[Photo: Tracy Wilcox]
I was at the Travelers a few weeks ago when I noticed Akshay Bhatia grinding over a birdie putt in his pro-am. He used his full routine and pulled his caddie in for a read, you could tell he was taking it seriously. It caught me slightly by surprise.
It turned out he and Chris Gotterup, who was playing in the group behind, were locked in a match. The rules are incredibly easy to understand:
- Each birdie is worth a set dollar amount
- The golfer who makes the most birdies wins
- The golfer with the fewer birdies pays the difference
So if me and you are playing a $10 birdie sprint match, and you make 5 birdies and I make 2, I owe you $30.
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But anyway, the more I asked around, the more I learned how common this game is on tour. It’s one of the go-to games for tour players during their pro-am or practice round days, and there are some good reasons why.
1. It reinforces positive feelings
The eve of a tournament is the worst time to think about pars and bogeys, especially the week after the U.S. Open, which the Travellblowupers was. The best time to analyse, honestly, what went wrong and where to improve is after the tournament. Beforehand, the goal is preparing and cultivating confidence.
Birdie-only matches help you do that. It keeps players in an attacking, lean-forward mindset. They’re not focusing on bogeys they wished they didn’t make; they’re drawing confidence off the birdies they did.
2. It prevents scar tissue
These matches help pros not just chase the positive, they actively delete the negative.
In a birdie-only match the rules are simple: Anything other than a birdie is pointless. So often you’ll see players scoop up tricky par putts because they don’t matter to the match.
But why not hit it anyway? Well, because missing these putts has the chance to implant a bad memory in players’ minds, exactly the thing they don’t want on the eve of a tournament.
3. It conserves energy
Tournament weeks are seven-day mental grinds. One travel day, two days of preparation, and four days of competing. These guys are elite athletes, but consecutive weeks of that can get exhausting in a hurry.
There’s plenty of time to grind over par and bogey putts. That time isn’t in practice rounds, so when the hole is settled because birdie is off the cards, they often scoop up their ball and go practice chips and putts to future hole locations instead.
Save the mental and physical energy for when they need it most.
4. It gets the competitive juices flowing
The best players are wired to compete at everything, and they’ve learned to feed that instinct in various ways. A birdie-only sprint match puts some competitiveness around a specific skill—in this case, the skill of making birdies. Get creative in how you compete, and do it often. You’ll become a sharper player because of it.
How the rest of us should adapt it
If you’re not near scratch, a birdie-only match won’t be that interesting.
For 5-to-10 handicaps, I’d recommend playing pars-or-birdies sprint matches.
According to Arccos, a 5-handicap averages about 9.5 pars and ~1 birdie a round; a 10-handicap closer to 7 pars, so either way the maths works. And the best part of a match like this, much like the birdie-only match for lower-handicap golfers, is that you’ll never be handed the hole because of a blowup. A guy pumping a drive OB doesn’t mean anything, you still need a par to win the hole.
And that’s the whole point. Nobody gets handed a hole because the other guy blew up. You have to go make something.
