Private challenges and club pools

Two kinds of game

Every game on a Parful outing reads the same official scores and writes none. What differs is who runs it and who can see it. A private challenge belongs to the players in it: one member starts it from the group scorecard, invites the others, and only those players can read it. It never appears on a public leaderboard. A shared pool belongs to the outing: any player starts it from the outing page, for everyone playing or for the players who opt in, and it sits alongside the competition results. A club admin can start, edit or remove either kind from the outing's Competitions & games tab, under Games.

The arithmetic underneath is shared: Skins between four friends and Skins across sixty players resolve through the same engine.

Private challenges

A challenge is always private. It is created from the scorecard by a member playing in the outing, picks a game from the catalog, and names its participants from the group or, for group games, from other groups. Guests can be in a challenge and are scored from the group's device; a guest cannot accept a wager, so a challenge with a guest runs without one.

A challenge moves through invited, accepted and active as players respond and scores arrive, and lands on resolved when the outing is closed out. Group games freeze their rosters once enough players have accepted, so a late change to the outing's groups does not rewrite a game in progress. The creator can give the game a name and change its safe settings during play; the kind and anything to do with money are fixed.

Cancelling is undoable while the outing is open: the game keeps its players, settings and result and can be reopened. After close-out the result is frozen; if the outing is reopened for corrections the challenge reactivates and follows the new scores.

Club pools

A pool is a manager's tool. The manager picks the game, Skins, Nassau, Birdie Pool, Greenies, Sandies or Fewest Putts, chooses gross, net or both, sets who is in, and chooses the visibility: public on the outing page, participants only, or admin only. A pool can carry a buy-in. Until anyone is marked paid the pot is an estimate, the buy-in times the number of entrants; once the manager records money the pot is paid entrants times the buy-in and reads zero if every payment is reversed.

Each entrant is unpaid, paid, waived or refunded, and can opt out. Marking an entrant paid writes a line in the club's financial ledger; marking them unpaid voids it. Fewest Putts does not yet take a buy-in, because it ranks ascending and the payout rule assumes the top row won the most.

Settling the pool recomputes the results one last time, freezes them, and generates payout lines from the standings: the pot splits in proportion to units won, floored to whole cents, with the rounding remainder going to the top winner. Each line is pending until the manager marks it paid or waived. If scores change after settling the pool shows drift rather than silently changing; unsettling voids the pending lines, keeps any that were paid, and reopens the game.

Member-created shared games

Between the two sits a third thing. A club can let members start a game shared with the whole outing rather than kept private. It is on by default and the club can turn it off in its games settings. The member must be a confirmed player in the outing and the game must be one the catalog allows to be shared. The result has participants-only visibility, no buy-in, no entrants and no payouts, and the admin workspace labels it a member game.

How Parful runs it

Every game, private or pooled, recomputes on each score and fact write, so standings are live. A player sees the challenges they are in and nothing else; a manager sees every pool and every member game. Nothing a game does can change an official score, a competition result or a standings table.

Money on a pool is a record of what was collected and what is owed, kept in the club's ledger. Parful does not collect the buy-in or pay the winners; the manager does, and marks it done.

Worked example

A worked example: settling a Skins pool

A club runs a net Skins pool with a $10 buy-in. Twelve players entered; eleven paid and one was waived. The pot is 11 times $10, which is $110. Six skins were won on the day.

• infoThe waived entrant is in the game and can win skins, but does not count toward the pot because only paid entrants do.
• infoWhen the manager marks Ana's line paid, it stays paid even if the pool is later unsettled; only the pending lines are voided.

Common variants

Pool for a chosen list

A pool can name its entrants instead of taking the whole field, for example a flight or a division. Entrants are drawn from the outing's confirmed players and late joiners can be admitted.

Custom bet as a private challenge

The Custom bet game records who is in and nothing else; the players settle it themselves. It is the one game available on scramble formats.

Admin-only pools

A pool set to admin visibility never shows on the outing page. Managers use it to run a quiet sweep or to check a game before publishing it.

Related terms

• Game

  Birdie Pool

  A Birdie Pool is a whole-field side pot where every entrant pays a buy-in and the pot is shared out by birdies made: each gross birdie is one share, the player with the most birdies takes the biggest slice, and a club can count an eagle as two birdies.

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• Game

  Greenies

  Greenies is a par-3 side pot: on each par 3 the player whose tee shot finishes closest to the hole wins a greenie, and the pot is shared out by greenies won. On Parful a greenie is a closest-to-the-pin contest with a recorded winner.

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• Game

  Sandies

  Sandies is a side pot for bunker saves: a player earns a sandie by being in a bunker on a hole and still scoring gross par or better. Every sandie is one share of the pot. A casual version pays any hole where the player was in the sand at all.

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• Game

  Wagers and settlement

  A wager on a Parful game attaches a value to a result the game has already decided: so much per unit, or an ante pot, in units or as a currency reference. Every person financially affected accepts the terms before the wager is live, the ledger is zero-sum, and Parful shows who owes whom without moving any money.

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• Game

  Skins

  Skins is a golf betting game in which each hole is worth one skin and the skin goes to the player with the outright lowest score on that hole. When two or more players tie for low, nobody wins the skin and it carries over, so the next hole is worth two skins, until someone wins a hole outright.

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Private challenges and club pools questions