How to choose a golf outing format: scramble, best ball, stableford, or stroke play

The 30 best players in the world tee off Thursday at East Lake for the Tour Championship, and the PGA Tour spent years engineering exactly one format for them: straight 72-hole stroke play, everyone starting even, low score wins the FedEx Cup. That works because the field is elite and the whole point is to separate the very best from the merely great. Your Saturday outing has the opposite job. You are handing a scorecard to a scratch player and a 25-handicapper in the same group, and the golf outing format you choose is what decides whether both of them are still having fun on the back nine — or whether half your field has mentally checked out by the turn.

What does "golf outing format" actually mean?

A golf outing format is the set of rules that determines how each group plays and how scores are counted. It is the single biggest lever you have over the feel of the day: the same course, the same players, and the same weather produce a completely different event depending on whether you run a scramble or individual stroke play. Pick the format first, because it dictates everything downstream — pace of play, how you handicap, what the leaderboard looks like, and whether a beginner ever touches a ball that matters.

There are four formats that cover the vast majority of outings. Here is how each one actually plays.

Scramble: the default for mixed fields

In a scramble, everyone on a team tees off, the group picks the best shot, and everyone plays their next shot from that spot — repeating until the ball is holed. It is forgiving by design: a beginner's bad drive disappears the moment a teammate hits a good one, so nobody spends the day hunting for balls in the trees.

Choose a scramble when your field is mixed-ability, social, or full of infrequent golfers — charity events, corporate outings, and fundraisers almost always land here. It keeps pace brisk, keeps morale high, and lets a foursome of very different players genuinely compete. The tradeoff is that team scores bunch tightly, so you lean on tie-breakers and clean handicap math; our guide to golf scramble scoring walks through the allowance and anti-sandbagging rules that keep it fair.

Best ball: real golf, still team-friendly

In best ball (sometimes called four-ball), every player plays their own ball for the whole hole, and the team takes the single lowest score on each hole. Unlike a scramble, each golfer plays a real, continuous round — which better players prefer — but a blow-up hole for one person doesn't sink the team, because a teammate's score covers it.

Choose best ball when your field is more experienced and wants to actually play their own game, but you still want the safety net of a team score. It plays slightly slower than a scramble because four balls are in motion, so it suits a field that can keep pace.

Stableford: nobody quits, everybody counts

Stableford scores by points instead of strokes — players earn points relative to par on each hole (more for birdies, fewer for bogeys, zero for a disaster). The magic is that a triple bogey just means you pick up and move on; you can't wreck your whole day on one hole, so the field keeps moving and stays engaged to the last putt.

Choose Stableford when pace of play is your top worry or when you have a wide spread of abilities playing individually. It naturally speeds up a round and keeps the tail of your field from grinding out an 11. Pair it with a net handicap system and even your highest handicappers stay in contention.

Individual stroke play: only for the right field

This is the East Lake format: every player counts every stroke, low score wins. It is the purest test and the least forgiving, which is exactly why it is wrong for most outings. Reserve straight stroke play for a competitive, low-handicap field — a club championship flight or a serious member event — and, if you run it in a mixed field, score it net and split the field into flights so a 20-handicapper isn't measured against a 4.

Match the format to your goal, not the other way around

Work backward from what the day is for. Raising money with a big, casual crowd? Scramble. A field of regular players who want to compete but not get buried? Best ball or Stableford. A serious competition among skilled golfers? Net stroke play in flights. Write the format and its scoring rules onto the cart card and the rules sheet so nobody argues it at the first tee, and be consistent for the whole field.

Once you have chosen, running it cleanly is the other half of the job. On Greenside Golf, you set your format when you build the event and the platform handles the rest — it applies the right handicap allowance, tallies team or net scores automatically, and posts results to a live leaderboard as cards come in, so the moment your last group finishes you already have a winner instead of a scoring table full of arguments. Choose the format your field deserves, write it down, and the competition takes care of itself.