Let It Ride is a points-based golf betting game where every hole ends with the same decision: bank the points you just earned, or let them ride onto the next hole.
A net bogey pays 5 points, a par 15, a birdie 30, and an eagle 60. Bank them and they’re yours for the rest of the round. Let them ride and the next hole pays double, then double again, for as long as your nerve holds out.
Make a net double bogey while you’re riding and every riding point goes to zero.
Game Setup
Let It Ride works with 2, 3, or 4 players, everyone playing their own ball for their own score. There are no teams and no partners to sort out. A twosome can run it, and so can a foursome when nobody wants to be paired up.
Four things to agree on:
- Handicap allowance: 100% of course handicap, applied hole by hole off the stroke index. Full strokes are the standard here, and the game leans on them harder than most.
- Point value: what a point is worth in terms of dollars, settled at the end on the difference in banked totals. If you’re looking to keep bets light, understand that this game tends to get into the 1,000+ points at times. It all depends on how long your group lets it ride and keeps playing well.
- Declaring: you call bank or ride on the green, before the group leaves for the next tee.
- The last hole: anything still riding after 18 gets banked, since there’s no hole left to ride into.
Every point runs through your net score. Our free golf handicap calculator gives you each player’s course handicap for the tees you’re actually playing.
How Let It Ride Scoring Works
The scoring is a points ladder keyed to your net score, in the same family as Stableford scoring, but with much bigger gaps between the rungs and nothing at all below bogey.
The Point Table
| Net score | Points |
|---|---|
| Eagle | 60 |
| Birdie | 30 |
| Par | 15 |
| Bogey | 5 |
| Double bogey or worse | 0 |
Read the gaps rather than the numbers. A birdie is worth six bogeys and a par is worth three. The table pays for good scores, but a steady bogey golfer who keeps letting it ride will land a long way ahead of a streaky par golfer by the 18th green.
The Hole That Pays Nothing
A net double bogey is the cliff. It scores nothing on its own, and if you had points riding, it takes all of them.
That one rule does most of the work in this game. Penalty strokes are the usual culprit, since a single drop turns a routine net bogey into the hole that wipes your running stack.
Our guide to golf penalties lays out the drop options and stroke counts for every stripe and stake. Worth knowing before you are standing over one with 400 points on the line. Golf Digest’s four shots that keep doubles off your card is the practical solution to this problem.
Bank It or Let It Ride
Riding doesn’t double the points you’re holding. It doubles the table for the next hole.
Ride once and a bogey is worth 10 instead of 5, a par 30, a birdie 60. Ride again and it’s 20, 60, and 120. Your existing pile just sits there at risk while the ceiling above it keeps lifting.
A run of straight net pars looks like this:
| Hole in the run | Multiplier | A net par pays | Riding total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 1x | 15 | 15 |
| 2nd | 2x | 30 | 45 |
| 3rd | 4x | 60 | 105 |
| 4th | 8x | 120 | 225 |
| 5th | 16x | 240 | 465 |
| 6th | 32x | 480 | 945 |
Look at the sixth line. That one hole pays 480 points, and everything banked up over the previous five adds to 465. Every hole in a run is worth more than the entire run before it. That’s just what doubling does, and it decides how the game should be played.
The doubling will be familiar if you’ve played Hammer, where either side can throw the hammer to double the bet mid-hole and either side can refuse and concede. Let It Ride hands the offer and the refusal to the same player.
Variations Worth Knowing
- Eagle at 50, albatross at 100: some groups drop the eagle to 50 points and add a 100-point line for a double eagle. It changes almost nothing in reality but gives the par-5 hero something to chase.
- The double-par+ poison pill: a net double par, meaning a 6+ on a par 3, an 8+ on a par 4, or a 10+ on a par 5, wipes your banked points along with everything riding. It turns one lost ball into a lost round. Agree on it in advance rather than after somebody makes a 9.
- Capped doubling: the multiplier stops climbing after four or five rides. This is the variation we’d actually recommend, for reasons covered at the end.
- Bank at the turn: everything cashes automatically after the 9th. It splits the round into two shorter games and keeps a hot front nine from settling the day.
- Par to restart: after banking, you can’t open a new run until you make a net par. Bogeys still score, they just don’t start a fresh ride.
With no teams to balance, the player count barely changes how it plays. A twosome gets the same game as a foursome with fewer people to beat. That puts it on the short list of golf games for 2 players that need no format change.
Other Golf Games You’ll Love
Skins is the other great carryover game. A halved hole rolls the pot forward giving you the rising stakes without any of the decisions.
18 Chips hands each player a stack of chips to wager hole by hole against one opponent. You set your own exposure on every tee.
Quota runs on the same points-for-net-score idea but gives every player a target based on their handicap.
Our golf betting games collection sorts 30+ money formats by group size and stake, and golf games for 4 players covers the ones built for a full group.
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