- Home
- Tested by a Bogey Golfer
- Strategy Tests
- No Gimmes for a Month
I Stopped Taking Gimmes for a Month. It Wrecked Me — Then It Fixed Something.
Dave conceded me a two-and-a-half footer on the fourth hole two Saturdays ago, the same way he's conceded me two-and-a-half footers for about six years now — a little wave of the hand, already walking to the cart before I've picked the ball up. I said "actually, I'm putting it out" and he stopped walking and looked at me like I'd announced I was taking up cross-country skiing.
I holed it. Barely. Left edge, dying speed, the kind of putt that goes in about seven times out of ten and I'd never once had to prove it before.
Six years of "that's good" and I still didn't actually know if it was.
The short answer: I putted out every single putt — inside two feet, inside one foot, the ones your group has waved in since college — for four straight weeks of weekend golf, with no exceptions and no re-negotiating mid-round. My scores got worse for about ten days, then dropped below where they started. My putts per round went up before they went down. And I learned my "gimme range" had been quietly creeping outward for years without anyone, including me, noticing.
Here's the thing nobody talks about: a gimme isn't really a mercy. It's a guess. Your buddy looks at a two-footer, decides it's "basically in," and waves it away — and that guess becomes permanent the second you pick the ball up. You never find out if he was right. I'd been banking a decade of unverified two-footers and calling it a stroke average.
I improve my own experience out here more than I improve my swing, and I'd started to wonder if the gimme culture in my group was quietly working against that — smoothing over the exact moments that would actually tell me something. So I ran the experiment. This is the latest entry in the ongoing series of tests over at Tested by a Bogey Golfer, which started with figuring out how to play smart when you're not playing well and has been picking apart one assumption at a time ever since. This is what happened, hole by hole, week by week, more honestly than I expected to be able to write it.
What Even Counts as "No Gimmes"? The Rule I Was Actually Testing
This wasn't a made-up personal challenge with vague boundaries. In real stroke play, this is already the rule — casual Saturday golf is just the one place where nobody enforces it. Under the official Rules of Golf, you're required to hole out on every hole in stroke play — there's no such thing as a conceded putt. Gimmes only formally exist in match play, where a player can concede a stroke or a hole outright. Every casual foursome that waves in two-footers is, technically, playing a hybrid game that doesn't fully exist in the rulebook.
My test rules were simple, and I wrote them down before round one so I couldn't quietly soften them by week three:
- Every putt gets struck into the hole. No pick-ups, no "I'll count that as a two," no exceptions for tap-ins under six inches.
- I could still ask my group to concede — but I had to say no and putt it anyway.
- Score gets recorded honestly, miss and all, even the ones that would humiliate a lesser man in front of strangers.
- Four full weekend rounds, same group, same home course for three of the four.
Mike asked me what changed halfway through week one, mostly because I was visibly annoyed at my own putter. I told him the truth: I wanted to know what my actual short putting looked like instead of what my buddies' generosity looked like. It's the same instinct behind declining a mulligan instead of automatically taking one — sometimes the generous move from your group is exactly the thing standing between you and an honest number.
📋 What Actually Happened When I Tried Putting Out Everything
- 😤 Before: A "gimme range" that had quietly grown from one foot to nearly three, and a score I half-trusted
- 💡 The experiment: Four full weekend rounds, every putt holed out, no exceptions, no re-negotiating
- 🎯 What changed: Scores got worse for ten days, then dropped two strokes below my starting average by week four
- 🏌️ The verdict: I'm keeping a permanent one-footer-only gimme rule — and I'm glad I found that out the hard way
Week One: I Was Worse. Noticeably, Embarrassingly Worse.
Here's the part I didn't expect and definitely didn't want. My first "no gimmes" round, I shot four strokes worse than my rolling average, and every single one of those extra strokes came inside four feet.
Not because my stroke changed. Because the pressure changed. A putt your buddy concedes has zero consequence attached to it — you tap it toward the hole with the same energy you'd use closing a car door. A putt you have to actually hole, in front of three guys who are now watching because you made a whole thing about not taking the gimme, has a completely different weight to it. My grip pressure crept up. I started steering the putter instead of stroking it. Classic short-putt yips behavior, except I'd apparently been avoiding the situation that triggers it for years by just not putting the ball when it mattered least.
I'm not totally sure why this took me by surprise — I'd have told you, before the test, that a two-footer is a two-footer regardless of who's watching or what it's "worth." I was wrong. The gimme wasn't just erasing a stroke off my card. It was erasing the only putts in my round that came with real pressure attached, which meant I'd never practiced handling that pressure in an actual round — only on the practice green, where missing costs nothing and nobody's foursome is waiting on you.
Three-putts also crept up that first week, which is its own kind of insult. When your first putt from twenty feet leaves you five feet short instead of the usual gimme-range two or three, suddenly you're facing a putt you'd normally never have to hit on your own. The whole gimme culture had been quietly protecting my lag putting from consequences too. It reminded me a lot of running the "just aim for the middle" test a while back — both experiments got noticeably worse before they got better, and both times I nearly quit around day four convinced I'd broken something that wasn't actually broken.
