top band is worth eight times a hole in the bottom one.

That last hole has a name. The televised Skins Game called it the super skin — a single hole worth a fifth of the purse, sitting at the end of a ladder that had been climbing all afternoon. The shares above are that event’s, scaled to whatever your group puts in.

That’s the whole scoring system. No negotiation, no doubling, no side bets — the stakes climb on their own and the pressure arrives exactly when you are most tired.

Where the money actually is

A third of the round holds more than half the money, and one hole holds a fifth of it. That is the format’s entire personality, and it is why nobody in a Tour Skins group has ever gone quiet after a bad start.

Turning percentages into money

Whatever your group puts in, the shares never move. Four players putting in $50 each makes a $200 pot, and $200 is the natural place to start because the pot divides into two hundred parts worth a dollar apiece: five for an opening hole, ten in the middle, fourteen down the stretch and forty on the last.

Contributions that give whole dollars

Because the smallest band is 2.5% and the awkward one is 7%, whole-dollar holes need a contribution that is a multiple of $50 per player. Fifty is the first, and it is the one most groups will want:

Anything in between still works — it just leaves you settling cents, which nobody has ever enjoyed doing in a carpark.

How you win a hole

Four players, individually — 1 v 1 v 1 v 1. No teams.

Eighteen holes, starting at the 1st. There is no nine-hole Tour Skins and no shotgun start, and that is deliberate rather than an omission: a ladder that puts a fifth of the pot on the last hole only means anything if the holes before it are played in order.

The outright lowest score wins the hole and its entire current value. Not lowest unique, not best two of four — lowest, on your own.

That’s it. Tour Skins has no Nearest skins, no Greenies, no Ferrets, no Sandies, no Birdie Trains. No side bets to adjudicate and no arguing about whether a bunker was inside fifty metres. If Classic Skins is a folk tradition with twenty-five appendices, Tour Skins is a stopwatch.

Ties and carries

Tie for the lowest score and nobody takes the hole. Its full value carries to the next hole, and here is the detail that makes the format: all four players remain eligible for the carried value.

Nobody is knocked out by tying. A player who has tied every hole to the 17th is still live for everything sitting on the 18th.

Carries stack backwards through consecutive tied holes, and because the base values are climbing anyway, a run late in the round gets ugly fast.

The round everyone remembers

Thirty-four per cent of the entire pot — decided by one hole, with all four players still eligible. On a $200 pot that is $68 on a single green. Scale it up and a group playing $200 a head has $272 riding on one putt.

What happens if the 18th ties

Decide this before you tee off, because the ladder does not answer it for you: there is no nineteenth hole for the value to carry to.

The straightforward answer is that the money is forfeited. Whatever is still on the table when the last putt drops stays there, and nobody collects it. That is stricter than the televised original, which generally sent the tied players back out to sudden death, but it suits a Saturday morning — nobody is walking back to the first tee in fading light to settle a third of a pot.

Forfeiting also changes how the last hole is played, which is the part worth thinking about. If a big carry has landed on the 18th, a tie is worth nothing to anyone. The player who can only halve it has no reason to protect a score, and everybody has a reason to take on the flag. A format that already puts its biggest number on the last green then removes any incentive to play it safe there.

If your group would rather settle it properly, a sudden-death playoff is the alternative — first to win a hole outright takes whatever was left. Agree which on the first tee, not on the 18th green with a third of the pot in the air.

Who it suits

A fourball, exactly. This is the one format that wants a specific number. Four players, no teams, no substitutions.

Groups who want a clean game. One question per hole and nothing to adjudicate. Good for a corporate day, a group that does not play together often, or anyone who has ever spent the walk to the 4th tee explaining what a Quinella is.

Anyone whose group fades after the turn. Weighting the back nine this heavily means nobody is out of it walking to the 10th, and the last hour is the one that matters.

How SkinsMate handles it

Tour Skins is easy to score and annoying to track, because the number that matters changes every hole, and again every time somebody ties.

SkinsMate holds the ladder, adds any carried holes to the one in front of you, and shows what is actually on the table before you play it — so you never work out what the 15th is worth after two halved holes while standing on the tee. The shares are the same whether the round is played for a pot or for points: the 18th is worth eight times an opening hole either way.

Settle it before the first beer.