Masters Par 3 Contest: Format, History and the Jinx
How the Masters Par 3 Contest works at Augusta National: nine holes on Wednesday, family caddies, and why no winner has won the tournament the same week.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Masters23 min read
- First played
- 1960
- Course
- 9 holes, par 27
- Record score
- 19, Jimmy Walker, 2016
- Same-week Masters wins by its winner
- None
Raymond Floyd won the Par 3 Contest on Wednesday, April 4, 1990. Four days later he stood in the 11th fairway at Augusta National Golf Club in a sudden-death playoff for the Masters, pulled his approach into the pond, and lost to Nick Faldo. Nobody has come nearer to winning both in one week. In more than sixty contests since the first in 1960, no player has.
The contest itself is simple. It is a nine-hole stroke-play competition held on the Wednesday afternoon of Masters week, on a separate par-3 course in the northeast corner of the club's grounds in Augusta, Georgia. That year's tournament field may play, as may past champions who are no longer competing and a number of honorary invitees. The low score for nine holes wins a piece of crystal. It has no bearing on the Masters, which starts the next morning.
How the Masters Par 3 Contest works, in brief
Everything about the event fits in a small table, which is part of its appeal. Players do not need a yardage book and patrons do not need a rules official.
| Feature | The Par 3 Contest |
|---|---|
| Day | Wednesday of Masters week, in the afternoon |
| Course | Augusta National's nine-hole par-3 course |
| Par and length | 27, over 1,060 yards |
| Format | Stroke play, one round of nine holes |
| Who may enter | The Masters field, non-competing past champions, honorary invitees |
| Ties for first | Sudden-death playoff, conditions permitting |
| Prize | Crystal for the winner, for each hole-in-one and for closest to the pin on every hole |
| Effect on the Masters | None |
Players go out in groups, usually threesomes, and they choose their own caddies. That last detail is what the afternoon has become known for. Wives, children, parents, grandchildren and friends put on the white overalls that Augusta's caddies wear, and toddlers in miniature versions of them wander across the greens. A group of three players can easily come with a party of ten.
The golf is real, though. The greens are cut and rolled like the ones on the main course, the holes are short enough that every tee shot is a scoring chance, and a professional who is trying will usually break par. Winning takes a round of four to six under. Since 1960 that has meant somewhere between 19 and 24 strokes.
Two confusions are worth clearing up. The contest is not played on the par 3s of the tournament course. Those are the 4th, 6th, 12th and 16th, and they play no part in it. And it is not a pro-am or a team event. Each player keeps an individual score, the amateurs in the field compete on the same terms as the professionals, and the member or relative carrying the bag has no card of his own.
One point of etiquette is specific to this event. Patrons call for autographs along the ropes, and on Wednesday players sign them, which on the main course during practice rounds is not allowed.
The jinx: more than sixty contests and no double
The fact everyone knows about the Par 3 Contest is the one in this page's headline. Through the 2026 Masters, the Wednesday winner has never been the Sunday winner.
Call it a jinx, a curse or a coincidence. Players are aware of it, a few take it seriously, and broadcasters bring it up every single year. The record needs some care, because the claim is narrower than it sounds. Plenty of Masters champions have won the Par 3 Contest. Twelve of them, by the club's list of winners. They simply did it in different years.
| Player | Masters titles | Par 3 Contest wins |
|---|---|---|
| Sam Snead | 1949, 1952, 1954 | 1960, 1974 |
| Art Wall Jr. | 1959 | 1965 |
| Arnold Palmer | 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964 | 1967 |
| Gay Brewer | 1967 | 1973 |
| Tom Watson | 1977, 1981 | 1982, 2018 |
| Tommy Aaron | 1973 | 1984 |
| Ben Crenshaw | 1984, 1995 | 1987 |
| Raymond Floyd | 1976 | 1990 |
| Vijay Singh | 2000 | 1994 |
| Sandy Lyle | 1988 | 1997, 1998 |
| Mark O'Meara | 1998 | 2007 |
| Mike Weir | 2003 | 2022, shared |
Read the two columns against each other and a pattern shows. Ten of the twelve won the Par 3 Contest only after their last Masters title, often long after. Watson's first came the year after his second green jacket and his other 36 years later. The only men who won a Masters after having already won on Wednesday are Crenshaw, whose 1987 contest fell between his two titles, and Singh, who won the short-course event six years before the real one. For most champions the Par 3 has been something collected on the way down the mountain.
