How is Maxwell scored?

Every player on a squad of five plays their own ball. On each hole, subtract each player's strokes, drop the highest of the five net scores and add the other four. The team round is the sum of the eighteen hole totals.

How many players are on a Maxwell team?

Five. Parful sizes a Maxwell team at five players and counts the best four scores on each hole.

What handicap allowance does Maxwell use?

85% of each player's Course Handicap™, applied individually. Parful uses 85% by default and a committee can change it per competition.

What is par for a Maxwell team?

Four times the card par, because four scores count on every hole: 288 on a par 72.

Does the squad have to play in one group?

No. A five-ball is slow, so most clubs split the squad across two groups. Parful scores from each player's own card, so the group makes no difference to the team result.

Competition formats

Parful runs this

Maxwell

Also called Maxwell format, Best 4 of 5, Drop the worst of five.

Maxwell is a team format for squads of five in which every player plays their own ball and keeps their own card, and on each hole the four lowest net scores are added for the team, so the single worst score is dropped. Each player receives 85% of their Course Handicap™.

Played as: Own ball, own card, squads of 5
Team score: The four lowest net scores on each hole, added; the worst is dropped
Ranked by: Team net total, lowest wins
Allowance: 85% of Course Handicap™ per player
Net par for the team: Four times the card par, 288 on a par 72
Runs on: Parful Clubs competitions

How Maxwell works

Maxwell is best 3 of 4 for a bigger squad. Five players form a team and every one of them plays their own ball on every hole. After the hole each gross is reduced by the strokes that player receives there, the five nets are sorted, the highest is dropped and the remaining four are added. That sum is the team score for the hole, and eighteen of them make the round.

The format exists for the day when the numbers do not divide by four: a society of twenty-five, a corporate outing with an awkward headcount, a members' day where the committee wants bigger groups on the tee sheet. A five-ball is slow, so most clubs run Maxwell as two groups per team (a three and a two) and combine the cards afterwards, which the counted-scores engine does without anyone typing a team card.

Four counted scores per hole make it demanding. Only one player per hole gets a free pass, and it is rarely the same player twice in a row. A squad with two weak players will find that one of them counts on almost every hole.

Handicaps and where the strokes fall

Each player takes their own strokes at 85% of Course Handicap™, placed by the stroke index of their own tee. An 8 receives 7, a 12 receives 10, a 14 receives 12, a 20 receives 17 and a 26 receives 22. The allowance is the four-ball family figure from the World Handicap System™ tables, and a committee can set a different percentage per competition.

Because four of five scores count, the high handicappers' strokes matter on nearly every hole. A committee that finds squads with the highest combined handicaps winning every week can lower the percentage; the tradeoff is that a squad of five single-figure players then wins instead.

Ties and ranking

Squads rank on net total, lowest first. A tie on net is broken on the Parful leaderboard by the lower gross total of the counted scores, then shared. A club can apply countback on the team card under its own conditions.

How Parful scores it

Maxwell runs on Parful Clubs competitions with squads of five. Every player scores their own ball on the group scorecard, whichever group they are in, and the counted-scores engine builds the team card as the scores arrive: it sorts the five nets on each hole, drops the highest, adds the other four and updates the team total and the leaderboard. The result records which four players counted on each hole.

The engine itself counts the best four from whatever the squad has entered, so a squad of six would still count four per hole; the team builder sizes a Maxwell team at five, and that is the size to plan for. Every player plays their own ball from the tee, so the full set of own-ball side games is available alongside the competition.

Worked example

A worked example: holes 1 to 6

Ana, Ben, Cal, Dee and Eli play off Course Handicaps of 8, 14, 20, 26 and 12, receiving 7, 12, 17, 22 and 10 strokes at 85%. Net scores are shown; the highest on each hole is dropped and the other four are added.

Hole	Par	Ana	Ben	Cal	Dee	Eli	Dropped	Team
1	4	3	4	5	5	4	Cal or Dee, 5	16
2	5	5	5	6	6	6	One of the three 6s	22
3	3	3	4	3	4	4	One of the three 4s	14
4	4	6	5	6	5	5	Ana or Cal, 6	21
5	4	4	4	4	5	6	Eli, 6	17
6	3	3	4	3	4	4	One of the three 4s	14

Team through six: 16 + 22 + 14 + 21 + 17 + 14 = 104 against a team net par of 92 (four times 23), twelve over.

Hole 5 shows the safety valve: Eli's net 6 disappears and the team writes 17, one over its net par of 16.
Hole 2 shows its limit: three players made net 6 and only one of them could be dropped. The team wrote 22 on a net par of 20.
Ana's net 6 on hole 4 was dropped, so the best player's worst hole cost nothing. Her net 3 on hole 1 counted, as it would on any hole.

Common variants

Best 3 of 4: The same drop-the-worst rule for a team of four. A page of its own, and the more common format.
Best 3 of 5: Two scores dropped from a squad of five. Parful's Maxwell counts four; a three-count on a five-player squad is a variant Parful does not score.
Two-group Maxwell: The squad plays as a three-ball and a two-ball on different tee times and the cards are combined. This is the usual way to run it and needs no special rule: the team is the five players, not the group.
Gross Maxwell: No strokes; the four lowest gross scores are added. A scratch setting rather than a different format.