Golf scrambles are fun. They give you a way to play golf with friends and enjoy your time on the course without the same stress as you would find when playing your own ball the entire way.

As great as the golf scramble can be from the perspective of fun and games, there is also a bit of strategy involved.

If you want to win your next scramble tournament, here are the tips I have used to bring home quite a few golf scramble trophies through the years!

Background: The Rules of a Golf Scramble Tournament

The basic scramble is most commonly played; however, there are times when you may have a shamble, Texas Scramble, or even a Florida Scramble as your format of choice during a tournament. Here is what you need to know about the rules of a golf scramble tournament.

Traditional Scramble

In a traditional scramble, every player tees off. After the tee shots, the best is selected, and all players hit their shots from this location. This process is continued until you get the ball in the hole. The great thing about a traditional scramble is that you won’t need to play your ball if you hit a bad shot.

Texas Scramble or Shamble

The Texas Scramble or Shamble is where all golfers tee off, and the best shot is selected. From this point, all players will then play their own ball all the way into the hole. With this format, you play a bit more of your golf ball than you do with the Traditional Scramble format.

Florida Scramble

With a Florida Scramble, all golfers tee off, the best shot is selected, and then only three players hit their second shots. After these three shots are hit, the better one is chosen, and the player who hits that shot has to sit out. The process is then continued until the ball is in the hole.

7 Tips for a Winning Golf Scramble Strategy

Winning a golf scramble is a lot of fun. It’s a great way to play with a group of people that all have different handicaps but still get to be competitive together. When you play in a scramble, it’s all about being a great team player.

Don’t get overly worried about your own game; see what you can do to help out your team. Even the highest handicap players often have a chance in the scramble format to save the day and make their score count for the team.

1. Determine an Order

The first thing I recommend doing is establishing an order of play. You must decide who is going to go first on every hole. I like to keep the order the same throughout the entire round of golf.

Most of the time, the best way to do the order is to have the highest handicapped golfers tee off first. When high handicappers tee off and have a good shot, it eases some pressure from the lower handicap golfers.

These lower handicap golfers can now swing freely and get as much power as they can. Once a drive is in the fairway, you will have no trouble working to get some extra distance. If that doesn’t go well and the drive ends up in a bunker or the rough, you still have a straight shot to choose from.

2. Best Putter Putts Last

In addition to making sure that the best hitter goes last off the tee, make sure that the best putter goes last. When you are the best putter, your chance of making the putt is the highest.

If everyone else misses, the last player to go will have watched those three putts and can determine which way they want to play the break. When the best putter goes, there should also be one putt that is a tap-in so that they can go to the hole at full speed and really try to make it.

When playing in a scramble, you can go low, but golfers need to make some fairly long putts, and the good news is that even higher handicappers can do that from time to time.

3. Don’t Always Choose The Shortest Shot

The ball that is closest to the hole is not always the best shot. Take a look at where the pin is on the green and decide which one makes the most sense to play. If the pin is on the left side of the green, you will want to choose an approach shot from the right.

In addition, if one shot is in the rough, play the one from the fairway. Be smart about the shot you are choosing; making up for five or ten yards is not a big deal. Distance is not always the most critical thing in a scramble.

4. Don’t Always Choose The Closest Putt

When your group makes it to the putting green, you have to choose a putt that is most makeable. If you have a 10 foot putt down the hill or a 12 foot putt up the hill, the 12 foot putt is often the better choice.

Be really smart about which putts you decide to use, and make sure that it is a shot that several players in the group feel confident about making. Look at the slope, angles, and grain to determine your most significant percentage of making the putt.

The putting green is where you can earn the most strokes back after a bad hole. Take your time and be selective about your angles.

5. Alternate The Club Hit Off The Tee

One of the biggest mistakes that I have seen players make through the years is trying to have all golfers on the scramble team hit a driver off the par 4’s and par 5s. As long as you have some players in the group that can generate good clubhead speed, you can hit a 3 wood or even a utility iron at times to get a great shot in play.

