My biggest thing is that if you want to be at least in the realm of semi-accuracy, you should be playing your fourth from there, not 3rd. Whatever I guess, nitting over cheating wrong is kind of silly anyway.

Not to turn this into "ways people cheat" but my cousin is the worst.

If he has a 25 foot putt that burns the edge and doesn't fall? He counts it as in because "he deserves" to have made it because it was soooooo close. Shot out of bounds? Not only does he play it like a lateral hazard, he drops in the fairway about even with where it would have landed, plus a couple feet or so. Mulligans are freely taken.

And all of that is fine, because if he wants to keep score some bizzaro-world style, go for it. But then, at the end of the day, he'll add up the scores and then tell you "I beat you by 4 strokes!"

No. No you didn't. You shot a 123 but recorded numbers on that little card that add up to 81.

"You sure did, nice round!"

I don't understand people like that.

When we're just playing with friends (which is all the time), and we crank it OB we just take one stroke and drop it as close to the boundary as we can. Waste of time on a busy course to go back to the tee, and we all agree on this rule stipulation.

However, I don't play tournies, but of my friends who do, they do always feel the need to explain what the rule would be "in a real round".

I mean lying about your score to keep golf fun is one thing if it doesn't hurt anybody but to then be like "I BEAT YOU!" is just straight up unexplainable. Like how badly does one's brain have to malfunction for that comment to make it past any internal filter.

Haha I had one buddy coin the term infinity mulligan, but even he didn't give himself a putt unless he made it at some point

lol "deserves" it.

Love that line

i'm probably a 'real 12'. you would probably beat two of me playing best ball but I'd be a big favorite in a scramble. just the structure of the game

I'm a personal stickler for the official rules (and unless I'm playing my buddies for some $, I only care about my own rules and score) but I do make one exception when I'm playing on my own that I've mentally termed the 'PGA Exception"

I drive a ball somewhere (a place that is not out of bounds, and also not in a hazard) and can't find it (because it's dark, weird lie, whatever reason). I make my best guess as to where it would be and play it as an unplayable, hitting three. just can't justify hitting 4 in a spot where the pros would find the ball >99% of the time because of cameras, caddies, fans, etc. kind of cheap but so be it.

for the record, if I hit a ball OB and it's not in bounds, I give myself a good angle (from the rough) and hit four.

Problem with that is you never hit 6 from there....

Which would be an ESC adjustment hole anyway so who cares?

If I slice an approach shot too errant, I pretend it would have hit a TV tower and plopped down 30 feet from the green. Seems to work. It helps if you pretend you are playing with Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus because if it was just you out there, you cannot justify fictitious TV towers now can you.

Are we keeping score or recording a handicap from the scores we keep? I was under the illusion we were keeping score.

For the purpose of determining a "legit 12" vs a "reverse sandbagger 12" this doesn't matter at all