Did My Group Think I'd Lost It?
Mostly, yes. Dave in particular treated the first two rounds like I was making a point about him personally, which I wasn't — though I understood why he'd think that, since he's the most generous gimme-giver in the group and my new rule made his generosity functionally useless. By round three he'd stopped offering entirely and just watched, arms crossed, with the specific expression of a man waiting for slapstick.
It never fully arrived. But it got close on the sixth hole of week two, a fourteen-inch putt I somehow left short. Short. Fourteen inches. The kind of miss that doesn't exist in casual golf because casual golf doesn't let fourteen-inch putts happen — they get picked up before the ball's even fully stopped rolling.
Week Two Through Three: The Turn
Something happened. Something changed, and it wasn't dramatic — it was closer to just getting tired of flinching.
By the start of week two I'd hit sixty or seventy real short putts under real, if low-stakes, pressure — more competitive short putts in ten days than I'd probably hit in the previous two seasons combined, because the previous two seasons of short putts had all been gimmes. Repetition under actual stakes does something practice-green repetition doesn't: it teaches your hands what "good enough" tension actually feels like, because there's a real result attached every time instead of an assumed one.
My three-putt count dropped first, which surprised me — I'd have guessed the short putts would improve before the lag putting did. What I think actually happened: forcing myself to hole out from three and four feet made me pay much closer attention to where my approach putts were finishing, because a bad lag now meant a genuinely uncomfortable second putt instead of an automatic tap-in. The incentive to leave the first putt closer got real for the first time in years.
Week Four: The Number I Didn't Expect
By the fourth round, my putts per round had dropped to two below my pre-test average — not two below the worst week, below where I'd started the entire experiment. I made four putts inside four feet that I'd have had conceded in any normal round, and I missed exactly one, a breaking three-footer on sixteen that I still think about more than I should for a putt that cost half a stroke on a Saturday nobody will remember.
I'm not claiming a month fixed my putting stroke. What actually happened is narrower and, I think, more honest: I stopped avoiding the exact putts that were teaching me the most, and my hands adjusted to real consequence faster than I expected once I let them experience it.
What About the Guys Who Actually Wanted to Concede?
This is where the etiquette gets genuinely complicated, and where I owe the group an honest answer, not just a data point. Refusing a gimme isn't a neutral act — the guy conceding is trying to keep pace moving, and a foursome that's already tight on daylight doesn't love watching you crouch over a tap-in like it's the U.S. Open. Golfeaser's own gimme etiquette guide exists for a reason: in most weekend rounds, taking the gimme is the socially correct move, not a character flaw.
I told my group up front what I was doing and why, which mattered more than I expected — the two rounds where I explained myself before we teed off went fine. The one time I didn't (a random fourth in a scramble I joined solo) got noticeably tense, because putting out a "gimme" without warning reads as an accusation that the other guy's generosity was wrong, even when that's not remotely what you meant.
If you try this yourself, that's the one non-negotiable: say it out loud before round one, once, and let it go. Explaining yourself hole by hole is worse than not explaining at all.
Stroke Play Already Requires This. Our $5 Nassau Never Has.
There's a real gap between what the rulebook says and what casual money games actually do, and week three is when it caught up with me. We play a standing $5 Nassau most Saturdays — front nine, back nine, overall — and on the seventeenth hole of that round, Jim had a three-footer to close out the back-nine bet. Two weeks earlier, that putt gets waved in without a second thought. This time I said nothing, because refusing my own gimmes was one thing, but overriding my rule onto someone else's putt for money felt like a different kind of thing entirely.
He asked if it counted. I told him my rule only applied to my own ball, not the group's betting concessions — and he took the gimme anyway, out of habit more than principle. He'd have made it either way. But the fact that the question came up at all told me something: even inside a friendly Nassau, we'd built a small unwritten economy of trust around exactly the putts I was now refusing to trust for myself.
Here's the actual distinction, worth knowing if this ever comes up in your own group: match play — the head-to-head format a Nassau is loosely built on — genuinely allows a player to concede a stroke, a hole, or even the match. Stroke play doesn't offer that option at all; you hole out or your score doesn't count. Most weekend Nassaus are really stroke play wearing a match play costume — every stroke gets counted for the overall number, then match play's generosity gets borrowed for the side bets. That hybrid is exactly why gimmes feel so normal and so inconsistent at the same time.
I didn't touch the betting side of the experiment after that hole. Jim's putt stayed a gimme, mine didn't, and nobody's Saturday needed me relitigating the group's betting etiquette on top of my own putting one.
💡 If You Want to Try This Without Blowing Up Your Foursome
- ✅ Tell your group once, before the first tee, not hole by hole
- ⭐ Expect your first round or two to be worse, not better — that's the pressure recalibrating, not a sign it's not working
- 🚫 Don't do this in a scramble, a tournament, or any round where slow play would genuinely cost your group standing
- 💰 If pace is a real concern, cap it — no gimmes inside three feet, still conceding the true tap-ins under six inches
The Objection My Skeptical Buddy Raised — and the Honest Answer
Jim, who plays maybe eight rounds a season and treats every one of them like a social event first and a competition never, asked the obvious question over beers: "Why does it matter? It's not like you're getting a trophy for a real handicap."