This is especially important to consider when golfers are playing from different tees. If one of the golfers in the group plays from a shorter tee, let them get a shot in the fairway for you.

On par 3 holes, you will also want to have players alternate the clubs that they are hitting. Pay close attention to the yardage that your playing partners can hit their shots. If somebody can hit the ball 150 with their 7 iron, make sure you base your club selection off of that.

6. Check for The Minimum Number of Drives

Although some four-person scrambles have no extra rules or regulations, there are times when you will find a minimum number of drives is required. This minimum number of drives from each player can become a real issue if you ignore it early on in the game.

It’s usually easy to get two drives from the lowest handicap player, but from the highest handicap player, it can be a bit of a problem.

Make sure that you are working on this process right from the start of your round. Lets’ say the first hole results in a shot by the highest handicap golfer that is in the middle of the fairway but about three yards back from the lowest handicap golfer.

This is the time to check one off the list for the high handicapper.

If you wait until the end of the round, you will get stuck with these requirements and be forced to use a shot from a specific player. I have seen groups come down to the 18th hole, and the only shot they can even take from the tee box is the one outstanding player who has not fulfilled their drive quote.

This is a mistake.

Get those drives crossed off early, and then play the rest of the round, focusing on locking in those birdies and eagles.

7. The Pace of Play Can Be Different

The pace of play during a scramble can be a little different. You may feel like there is a lot of running around and motion, picking up golf balls and getting them to the best spot. Then once you get to that spot, it feels like a lot of waiting.

Prepare yourself for the scramble to be a slightly different pace of play.

Most of the time, things should move faster than they do when everyone plays their own ball, but plenty of beginner golfers play in scrambles and slow things down. Just be mindful that this will be different than a standard round, and you will have a lot more fun and a much better chance of winning your scramble event.

Brittany Olizarowicz

Britt O has been playing golf since the age of 7. Almost 30 years later, she still loves the game, has played competitively on every level, and spent a good portion of her life as a Class A PGA Professional. Britt currently resides in Savannah, GA, with her husband and two young children.

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Lexi Thompson ended a three-year winless run after holding her nerve to take the individual title at the Ladies European Tour’s Aramco Team Series in New York.

The 27-year-old American’s win at Trump Golf Links Ferry Point is her first since the ShopRite LPGA Classic in 2019.

In bright and breezy conditions in New York, Thompson held off the challenge Brooke Henderson and Madelene Sagstrom with a final round of 69 to finish three shots clear on 11-under-par.

Starting the final round of the 54-hole event with a two-shot lead after opening rounds of 71 and 65, Thompson took advantage of an early Korda bogey to birdie her first hole and build an early cushion that she maintained all day. Thompson’s putter remained hot all week and four birdies on the friendlier back nine eased her away from a chasing pack.

“I came into today just the way I played yesterday, just playing aggressive golf, and being kind of fiery,” she said. “I hit a great shot on No.1 to like six, seven feet and made it. I wanted to play fearless golf and not play away from pins, and commit to my shots. I hit some really good ones and I hit some iffy ones but with this wind and everything, you have to take the bad ones as best you can.”

Thompson’s win, with her brother on her bag, comes off the back of several top tens on the LPGA Tour this year with the hard work off the course paying off for the Floridian.

“I’ve been working extremely hard on my game,” the world no.4 said. “I felt like it was a matter of time, but I just wanted to put myself in contention in the final rounds and learn from the losses that I had and what I needed to work on, which I brought into today.”

Henderson, making her Aramco Team Series debut, found her best form of the week in the final round to make a late charge with a flurry of late birdies on the back nine in conditions that suited the supreme ball-striker. The Canadian carded a closing 68 for a tie of second on eight-under-par with Sagstrom.

