Track every hole, handle carryovers automatically, see exactly who wins what.
Each hole is worth one "skin." The player with the lowest score on a hole wins that skin outright. If two or more players tie for the low score, nobody wins.
When a hole is tied, the skin carries to the next hole. That hole is now worth two skins. Ties keep stacking -- a run of ties can make a single hole worth a massive pot.
You win a skin by having the outright lowest score on a hole. No ties allowed -- if two players both make birdie, neither wins and the pot carries forward.
Multiply each player's skins won by the skin value. Players who win no skins pay into the pot. The pot is distributed to skin winners proportionally.
Skins is not stroke play. Your total for the round barely matters -- all that counts is beating everyone else outright on a single hole. That one rule changes how you ought to play. To take a skin you have to win the hole on your own; a tie carries the value forward to the next hole and hands nobody a penny. Because a good score only pays when it is also the best score, skins rewards the player with nerve: the one willing to take on the flag when a safe par would earn only a share of the hole.
Picture a short par four with water short of the green. In stroke play you might lay up, wedge on and pocket a tidy four. In skins that same four is often worthless -- someone else makes four too, the hole ties, and your caution earned nothing. When you sense the field will make par, the birdie is the only score that pays, so the aggressive line is frequently the right one. Attack the pin when a par will not win it on its own; play safe only when a steady par or bogey is genuinely likely to be the low number.
Carryovers are where skins gets its teeth. Every tied hole stacks its value onto the next, so a run of halved holes can leave a single green worth five or six skins. Once that pot is fat, the maths tilts hard towards going for it. A driveable green or a makeable eagle putt suddenly carries the weight of several holes at once, and the player who takes the risk while everyone else protects par is the one who walks off with the lot. Late in the round, with only a few holes left and skins still live, the sensible thing is often the bold thing.
One more thing sets skins apart from a friendly fourball: when a skin is live, everybody plays out. There are no gimmes and no "that's good" concessions, because a two-footer you would normally pick up might be the very putt that wins or halves the hole. Everyone holes everything until the skin is decided.
Played on gross scores alone, skins belongs to the best ball-striker in the group -- the lower handicapper who makes the most birdies. That is fine among players of a similar standard, but it drains the tension out of the game when abilities are mixed. Net skins fixes that by giving each player their handicap strokes before scores are compared.
The strokes are allocated by the stroke index printed on the card, where each hole carries a difficulty ranking from 1 (hardest) to 18 (easiest). A player receiving nine shots gets one stroke on the nine holes indexed 1 through 9; a player receiving twenty gets a stroke on every hole plus a second on the two hardest. On a hole where you have a shot, you subtract it from your gross before the hole is judged, so a net three can beat a gross three and a higher handicapper genuinely can win skins -- which is the whole point.
Net skins keeps everyone in it. The scratch player still has to make his birdies count, and the fifteen-handicapper who strings together a couple of steady net pars can lift real money off the group. If you are unsure of the right number to use, sort your handicap out before you tee off rather than arguing about strokes on the green.
Skins has as many local wrinkles as there are clubhouses. Agree which ones you are using before the first tee shot, because sorting it out afterwards never ends well.
Then there is the awkward one: the round ends with skins still carried and the last hole tied. You have three fair options -- split the unclaimed pot equally among everyone, share it only between the players who tied the final hole, or send them back down the 18th for sudden death until someone wins outright. None is more correct than the others; just pick one before you start so nobody feels stitched up at the end.
Skins settles cleanly if you set the terms out loud on the first tee. Fix the skin value -- a fiver a skin is a common friendly stake -- and state plainly whether ties carry over. Agree your validation rule, your handicap allowance if you are playing net, and what happens to any pot left unclaimed at the end. Two minutes of housekeeping before you hit off saves twenty minutes of debate in the car park.
On the course, the golden rule is simple: when a skin is live, hole everything out. No gimmes, no scooping up a tiddler, no conceding a putt to speed things along, because every stroke can decide the hole. Call the result on each green before you walk to the next tee, and keep a running note of who has won what -- or let the calculator above do the tallying for you.
At the end, work out each player's take the easy way: skins won multiplied by the skin value. Square up the difference between what you won and your share of the pot, settle in cash or by whatever app your group uses, and do not be the one who goes quiet when it is time to pay. It is a game for a few quid and a bit of needle, not a mortgage -- win with grace, lose with a shrug, and buy the first round in the bar.