Golf Card Game

Golf: six cards you can't look at, and nine holes to get rid of them

Golf is the card game where your own cards start face down and you are not allowed to look at them. Each player has six, laid out in two rows of three, with two turned up. Every turn you draw a card and either swap it for one of yours or throw it back, and after nine deals — called holes — the lowest total wins. This is the Golf you play against other people. The one-player patience game, where you run cards off seven columns onto a single pile, is Golf Solitaire: it shares the name and the low-score-wins idea, nothing else, and has its own page.

Most descriptions of the game stop at about three hundred words: deal six, turn up two, swap, low score wins. What they leave out is everything a table actually argues about. Is a pair of twos worth minus four? Does everybody get one more turn when somebody goes out? Should you be racing to turn your cards up? Before the computer opponents on this page were allowed to play, each of those was settled the slow way — more than 300,000 simulated holes, changing one habit at a time and measuring it against an otherwise identical player at the same table.

Where Golf comes from

Golf is a folk game in the strict sense. Nobody is recorded as having invented it, there is no founding rule book, and the card-game reference Pagat describes it as widespread in North America and Britain while seldom appearing in card-game books at all. It spreads by being taught across a kitchen table, which is why it has collected so many names: the four-card game is also Polish Polka, Polish Poker or Turtle, the six-card game is sometimes Hara Kiri, and the nine-card game is Crazy Nines.

The name is simply the scoring. As in the sport, every point is a stroke against you, a deal is a hole, a full game is nine of them, and the best player at the table is the one with the smallest number.

How many cards do you deal in Golf?

Six each, dealt face down and arranged as two rows of three. One standard 52-card pack is enough for two, three or four players, which is what this table offers; for five or more, shuffle in a second pack. The undealt cards go face down in the middle as the stock, and the top one is turned over beside it to start the discard pile.

Then every player turns any two of their six cards face up. The other four stay face down, and nobody may look at them — not even their owner. Which two you turn is the first decision of the hole, and it is not a free one; the strategy section has the number.

How a turn works

1. Draw one card — either the top of the stock, which nobody has seen, or the top of the discard pile, which everybody has.
2. A card taken from the discard pile must be used. It replaces any one of your six cards, face up or face down, and the card it replaces goes face up onto the pile. You may not pick it up and put it straight back.
3. A card drawn from the stock can be refused. Swap it in the same way, or discard it and leave your layout exactly as it was.
4. A card you place always goes in face up. If it replaced a face-down card, you find out what that card was only as it lands on the discard pile. You may not peek first.
5. Play passes to the left.

Anyone who has played Rummy will recognize the rhythm — one card in from the stock or the pile, one card out — but nothing is ever melded and your cards never leave the table. On this board, click the stock to draw, or click the pile to pick up its top card and then click the card it should replace. Picking up from the pile can be undone until you place it, because that card was already face up and nothing has been given away. A stock draw cannot: you have seen it.

A hole is short. In simulation each player got about four turns at a four-player table (4.2 on average) and between five and six heads-up (5.7), so most of your cards are replaced once and never touched again.

What are the cards worth?

That average is the most useful number in the game. A face-down card is not a zero and it is not a ten — it is, on average, a five and a half. So any card of five or lower is an improvement on one you have not seen, and a six or higher is not. A player who will not cover a face-down card with a four because "it might be a king" is turning down about a stroke and a half.

Does a pair of twos score minus four?

No. It scores nothing — and nothing is worse than minus four. The rule is that a column cancels when both of its cards are the same rank, and it does not care which rank. Two nines in a column are worth zero instead of eighteen, which is why you chase pairs. Two twos in a column are worth zero instead of minus four, which is why you keep them apart.

Two more things follow from the same rule. Pairs only count down a column: matching cards side by side in a row are just two cards. And a pair of kings gains you nothing, since each king was already worth zero — harmless, but no reason to take a second king for the column the first one is in.

The best hole it is possible to score is −6: three twos, one in each column, each sitting over a king. The fourth two cannot help, because it would have to go under one of the other three. Any hole below zero is a very good one — only 3.5% of four-player holes in simulation finished negative.

When does a hole end — and does everyone get one more turn?

The hole ends the moment any player's last face-down card is turned up. Everyone else's face-down cards are turned over where they lie, every layout is scored, and the deal passes to the left. That is how Pagat and Bicycle both give the rule, and it is how this table plays: there is no final round.

A great many households play it the other way — once somebody has all six cards up, everybody else gets one more turn. Neither is wrong, but they are different games, and the difference can be measured. Under the sudden ending, the player who turned up the last card had the lowest score on the hole, or tied for it, 87.4% of the time heads-up, 80.6% at three players and 73.4% at four. Give everyone a last turn and those fall to 73.0%, 62.3% and 54.0%.