Scotland’s Kylie Henry took fourth place with a best-of-the-day 67, while Annabel Dimmock faired best of the English continent with a share of seventh place on four under par. Charley Hull, fresh off her win on the LPGA Tour, could only finish in a tie for 58th, with her tournament hopes ended with an opening 10-over-par 82, which she followed up with rounds of 70 and 71.

The team event, which was decided the previous day, was won by Johanna Gustavsson, Jessica Karlsson, Karolin Lampert and New York college amateur Jennifer Rosenberg. They finished on -23 to win by two shots from Team Hewson (-21), with Team Maguire (-19) and Team Babnik (-19) in third respectively.

“It’s a win and it’s a team win, and it’s just great to celebrate with the others and have this kind of experience,” said Gustavsson, who captained the winning team. “The joy of winning is so much better when you share it. It’s just been great and having Jennifer with us, she’s got a bright future, turning pro soon, and I think we’ll see her again”.

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Oliver Wilson claimed an emotional second DP World Tour victory at Made in HimmerLand after the Englishman put on a stunning display down the stretch to overcome Ewen Ferguson by a shot.

It was a dramatic finale in Denmark and it was Wilson who provided most of the fireworks, which began with a monster birdie putt which found the cup at the 13th, before his chip at the 14th horse-shoed around the cup to just miss out on a second successive birdie.

The former Ryder Cup player continued to entertain the crowds with a superb birdie at the 16th – one of just six birdies all day at the short par three known as HimmerLand Hill. He then drained a 65-foot birdie putt at the 17th to edge into a one-shot lead over Ferguson, who moments before had signed for a 66 to post a 20 under total.

A testing tee shot awaited Wilson at the 18th, but he smashed it down the middle, before a nerveless approach left him 20 feet for a two-putt par, a four under 67 and a 21 under winning total.

That earned the 41-year-old a first DP World Tour title since the 2014 Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, moving him to 28th in the DP World Tour Rankings and earning him a spot in this week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth.

Wilson said: “I was so confident, I knew I could get the job done. Everything I’ve done up to this point to rebuild my game and I knew I could do it. I was so in control, I almost enjoyed the last hole!

“It’s pretty special, I’m so proud of myself. I’ve got a great team around me and there are other people who have helped me get to where I am today. The list goes on, everybody who knows me has been pulling me along to help figure this game out. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I feel like there’s a lot ahead of me, and I’m so pleased to get win number two. My game has been trending in the right direction with my stats and my results.

“I guess it was my day, but I feel like I deserved it. I missed a bunch of short putts today, but I guess 18 years’ experience gets you to hang in there and, to get it over the line, it feels good, so good.

He added: “I have to give a shout out to Callaway. They have spent a lot of time with me over the last two months working with me on my driver set up. Changing equipment is not my cup of team, but I’ve done a lot of work with them and it’s started pay off in the last couple of weeks. All of my sponsors – Callaway, True Links and Peter Millar – have been through  some of my dark times and they all stuck with me, so this is for them as well.”

What’s in the Bag – Oliver Wilson
Driver: Callaway Rogue ST Triple Diamond (8.5°)
Fairways: Callaway Epic Speed Sub Zero (15°)
Utilities: Callaway Apex UW (19°), Callaway X Forged UT (21°)
Irons: Callaway X Forged ’18 (4-9)
Wedges: Callaway JAWS Mack Daddy 5 (46°, 52°, 58°)
Putter: Odyssey White Hot OG 2-Ball Blade
Ball: Callaway Chrome Soft X

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Six years after his stunning victory at Augusta, Danny Willett is bidding to get his game back into top gear as he returns to the scene of his finest hour and embarks on his 14th season on tour

As he heads off to the airport to travel to Augusta next month, there must be a moment when Danny Willet has to pinch himself that he is a member of exalted group of 90 players who have earned the right to call themselves a ‘Masters champion’.

But whatever else the 34-year-old Yorkshireman is able to achieve in the rest of his career, nothing, perhaps baring a victory in the Open Championship at St Andrews next month, will come close to the elation, and the global recognition, that comes with bagging that cherished title.

