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Every charity golf outing has a moment where someone on the fourth hole quietly kicks their ball out of the rough and looks around to see if anyone noticed. With me, a club length often becomes two or three. With a friend of mine, every shot is somehow a fairway shot.
What if you just let them do it, and charged for the privilege? That's the entire business model behind cheater games, and it's one of the highest-margin revenue lines at any well-run golf outing.
Cheater games are pure profit. There's no inventory to order, no vendor to coordinate, and no cost per unit. Every dollar collected goes straight to your cause. Better yet, golfers want to buy them, not because they're fundraising-minded in the moment, but because shaving a stroke or two actually matters to them. You're not asking for a donation. You're selling relief.
Start with the foundational four before adding anything else.
Mulligan: The do-over. A golfer hits a bad shot, pays for a mulligan, and hits again without counting the first. Price these at $10–$20 each and cap them at two per player. Unlimited mulligans kill pace of play and create resentment from the teams who bought fewer. The cap also creates urgency. Golfers want to spend their mulligans wisely, which keeps them thinking about it all round.
Gimme String: Sell lengths of string: 3 feet for $10, 6 feet for $20. If the ball lands within the string's length of the hole, it counts as holed. No one ever buys the 3-foot string when the 6-foot option is sitting right there. Price accordingly and let the upsell happen naturally. Teams will routinely spend $20–$25 on a gimme package without blinking.
Grenade: The player picks up their ball and throws it once instead of hitting it. Ideal for a terrible lie in the rough or a disaster tee shot. Sell these for $10–$15 each. They're a crowd-pleaser. Someone always throws it badly and loses distance, which is its own kind of entertainment.
Foot Wedge: The player kicks their ball to a better lie. One kick, no club required. Simple, cheap to administer, and genuinely useful on a bad day.
Sell each item individually and you'll get some takers. Bundle them and you'll double your revenue.
A "Cheater's Survival Kit" (one mulligan, one grenade, one foot wedge, and a gimme string) sold as a package for $35–$40 converts at a much higher rate than the sum of its parts. Golfers buy the bundle at registration without doing math. When you ask them individually about each item, they start making decisions. Decisions mean hesitation. Hesitation means fewer sales.
Bundled cheat kits positioned as a fun event accessory, not a fundraising ask, consistently outsell itemized options.
Here's one most organizers leave on the table. Before a long par 5, offer any team the chance to swap their best drive for a 300+ yard peg by an event volunteer or ringer, all for $20. Give the team a drop area in the fairway in case the pro hits a bad one, so the value always holds up.
In a scramble format, that's essentially buying the best starting position on the hardest hole on the course. The perceived value is enormous. The actual cost to you is nothing. Run this on one or two signature holes and it adds several hundred dollars to your total with zero overhead.
The most common mistake: treating the check-in table as your only sales window.
Pre-selling matters. Add-on packages bought at registration tend to generate more per player than day-of sales, so make the cheat menu part of both your online sign-up and your check-in table.
But don't stop there. Golfers at check-in are distracted, busy grabbing scorecards, finding their carts, and tracking down their team. Announce your full cheat menu again at the first tee, when everyone is gathered, warmed up, and in the mood. That's where you capture the impulse buys you missed at registration. Build a quick 90-second pitch into your first-tee ceremony and watch the line form behind the person selling the kits.
One sheet of paper, per team, in the cart. List every cheat available, the price, the rules, and who to pay.
Ambiguity is the enemy of fun. If a team uses a grenade and then argues about whether it still counts as in bounds, you've spent more energy adjudicating than the revenue was worth. Set the rules in advance, communicate them clearly, and don't make exceptions, even for the team that's three strokes behind and getting desperate.