The reason is what the others are left holding. When a hole ends without warning, every other player is caught with cards still face down — about one and a half each on average — and each of those costs its 5.46 strokes whether or not anybody ever saw it. A last turn lets each of them fix their single worst problem, and the average falls to one card each.

If the stock runs out, the discard pile, apart from its top card, is shuffled and turned over to make a new one. That much is standard. What the traditional rules do not cover is the stock running out a second time, and without some limit a table could draw and discard forever, so here a second run-out ends the hole where it stands. It is a rule you will almost certainly never meet: in 54,000 simulated six-card holes the stock was turned over once and never ran out twice.

A game is nine holes and the lowest total wins. Across a thousand simulated four-player games the average player finished on 118 and the winner on 91; heads-up it was 92 and 78. Two players who finish level share the win, which happened in between 1% and 2% of games.

Is it worth racing to go out?

Those figures make going out look like the whole game: turn up your last card and you win the hole three times in four. So the obvious plan is to get your cards face up as fast as possible and end it while everyone else is still sitting on unknowns.

That plan was built as a computer player, and it was the worst thing measured. The racer covered a face-down card with almost anything it drew and went out the moment it could. At a four-player table it turned up its last card first on 72.7% of holes, against 9.3% for an ordinary player in the opposite seat — and lost 2.35 strokes a hole to that player, winning only 28.9% of their nine-hole matches.

The closer wins because the closer was already ahead. Players go out when their layout is good; the good layout is the cause, and going out is only what it looks like from across the table. Four other habits were measured the same way.

• Turn up one card in each of two columns. Each face-up card is then sitting over a face-down one, so any match you draw can go underneath it — pairing the column and getting rid of an unknown in a single move. Stacking both flips in one column cost 1.05 ±0.08 strokes a hole at four players and 0.86 ±0.07 heads-up.
• Hold a high card for its pair — for a while. A nine with an open slot under it is one draw from being worth nothing. A player who never waited, and swapped out every high card for the first lower one, gave up 1.95 strokes a hole. But the waiting has to stop when the hole is about to: once an opponent is down to a last face-down card, an unpaired nine is just nine.
• Cover face-down cards with anything of five or under. You gain on the average and you find out what was there. In simulation about four swaps in five went onto a face-down card rather than replacing one already showing.
• Do not hold out for a lead before going out. If turning up your last card is the best use of the card in your hand, do it. Insisting on being four strokes clear first cost 0.29 ±0.08 a hole, and going out at the very first chance made no measurable difference either way.
• Watch the next player's cards — but only heads-up. Whatever you discard, the player on your left gets first refusal. In a two-player game that player is your only opponent, and a computer player that stopped caring what it handed over lost 1.35 ±0.07 strokes a hole. At a four-player table the same care cost 0.75 ±0.08: you bend your own play to deny one opponent in three, and the other two collect the difference.
• Going first helps. The player to the dealer's left took 57.5% of heads-up holes and 31.9% of four-player ones, counting a tied hole as a share, where an even split would be 50% and 25%. The deal rotates, so the advantage comes round to everybody.

Nine-card Golf

The toggle above the table switches to the nine-card game, sometimes called Crazy Nines. A turn is exactly the same; what changes is the layout and what it takes to cancel a column.

It is the same game with a harder target. A pair in a column is worth nothing here — you need the third card — and that changes how often a column actually cancels: 72% of finished four-player layouts in the six-card game had at least one cancelled column, against 40% in the nine-card game. Holes run nearly twice as long and scores nearly twice as high. The lessons carry over with bigger numbers: never holding cards for a match cost 2.94 ±0.16 strokes a hole, and stacking all three opening flips in one column cost 0.77 ±0.16.

Common variations

• One more turn each. The most common house rule, covered above: when somebody's last card is turned up, everybody else gets a final turn before the cards are scored. This table ends the hole at once.
• Turn a card when you refuse. Some play that if you draw from the stock and discard it, you must also turn one of your face-down cards up. It speeds the hole along and removes the option of sitting still.
• Jokers. Two per pack, usually worth −2, in which case a two goes back to being worth plus two. Other houses make the joker −5.
• Bigger rewards for sets. Four of a kind across two columns scoring −10, or −20 for a square block of four; some tables cancel a pair wherever it sits, not only in a column.
• Eighteen holes. The same game, twice as long.
• Four-card Golf. The other classic form, and really a different game. Four cards in a square, all face down; you look at two of them once at the start and then have to remember them. Nothing is ever turned face up, twos count as two, and instead of going out a player knocks, after which everybody else gets one turn. Many tables add a penalty — commonly ten strokes — for a knocker who turns out not to have the lowest score.
• Power cards. A branch of the four-card game in which certain ranks let you peek at a card or swap one with an opponent, played as Cambio, Pablo or Cactus and sold in boxed form as Cabo. It is a relative of the game on this page, not a version of it.
• Eight-card and ten-card Golf. The six-card game on a wider layout — four or five columns of two — played with two packs.