The record book

Everything your group's rounds add up to. None of it typed in, none of it maintained, and none of it forgettable by whoever usually remembers.

What's in there

Records are the extremes. Biggest day, worst day, largest career lead, best season, longest skins carry.

Trophies change hands. You hold one until somebody beats you, and then you don't, which is the entire appeal. The ones nobody has won yet hang in the cabinet too — tap one to see the sculpture, what it takes, and who in the group has it.

Seasons close at the end of the year and crown whoever finished top of the money list. Courses tracks who owns each place, counted across every round anyone's played there. [Trips](/help/trips) keeps every chapter and its champion.

The Cup

The season's money race, at the top of the book: who leads, by how much, and how many days are left. It's the same table that has always crowned the year — it just stops being arithmetic you have to go and look up, and starts being a race with a clock on it.

Or December decides it

A group can give the Cup teeth. Switch the season to the playoff format and the first eleven months become the regular season — they seed the bracket, nothing else. The top four go to December: one plays four, two plays three, and every tie settles the way your group settles everything, with a real round, head to head. A push decides nothing; the next Saturday does.

What it's played for

The Cup doesn't have to be called the Cup. The group picks its own hardware from the cabinet — the jug, the jacket, the belt — and engraves its own name on it. The Record Book wears it and every Cup card answers to it. The Breakfast Jug is a real trophy the moment you say it is.

The story so far

The record drawn instead of listed: money over time, one line per player with settle-ups marked; recent results with everyone's money; money in and out per player; who paid whom; what everyone shot against par; and the sandbag index over time. A span picker switches between this season, the last twenty rounds and all time. It's reached from the Record tab, the ledger and the record book, and the clubhouse links to it under the group table.

The sandbag index

Plays-to is the average of the best eight differentials from the last twenty rounds — the same shape as a real index, on this group's cards. Nines count: a nine is measured against its own nine holes' par and doubled, the way a handicap system counts one. Set is what the group plays a player off; the gap between the two is the reading. Nothing here changes a stroke. Handicaps stay whatever the group sets; this is the evidence.

The Almanac

Everything the record knows but has never said. Where each of you actually wins — course by course, with the win rate against your own average. What company costs you: your win rate with a man in the field, against your days without him. And whether you're hot, measured against your own usual, not somebody else's. Every claim traces to countable rounds, which is the point — this is the argument-settling layer, not a vibes engine. It says nothing before three rounds at a course, because two good Saturdays is an anecdote.

The year, told properly

The Year in Review turns the season into full-screen story cards — the money moved, the champion or the leader, the rivalry of the year, the biggest beatdown, the faces from the photos everyone added. Every number is derived from the record on the day you open it, and a thin year makes a short film rather than a padded one.

Who holds what

A row on the clubhouse for the things that change hands: the group's held objects first, then this season's champion, the Wooden Spoon, the record plaques, the Iron Man and the last trip. One glance answers the question the group actually asks, which is rarely "what's the standing" and usually "who's got the snake".

The held object

Every group has one — the snake, the sweater of shame, the headcover nobody wants on their driver. The commissioner starts it from the clubhouse row with a name, a symbol and a rule for how it moves: worst hole of the day, highest score of the day, biggest loser of the day, or handed over by the group. Rounds before the day it was made don't count.

Who holds it is worked out from the record, not stored, so correcting a card moves it the way it should have and every phone agrees. A tie leaves it where it is; a shared snake is not a snake. Its page shows the holder, the days, the reason, time served per person, the longest single stretch, and the whole chain of custody. Anyone can hand it on with a reason — as themselves, to somebody else — and the new holder is told. A round that moves it tells the new holder too.

Not everything is for winners

Most of the cabinet pays whoever wins. Two pieces don't. The Iron Man goes to whoever played the most rounds in a season, and The Regular to whoever has played a course more than anyone else in the group ever has.

That's deliberate. The man who is down six hundred lifetime and has not missed a Saturday in three years is holding the group together, and until now the record had nothing to say about it.

Nothing to keep up

It's all derived from the rounds, so correcting a round in November fixes the standings, the head-to-head, the course ownership and the season table with it. No rebuild, nothing left stale.

It starts empty

A new group's book is mostly blank and says so rather than showing you a wall of zeroes. It fills in on its own. All you have to do is play.