Three Club Monte is a golf format that cuts your bag down to three clubs for the round. You pick the three before you start and play all 18 with them. The lowest total wins the same as any other stroke play round.
Most groups let you keep the putter on top of the chosen three, which makes all three picks full-swing clubs. The club decision is the juice of the format, and there’s a trick to making your choices.
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IF YOU LIKE A HARDER ROUND
Three more formats that put the pressure somewhere unfamiliar:
- Worst Ball — you play your worse ball on every shot, including the putts
- Snake — the three-putt tax that sticks to whoever three-putted last
- Murphys — a side bet that only pays when you call the chip before you hit it
How Three Club Monte Works
You choose three clubs out of your bag, and those three are what you play the round with. Nothing else changes. Every stroke counts, and the lowest score at the end wins.
What you need is three clubs and a putter. There’s not much more to it. It runs the same as an individual game or a team event, in a threesome or a foursome.
The skill the round leans on is distance control and manipulation, because you’ll spend the round asking one club to cover three or four different numbers. Our drills for tightening up your distance control work that same problem on the range, and an afternoon of this will show you things you can do with a single club that you didn’t know were possible.
Does the Putter Count as One of Your Three?
Most groups don’t count it. You keep the putter and pick three other clubs. That’s the version clubs run when they put a Three Club Challenge on the calendar.
The reason to leave it out of the count is that the putter isn’t a distance decision. Counting it turns the day into a putting-with-an-iron exercise, which adds strokes without adding any of the shot-making the format exists to produce.
How to Pick Your Three Clubs
The usual approach starts with a driver and works down through your yardage gaps. Start with the par 3s instead. The long par 4s look like the problem, but they aren’t the holes where a missing club actually costs you.
On a par 4 or a par 5 you advance the ball in stages. Coming up 30 yards short with your longest club just means you hit another shot you were going to hit anyway. A par 3 has no stage to advance through. Either one of your three carries the green or you’re chipping for par before you’ve hit a second full shot, and a par 72 gives you four par 3s.
Start With the Longest Par 3
Look up the scorecard for the course you’re playing and find the longest par 3. One of your three has to cover that number in the air off a normal swing. That club is your first pick, and it’s usually longer than people reach for.
If the longest par 3 plays 195, a hybrid or a 5 iron is the pick. A 7 iron leaves you short of that green on most swings, and there’s no technique an average golfer can pull off to make up the difference.
CHECK THE CARD FIRST
Your longest club is set by the longest par 3, not by the longest hole. That par 3 yardage is the one distance on the course you can’t break into two shots.
Fill the Middle Next
The second pick is the club you’d hit into greens most often in a normal round, which lands on a 7 or an 8 iron for a lot of players. It ends up doing more work than either of the others.
It’s your tee shot on the short par 4s, your layup on the par 5s, and your bump and run into a front pin. A three-club round is mostly partial swings, so it helps to bring a repeatable method for the knockdown shot rather than guessing at how far back to take it each time.
Wedge or No Wedge
The third pick is where the argument usually lands. A wedge gives you the greenside shots and the 80 yard approach, and it’s the club that keeps a bad hole from turning into a disaster.
THE BUNKER GAP
You can’t fake your way out of a greenside bunker. Choking down and opening the face handles most trouble, but a steep bunker face needs loft the club either has or it doesn’t.
Whether to Take the Driver
The driver usually goes in first, and it earns that spot less often than people think. Extra distance off the tee only turns into strokes if the next club can reach the green, and with three clubs it often can’t.
The driver costs you one of the other two. Take it and you’re giving up either the long club that covers your par 3s or the wedge that covers your greens, and both of those come up more often than 14 tee shots do.
A hybrid, an 8 iron and a sand wedge covers a standard course for most players, with the putter free on top. Swap the hybrid for the driver if the course is short and flat, and expect the par 3s to be the holes you regret it on.
Running It With a Group
It scales up without much effort. Clubs run it as a formal Three Club Challenge, and it works just as well as a one-off in a regular foursome. For the next time out, our rundown of golf games for 4 players covers 50+ foursome formats for you to choose from.
Scoring and Handicaps
Full handicaps are the simple call here. Everyone is under the same restriction, so net stroke play off full course handicaps keeps the field honest.
Stableford is the better choice for a bigger field. Three clubs produces the occasional big number even from good players, and running a stableford round puts a floor under it instead of letting one hole wreck a card.
You’ll also want each player’s three clubs written down where the group can see them, since that’s what any dispute later in the round comes back to.
Other Versions Worth Running
- Five clubs. The gentler entry point for a club event, since it lets people keep a driver and a wedge and still feel the squeeze.
- One club. The same idea taken as far as it goes, one club for all 18 including the putts.
- Three-club scramble. Each player picks their own three and the team plays a scramble. Between four bags there’s usually a club that suits the shot, which makes this the version to run at a charity outing where nobody wants to shoot 105.
- Putter counts. Three clubs total, putts included. Keep this one for a solo round rather than a group event.
One Range Session Before You Play
Take the three clubs you’re leaning toward to the range and hit each one three ways, at a full swing, at three-quarters, and choked down to the bottom of the grip.
That gives you nine distances instead of three. Write the numbers on your phone and you’ll cover a golf course a lot better than three clubs has any right to.
The other half of it is knowing what you’ve actually got left out there rather than what it looks like. A GPS watch earns its place on a day like this more than on a normal round, because the choice between a full 8 and a choked 7 comes down to a handful of yards.
Three clubs, a putter and a few guys looking for something different makes for a fun afternoon. Give it a go, and let us know what you think.
