Golf Solitaire

Seven columns, one waste

How to play Golf Solitaire

Thirty-five cards go into seven columns of five, all face up. One more card is turned to start the waste, and the remaining sixteen wait in the stock. There are no foundations and no building — there is only the waste pile, and everything you clear goes onto it.

The bottom card of each column is available, so you always have seven candidates. Any of them that is exactly one rank above or below the current waste card can be played, and it becomes the new waste card. Suits never matter.

You may turn the next stock card whenever you like, and you must when nothing fits. That is where the pressure lives: sixteen draws, no recycling, and thirty-five cards to shift. A good deal is one long chain; a bad one is a series of two-card runs that burn a draw each time.

Kings and aces stop

Why kings and aces are dead ends

In many versions of Golf the chain wraps: a king connects to an ace and the sequence runs in a loop. This page does not wrap. The rank chain runs from ace to king and stops at both ends.

That single choice is most of the difficulty. Every other rank has two ways in and two ways out — a 7 can be reached from a 6 or an 8 and leads to either. An ace can only be reached from a 2, and once played the only card that follows it is another 2. A king is the same in reverse.

Reading the waste

Which cards the waste pile will take

A draw is always legal, even when a card fits, and that freedom is worth far more than it looks. A solver that knew the order of the stock cleared 45.2% of our deals; forbidden to draw while a card fits, the same solver cleared only 24.8%. On 20% of all deals, every winning line turns a stock card while a play is still available, saving that card to extend a run later.

Reading ahead

Golf Solitaire strategy

We tested the usual advice by playing 100,000 deals several ways, none of which could see the order of the stock. The clear winner is also the simplest to describe: find the longest run the face-up cards allow, and play its first card. Every move changes the waste, so a run you can see now may not exist after one careless move. Trace the whole sequence — 8, 7, 6, 5 — and check that each step really is at the bottom of a column before you start.

When two runs are equally long, start the one in the taller column. Taking from the tallest column was the next best habit we measured, at 2.6%. Options are the resource in Golf: tall columns hold the cards you have not reached yet, and a column dug to the floor early is one choice fewer for the rest of the deal.

The Hint button plays exactly this strategy, and it never draws while a card fits. We also tried a smarter blind rule — draw early whenever the cards known to be in the stock promise a longer run than playing now — and it won 3.54%, within the margin of careful play's 3.48%. Early draws pay off when you know what is coming, and in a real game you do not.

Three costly reflexes

Where Golf deals get away from you

Emptying a column too early

A cleared column is one fewer choice for the rest of the deal. With seven columns you have seven options each turn; with three you have three, and the odds that any of them fits the waste collapse. Spread the clearing out rather than digging one column to the floor.

Playing a card just because it fits

Every move changes the waste card, which changes what is available next. Taking an 8 to reach a 7 is only good if a 7 is actually down there. Look one step ahead before committing, because the alternative may have opened a longer run.

Forgetting what the stock holds

Every card outside the stock is face up, so you always know exactly which sixteen cards are still to come — only their order is hidden. If no queen is left in the stock, none will arrive from there to rescue a king, and a column blocked by one needs a queen you can already see in the tableau.

Measured on this page's game

Is Golf Solitaire winnable?

Often, if you could see the stock; rarely, if you cannot. We played 100,000 shuffled deals through the same game code that runs at the top of this page, several different ways, and gave every deal to a solver that knew the order of the stock.

45.2% of deals can be cleared, in line with the published figures for these rules: solitairewinrates.com measured 45.1% over 10 million deals, and Politaire 45.1% over 100,000. The catch is the other number. Careful play without knowing the order cleared 3.5%, about 1 in 29, and on 42% of all deals the cards were there to win and careful play still lost.

The misses are close, too. Of the deals no line of play can clear, 42% can still be brought down to a single card, so 23% of all deals end one card short even with perfect knowledge.

Most deals end with a few cards left, and that is normal. A careful game typically leaves 6 cards, and half end with between 3 and 9. Finishing with three or fewer puts you among the best 28% of careful games. When a deal is lost, the result screen asks the solver for the best finish that deal allowed, so you can tell a bad shuffle from a missed chance.

Nine holes

Keeping score: why it is called Golf

The name comes from the scoring. Each deal is a hole, and your score for it is the number of cards left in the tableau. Clear the tableau and each card still in the stock counts one below zero. Nine deals make a round, lowest total wins, and par for a round is usually given as 45 — five cards a hole.

That par is harder than it sounds. Careful play left an average of 6.6 cards a deal, about 60 over nine holes (counting a cleared tableau as zero), and playing the first card that fits averaged 9.4. Morehead and Mott-Smith set an even lower par of four a hole, and that was for the stricter game in which nothing may go on a king. Beating either takes better play than our careful strategy manages.

Three rules for kings

Kings decide how hard Golf is

Golf is printed with three different rules for kings, and the difference is enormous. We ran the same solver on 20,000 of our deals under each one.

Published figures: solitairewinrates.com (10 million deals) and Politaire (100,000 deals) for queens on kings; Politaire for the other two. Every deal is solved with the order of the stock known.

Wraparound Golf can almost always be cleared; the strict game about one deal in four. This page plays the middle rule, which is also the oldest: the earliest printed version let a queen follow a king.

Other names

One Foundation, Golf, and Putt Putt

The earliest known printing is One Foundation, in Tarbart's Games of Patience of 1905, named for the single pile that every card ends on. Its rules let a queen follow a king, giving runs like J-Q-K-Q-K, which is the rule this page plays. The name Golf came later, with the scoring.

The strict rule arrived in 1931, when Bonaventure's Games of Solitaire barred anything, even a queen, from going on a king; it spread mainly through American books. The wraparound version, in which king and ace join, is usually called Putt Putt. Solitaire Laboratory's notes on the game's printed history are the source for these dates.

The one-pile games

Golf against the other quick clearing games

These four all clear a board rather than building foundations, and they finish in a few minutes. What separates them is how many choices you get each turn.

TriPeaks is the direct comparison and the friendlier game: it uses the same one-rank rule but the chain wraps, so no card is ever a dead end. If Golf's kings are what frustrates you, that is the page to try.