Call Your Shot is a golf prediction game for two players, built on one decision you make before every tee shot. You pick a target score for the hole, your opponent picks theirs, and you both reveal at the same time.
Hit your number or better and you bank points, one for a bogey call up to eight for an eagle. Miss it and your opponent banks points instead.
Both calls are live on every hole and you can both come away with points from it. The round becomes a running total rather than a hole-by-hole fight, and you can lose it without your opponent doing anything special, just by missing your own calls.
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GAMES WHERE YOU COMMIT BEFORE YOU SWING
Three more formats that ask you to name your price up front:
- 18 Chips — eighteen numbered chips, one committed in secret on every hole
- Bisque — your handicap strokes, spent on the holes you pick rather than the ones the card assigns
- Let It Ride — bank the points you have or push them onto the next hole at double
Setting Up a Round of Call Your Shot
What you Need
You need two players and a scorecard, that’s it.
Most golf games for 2 players settle hole by hole. This one runs on a total that keeps building all day. What it requires is knowing how to balance knowing your game with your ego. Golfers who spend time on scored practice games and short-game drills know which holes they can par and which ones they can’t, and that read is worth more here than twenty extra yards off the tee. A laser rangefinder pays for itself here too, since calling par off a guessed yardage is how you end up funding your opponent.
Making the Calls
On every hole, each player picks one of four calls, either bogey, par, birdie or eagle+. You’re naming the score you intend to make.
Both calls go down before either player tees off, and both get revealed together. That needs a card with room for a call and a running total on every hole, which is what our printable game scorecards are built for.
Once a call is revealed, it’s locked. You play the hole out and the card settles the rest.
Gross, Net, and What a Point Is Worth
Two golfers of similar ability can play straight up with gross scores. If there’s a real gap between your skill levels, switch to net and measure each call against the net score on the hole rather than the raw one.
Run both players through our golf handicap calculator to get a course handicap each, and if either number looks wrong, how a golf handicap is calculated shows the arithmetic behind it.
A dollar value per point is the stake. A quarter a point keeps an 18-hole round in beer money. A dollar a point means two missed birdie calls cost you four dollars on their own. That runs steeper per hole than most golf betting games ever get.
If both players finish on the same total, the player who made more successful calls takes the win. If you manage to come out level on both counts, then it ends in a draw.
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How to Play Call Your Shot
Each call is scored on its own. Yours doesn’t cancel your opponent’s out, and you can both walk off a hole with points.
| Call | You need | You make it | You miss it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bogey | Bogey or better | +1 | Opponent +1 |
| Par | Par or better | +2 | Opponent +1 |
| Birdie | Birdie or better | +4 | Opponent +2 |
| Eagle | Eagle or better | +8 | Opponent +4 |
Every call is the target or better. Call par and make birdie and you’ve made your call. Call bogey and make eagle and you’ve made that one too, though you left seven points on the table doing it. Nobody is punished for playing better than they predicted.
A missed call pays your opponent whatever sits in the right-hand column, whether or not they made their own call. Two misses on the same hole means you both collect from each other.
WHERE THE BIG CALLS GO
Birdie calls belong on the par 5s and the short par 4s. On a long par 3, a birdie call means you’ll likely need to chip in or hole a putt from distance.
Take a hole where you call birdie and your opponent calls par. You both make par. Your call fails, and they collect 2 points for your miss on top of the 2 they earned making their own. The hole ends 0 to 4.
Turn it around. You call par and make par for 2, they call birdie and make birdie for 4. Nobody missed, no penalty points move, and the hole ends 2 to 4.
A hole you don’t finish is a missed call. Pick up, concede after a lost ball, or take a drop you never hole out from, and the call fails.
Which Call Is Actually Worth Making
Look at the two right-hand columns again. The bogey call is the only one that pays exactly what it costs. A point for making it, a point away when you don’t, so it only puts you ahead if you beat bogey more than half the time you use it.
Every other call is priced at two to one. Par pays 2 and costs 1. Birdie pays 4 and costs 2. Eagle pays 8 and costs 4. All three only have to come off one time in three to be worth making.
First-time players usually read that backwards. Bogey feels like the safe call and it’s the poorest value on the card. The par call carries the round for anyone who makes par with any regularity at all.
Landing those calls comes down to getting up and down more often than not, and this 9-iron chip that runs off a putting stroke is about as repeatable as anything around a green.
Eagle sits at the other end. Breaking even on it means holing out for eagle a third of the times you call it. Nobody does that. The eagle call isn’t a strategy, it’s a way to close a gap late when nothing else covers the distance. Birdie belongs in the same bracket unless you make a decent share of them.
Every scorecard.
Built for every format.
- Download them. Print them. Take them to the course.
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★Card generator included. Add your course’s yardages, pars, and handicaps.
Call Your Shot Variations
The following are add-ons and not part of the base game. Each changes how the calls behave. Run them one at a time rather than stacking them.
Exact Call
Drop the “or better” rule and a call has to land on the number. Call birdie, make eagle, and it counts as a miss.
It creates far more chaos, along with incentives you probably don’t want, like laying up to protect an exact par call. Worth a nine-hole trial before a full round.
Challenge
Once both calls are revealed, either player can challenge the other’s. A challenge raises the reward and the penalty on that call together.
A challenged birdie call pays 6 instead of 4 and costs 3 instead of 2 when it misses. The challenger gets no say in whether the call comes off. A challenge is a straight opinion on whether your opponent can back up what they just claimed they could do.
CALLING THEIR BLUFF
Challenge the call your opponent has already missed once. Players get attached to a number and go back to it, and the repeated attempt is the opportunity that often pays you more times than not.
Restricted Calls
Cap how many holes in a row a player can make the same call. Two bogey calls back to back is the usual limit.
The standard scoring already leans against camping on bogey. This one suits groups who want the variety forced rather than encouraged.
More Aggressive Point Scale
Steepen the payouts to push both players up the board. Bogey stays at 1 and 1, par goes to 3 and 1, birdie to 6 and 3, and eagle to 10 and 5.
Only the par call gets a better ratio. It moves from paying double a miss to paying triple, while birdie and eagle stay at two to one. The steeper scale rewards the middle of the board rather than the top, and it makes par calls more attractive.
What Your First Round Will Look Like
Expect the first nine to be scrappy. You’ll both over-call, because four points for a birdie looks like free money right up until you’re handing over all those points.
The other thing that surprises people is how quickly a lead can disappear. If you both call birdie and only one of you delivers, that’s a six-point swing on a single hole. Nobody is safe walking to the 18th tee, and that’s most of the reason to play it.
Screenshot the reference card above and keep it on your phone for the first round, because the payouts are what everyone forgets. After that it comes down to how honest you are about your own game.
Thanks for stopping by, and good luck out there.