Fair. Here's the honest answer, and it's not really about the score. I'd started assuming things about my own game — that my short putting was solid, that a two-footer was basically automatic — based entirely on putts I'd never actually had to prove. That's not a scoring problem. That's a self-knowledge problem, and it's a small, specific version of a bigger one: it's easy to build a whole identity as a golfer around the parts of the round nobody ever tests.
I make my foursome better when I actually know my own game well enough to make honest decisions on it — what to lay up on, when to play safe, when the two-footer really is automatic and when I'm just hoping it is. A month of proof did more for that than a decade of assumption.
Did It Change How I Bet?
A little, and this surprised me too. I'd been agreeing to closest-to-the-pin and putting-adjacent side bets with a private assumption that my short game was reliable. Turns out my actual make-rate inside four feet, under real pressure, was closer to seventy-five percent than the "basically automatic" I'd have claimed before the test. That's not a bad number. It's just a real one, and knowing the real number instead of the comfortable guess changed which bets I'll take without flinching.
What the Stats Actually Said When I Looked Back
I keep a rough scorecard log — nothing fancy, just strokes and putts by hole — and going back through four weeks of it after the test ended told a more useful story than my memory alone would have. The short version: my putts-per-round for the month averaged out almost identical to my season average, once you account for the ugly first week dragging the mean down. What changed wasn't the season-long number. It was the confidence I now have in that number, because for one month, every single putt in it actually happened. If you want the wider context on what a real 20-handicap's numbers look like across a season, not just a putter, our stats breakdown for average golfers is worth a read — and if you want a cleaner look at putts specifically, our putts-per-round data covers the number this whole experiment was really circling.
This one sits alongside a couple of other strategy tests worth running back to back if you're the type who likes proving things about your own game — the par-3 strategy test hits a similar nerve around club selection instead of putting, and I'm already circling a month of not reading putts at all as the natural follow-up once this one's fully settled in.
The Verdict
Would I recommend a full month of this to the group at large? No — not as a permanent standing rule, and I'd never spring it on a foursome that hasn't opted in. Pace of play matters, and most Saturday groups have enough daylight problems without adding contested two-footers to the mix.
Would I recommend the experiment itself, run once, deliberately, the way I ran it? Completely, without hedging. It's the single clearest thing I've done all season to find out what my short game actually is instead of what six years of friendly generosity told me it probably was.
What I've kept from it, permanently: I only take gimmes inside about a foot now, and I putt out everything past that even when it's offered — quietly, no speech, no re-litigating it with the group. It costs maybe ninety seconds a round. It's the most honest ninety seconds in my golf game.
I'm always just one round away from finding out something about my own game I didn't actually know. Turns out I didn't need a swing change to prove that. I needed to stop letting Dave's generosity answer questions I hadn't actually tested myself.
🏌️ Got a Golf Story?
Share it with us. Every story we publish earns the author a free copy of The Weekend Golfer's Social Playbook — our three-step system for finding your people, running trips that actually come together, and earning the right to brag at the 19th hole.
Or join the Golfeasers — free weekly content for people like us.
What Weekend Golfers Ask Before Trying This
Is refusing a gimme actually against golf etiquette? Not against the rules — stroke play technically requires it — but it can read as awkward or even a little insulting if you spring it on a group without warning. Say it once before you tee off and it stops being an issue.
How short a putt should you always concede, even during a test like this? Anything genuinely inside six inches is a tap-in with essentially zero miss rate for most golfers; conceding those keeps pace reasonable without sacrificing the point of the experiment. The real data lives in the one-to-four-foot range, which is exactly where most groups' gimmes have quietly crept.
Did this actually lower your handicap? It didn't move my index in any official sense — I don't post enough rounds for that to matter — but my honest putts-per-round dropped by two strokes from where I started once the pressure adjustment settled in, which is the more useful number for a weekend golfer anyway.
Will this slow down my group's pace of play too much to be worth it? A little, especially in week one when you're steering putts you used to tap in confidently. By week three the extra time was negligible — maybe a minute a round — because I wasn't lingering over the decision anymore, just putting.
Should I do this for a full season instead of a month? A month was enough to get an honest read without burning out my group's patience. If you want a longer version, do it solo or in practice rounds rather than asking the same foursome to sit through it for twelve straight weeks.
More From the Bogey Golfer Testing Ground
- Playing Smart When You're Not Playing Well
- I Played Ready Golf Religiously for 10 Rounds
- I Played to the 150-Yard Marker for a Month
- When to Concede a Hole in Golf
- What We Actually Bet When Nobody Wants to Lose Money
Johnny is a 25-year weekend golfer who's double-booked tee times, forgotten his clubs an hour from the course, and made pretty much every other trip-planning mistake there is — so you don't have to. Guided by The Golfeaser Manifesto, he started Golfeaser.com to prove that weekend golfers are a special, funnier breed who improve the experience, not just the scorecard. He's also the guy behind The Weekend Golfer's Social Playbook — a three-step system for finding your people, running trips that actually come together, and earning the right to brag at the 19th hole.