“There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about winning the Masters,” he says. “I can remember almost every shot I hit, and I remember how I felt at each point throughout the week. It’s amazing how you get the same feelings on weeks when you win or do well. Clearly it’s not easy to replicate that feeling, but that week in April was unforgettable to say the least.”

Willett, while acknowledging that the win in Georgia back in 2016 changed his life for ever, is also mindful that it signalled the beginning of what has been a very frustrating period of what, by any standards, has been an extremely successful career which began on a council-run course in Sheffield and has so far yielded a major title, seven European Tour wins and almost €20m in prize money.

By his own admission, winning the Masters was both the pinnacle of his career and a curse. While he had achieved his childhood dream, the many lucrative and high profile opportunities which subsequently came his way pushed his already fragile back to breaking point. 

“I was on painkillers when I won the Masters,” he reveals. “Back then it was becoming an issue, but not a huge issue. And then I played and travelled a lot more than I’d planned. I went and played in America, Asia, and my body didn’t cope great with it. In the back of my mind I constantly knew that there was an underlying problem, and any moment it could spring up and hinder my performance. So I was competing and almost waiting for something bad to happen, instead of being completely clear of thoughts, and just actually enjoying the game.”

As the pain worsened, so did the results. Over the course of the next two seasons his world ranking dropped from a high of nine to something in the highs 400s, and there were times, Willett says, when he was almost too ashamed to show up for tournaments. 

“I got to a point where I was feeling like there was almost no point actually playing, because I wasn’t gonna play any good,” he recalls. “I wasn’t living to up to the stature I’d created for myself. It’s embarrassing when you pitch up at golf events and people are expecting you to play pretty well, you’re a Masters champion, and you don’t perform. I was just taking spots and making numbers, which is never a good thing if you’re trying to be a professional golfer.”

Eventually, Willett took drastic steps. He split with his long-time coach and caddy, both of whom had been with him since he started out on the tour, and turned to Canadian golf instructor Sean Foley. Over the course of the next 18 months the pair slowly rebuilt Willett’s golf swing to reduce the strain on his back. 

“I kind of rebuilt the whole team to focus entirely on working on the movement patterns of the golf swing,” he says. “It took a long, long time to sift through all the underlying areas that were causing problems, which meant it took the best part of two months before I was fully pain free again. It’s only been over the last two seasons that I’ve actually been able to focus on performance again. The scores haven’t always been that great, but just being pain-free means I can see that I’m going in the right direction.”

While his physical health has slowly improved over time, Willett says it wasn’t always easy to watch his ranking plummeting. By the time it had dipped into the 400s, he simply tried to see the funny side. 

“There were times I’d look at it and you’d just have to giggle because you know the player that you can be,” he says. “But it got to a stage where it was so poor that there was no point really paying attention to it. It’s how the rankings work. It’s easy to drop a long way down when all your points come off from when you were playing well, but it’s also easy to jump up pretty quickly. Lee Westwood fell all the way down and then came back to no 1; Henrik Stenson has had a couple of topples in his career and came back, Sergio [Garcia] the same. And, of course, Tiger fell all the way down and came back up to the top, before he got injured again.”

Woods’ remarkable rise back in 2018 proved a source of inspiration for Willett. And just like Woods, Willett slowly began to mount something of a comeback. At the end of the 2018 season he won the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai to break back into the world’s top 100, and the following year he won the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, beating Jon Rahm by three shots, to further remind himself, and the world, that he wasn’t quite ready to wave the white flag. 

The last two seasons, both of which were disrupted by Covid – which he also caught himself – have yielded some inconsistent results, but Willett rounded out the 2021 season with a confidence-boosting win at the Dunhill Links Championship in St Andrews, the eighth of his 14-year career on the European Tour. 

