TILT is a golf points game where every hole is worth more than the last one, as long as you keep making pars. Hole one is worth 1 point. Every net par or better makes your next hole worth more. A net birdie pays double whatever the hole has grown to.
Then there is the other side. One bogey costs you the hole and knocks you off Tilt, and you start climbing again from the bottom.
You play it against everybody at once without needing a partner, a team or an opponent, which makes it the easiest game on this list to add to a round that already has bets running.
This is a simulation, not a live round. Tap the gold Sim button on each hole to learn the game and watch this made up match unfold one hole at a time. Watch the Hole column: it is what the next hole is worth to that player, and the column beside it is what a birdie there would pay them.
The scores above are invented, but the scoring is not: this is the same card and the same live leaderboard your group sees on DeucePot while you play.
Play TILT Now! Switch it on at setup and everybody is in. It works on your own tooTILT is a net points game played by every player on their own card. Each hole has a value. It starts at 1 and it grows every time you make a net par or better.
The whole game turns on one idea. The pars you make are not worth much on their own, but they are what makes your next birdie enormous. Four pars in a row and your next hole is worth 5, so the birdie that follows pays 10 instead of 2. That is why the game is called TILT. A player on a run walks to the next tee with something real to lose.
The bottom lifts. Hole one is worth 1 point to everybody, and a player who has not made a net par yet keeps playing for 1 until they do. But the moment they make a first net par they have been on Tilt, and from then on a bogey only drops them back to 2, never all the way to 1.
It is a small rule that changes how the back nine feels. A player who blows up on the fourteenth is not starting from scratch on the fifteenth, so nobody spends the last hour playing for nothing.
Stableford pays the same for a birdie on the first hole as it does for a birdie on the eighteenth. TILT does not. What a birdie is worth depends entirely on what you did in the holes before it, so the same score can be worth 2 or 20 depending on when you made it.
Where V is what the hole in front of you is worth:
The bottom is 1 until you make your first net par, and 2 for the rest of the round after that.
Take the demo round above. Allen goes to the eighteenth tee playing for 10, built out of nothing more exciting than a long run of pars. A net birdie on the last, and that one hole pays them 20, which is more than they made on the entire front nine. Pete makes the same net birdie on the same hole off the same 10 and also collects 20, and it is still not enough, because Allen was 5 in front walking down the fairway.
The other side of it happened on the thirteenth. Alex was playing for 12, the biggest number on the card at that point. That is a net double bogey, which costs the 12 and puts the player back to a 2 point hole, and it took the whole run in to climb out of it. Second place in the end, second, which is the floor doing its job.
Neither of those numbers was typed by hand. Both come out of the scoring model this page is generated from, and the model and the page are checked against each other hole by hole before the page ships.
What takes a player off Tilt.
If it is the first time anybody at the table has played it, leave the setting on a bogey, play a quarter a point, and tell everybody one sentence: a par makes your next hole worth more and a birdie pays double it. That is enough to play the whole round. Everything else can be read off the app while you walk.
TILT is the one game on this site where the arithmetic is genuinely hard to hold in your head, because every player is carrying a different hole value and a different floor at the same time. If you are keeping it on paper, this is the column to draw:
Or hand it to a scoring site like Big Fairways, which carries each player's value and floor for them and turns the points into money at the end.
TILT is the best game on the card for a group with mixed handicaps, because it is played entirely off net scores and it never asks anybody to partner anybody. The high handicapper making net pars is building exactly the same number as the scratch player, and their stroke holes are where they collect.
It is also the most fun to watch. There is no other side game where a player standing over a four footer can tell you, to the point, exactly what it is worth to them.
Let a scoring site do the arithmetic What every hole is worth, on every row, with the maths shown hole by holeEvery hole has a value that starts at 1. A net par pays you the value of the hole and makes the next hole worth 1 more. A net birdie pays double the hole and adds 2, and a net eagle pays four times it and adds 3. A bogey costs you the value of the hole and knocks you off Tilt. Every hole is paid at the value you walked onto the tee with. Most points after eighteen holes wins.
It means your hole is worth more than the bottom, because you have strung pars or better together. The higher it climbs, the more a birdie pays you and the more a bogey costs you. The app shows the number on your scoring row all the way round, so you always know what the hole in front of you is worth.
Net. Handicap strokes count on every hole, which is what makes it work in a group with mixed handicaps. A gross bogey on a hole where you get a stroke is a net par, and it builds your number exactly like anybody else's par.
Yes. TILT is scored entirely off your own card, so it works as a solo game against your own round the same way it works in a fourball. There is nobody to settle with on your own, so it becomes tracking rather than a bet.
There is no benchmark the way 36 points is the benchmark in Stableford, because it depends entirely on how long your runs are. Eighteen net pars in a row without a single bogey comes to 171, which almost nobody will ever do. A round with a few clean runs and a couple of birdies collected at the right moment will usually win it.
The bogey costs you whatever the hole was worth and knocks you off Tilt. Your next hole is back at the bottom, which is 1 point if you have not made a net par all round and 2 points once you have. Hole one is the only hole anybody plays for 1 in a normal round.
Yes. A scoring site like Big Fairways runs TILT as a side game alongside Skins, Vegas or Junk: switch it on at setup, choose whether a bogey or a double bogey takes you off, and it carries every player's hole value and floor, shows what the next hole is worth, explains what each hole paid, and turns the points into money at the end.