“I know that my results have been a bit mixed in recent seasons, but I moved out to America full-time with the family in 2018, and it’s taken some time to find my feet on the PGA Tour. It was a bit of a learning phase, trying to find which courses I liked, how to go about things, but the wins, although achieved in Europe, have underlined that when things click, I still have the game to compete, and more importantly, to win.” 

Willett describes himself as being on a clearer path these days which has helped him with the mental side of the game. In the past he’s often referred to a battle with ‘inner noise’ while out on the golf course, and he says that at times during past season he was hitting shots whilst inwardly questioning whether he would ever play again.

“It’s a strange old game when you’re not playing well,” he says. “Everything seems to be against you. You get the bad breaks, and everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. And in the past when I wasn’t playing very good, I’d find myself asking questions like, ‘How good are you ever gonna be?’, ‘Are you going to give up?’ But being technically better has allowed me to think so much clearer out there. 

“For me, the mental side of golf is a chicken and egg thing. If I’m playing great, then there’s no reason why I should be in a bad place. While if I’m struggling with my game, then the psychology part is a pretty tricky one, because you end up asking yourself a lot of questions that you don’t really know the answers to. And that’s when it gets hard to actually concentrate on the game, because there’s so many other things going on in there!”

But having gone through such a tough period, Willett now feels he’s a lot more resilient through the bad patches, as he attempts to make his way back up to the top 100 and beyond.

“Before, everything was based around me playing good golf, but 

now I’ve come to realise that if I hit a couple of bad shots, it’s not the end of the world,” he says. “Everyone hits bad shots. If you’re relying so heavily on results to keep you happier on a golf course, that’s a pretty vulnerable place to be. Now I just feel that if I keep doing the right things, inevitably something good will come of it.”

Can Willett avoid being a permanent one-hit wonder, and add to his tally of major titles? While he dreams of once again being in contention down the final straight, for now he’s simply enjoying the thrill of competing pain-free.

“I’ve not really got any long term goals,” he says. “Out of all the sports, I think this is one of the most difficult, because you can’t control what other people are doing, what the weather’s doing, so I think career goals is a completely pointless aspect. 

“But it’s a big difference to be able to play without pain again, and know that what you’re working on has helped you to get that way. I was 29 when me and Foles got together, and I wasn’t sure how long my career was gonna be. But now my body’s in good shape, I’ve got maybe another 10 years, which is a pretty long time. That’s the main thing really, this is my 14th year of being a professional, and I want my career to be as long as it possibly can and as good as it possibly can.”

Asked whether a return to St Andrews for this year’s Open Championship, scene of two of his European Tour wins, might bring about a second major title, Willett remains cautious, but upbeat.

“I played alongside Zach Johnson the year that he won in 2015, and I finished sixth. I like the golf course and I enjoy the set up for the Open. It’s an interesting golf course. It gives you ways out. If you are nervous, you aim down the left on any hole you want. If you’re out of position a little bit too much, you can’t get to a few of the flags. But, as I said, I like the course and I’ve had some good experiences around there, so it will be interesting to give it a shot.”

In the meantime, Willett has the small matter of preparing for a return to the Masters, in what will be his eighth appearance at the season’s first major. The tournament has not been kind to him since his win with four missed cuts from five attempts, although a tied 25th in 2020, gave him a lift.

After that, Willett will be back on hosting duties at the British Masters at The Belfry in May, a role he enjoyed last year when it was also hosted at the iconic Midlands venue. Being a proud Englishman, it’s a tournament he would dearly love to win, but it’s a feat that has so far proved elusive to its hosts, with Ian Poulter, Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Justin Rose and Tommy Fleetwood all unable to present themselves with the trophy.

“I can see why others haven’t performed well on the course when they’ve hosted,” says Willett. “You want to try and play well and put a good performance in, but you also want to make sure the week goes as planned for other people as well as yourself, so it’s a tricky one. I can see why guys have struggled in the past, but fingers crossed I can change that and have a nice week.”

We’ve all got them crossed, Danny. 

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