The two who nearly did it
Floyd in 1990 is the close call. He was 47 and would have become the oldest Masters champion to that point. With six holes left on Sunday he led by four. Faldo caught him, the pair went back to the 10th tee for sudden death, and on the second extra hole Floyd's approach found the water beside the 11th green. That green and its pond are described in our guide to Amen Corner's three holes.
The other is Chip Beck. He won the contest in 1993 with a 21 and finished second in the Masters that week, four shots behind Bernhard Langer. Second place twice, then, and nothing nearer.
The par-3 course: nine holes around two ponds
Clifford Roberts wanted it more than the members did. Roberts, the club's co-founder and for decades its chairman, pushed through the idea of a short course in the late 1950s over a fair amount of skepticism from men who thought a serious golf club had no business building what they regarded as a novelty. It opened in 1958, designed by the architect George Cobb working closely with Roberts. Two years later it had a tournament of its own.
The course occupies low, wooded ground beyond the cabins to the east of the clubhouse. Its nine holes play around and across two ponds. One is DeDe's Pond. The other, Ike's Pond, is the better known and is named for Dwight Eisenhower, a member who spent a good deal of time at Augusta during his presidency. The club's account is that Eisenhower came back from a walk through the woods and told Roberts he had found the ideal spot for a dam if the club wanted somewhere to fish. The club built it.
The holes are short even by the standards of a par-3 course, running from about 70 yards to about 140. Nobody hits more than a short iron and several tee shots are partial wedges. The difficulty is in the greens, which are small, heavily contoured and kept at tournament pace. A ball that finishes above the hole on some of them is a three-putt waiting to happen, which is good preparation for Thursday.
- 9Holes
- 27Par
- 1060Total yards
- 119Holes-in-one since 1960
Course figures as listed by Augusta National. The hole-in-one total is cumulative from 1960 through the 2026 contest and rises most years.
What has been rebuilt
The layout has not stood still. In the 1980s the architect Tom Fazio added two holes that play over Ike's Pond, and those now close the round as the 8th and 9th, with the water in front of both greens and the largest crowds of the day on the banks around them. More recently, ahead of the 2023 contest, the club reworked several of the opening holes, rerouting them and opening up more room for patrons to watch. Augusta National rarely publishes detail about construction on its property, so the exact scope of that project is better described than quantified.
The rest of the year the course is simply the members' short course, and by all accounts a very good one. Its names for the ponds are the nearest it comes to the main course's habit of naming every hole for a plant, a custom explained in our guide to the eighteen holes of Augusta National.
Scoring, ties and the sudden-death playoff
A player's score is his total strokes for nine holes. Par is 27, so a 23 is four under and a 20 is seven under. There is no cut, no second round and no handicap. Ordinary stroke-play rules apply: every shot counts and the ball is holed out on every green. The general framework is covered in our explainer on how penalties work under the Rules of Golf, though rulings on Wednesday afternoon are rare and nobody is looking for one.
When two or more players tie for the low score, they go to a sudden-death playoff. That has happened often. The contest had been settled in extra holes 22 times through 2026, which is roughly one year in three, and is what one would expect from a nine-hole event in which a dozen players might finish within two shots of each other. Recent examples include Matt Wallace beating Sandy Lyle in 2019 and Nico Echavarria beating J.J. Spaun in 2025.
On three occasions there was no playoff and the title was shared.
| Year | Result | Why it ended that way |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | Padraig Harrington and David Toms shared the title | The tie was not played off |
| 2012 | Jonathan Byrd and Padraig Harrington shared the title | The tie was not played off |
| 2017 | No contest | Canceled because of storms |
| 2020 | No contest | Not staged at the November Masters |
| 2021 | No contest | Not staged, with attendance still restricted |
| 2022 | Mackenzie Hughes and Mike Weir shared the title | Weather cut the contest short |
A shared Par 3 title is recorded as a win for both players, and it matters to one statistic in particular. Harrington's three victories are the most by anyone, and two of the three were shared.
The club treats a playoff here as a pleasant extra and not as an obligation. If daylight is going or a storm is coming, nobody insists. That alone tells you where the contest ranks: on Sunday the Masters would keep players on the course until dark and bring them back on Monday if it had to.
Why so many cards are never turned in
Every year a large share of the field finishes nine holes and posts no score. This puzzles first-time viewers, who watch a player make five birdies and then cannot find him on the leaderboard.
The reason is a single condition. To have an official score, a player must hit every one of his own shots. The moment somebody else plays a stroke for him, his card no longer counts. And somebody else very often does. A six-year-old is handed a putter on the 9th green. A wife hits the tee shot over Ike's Pond. A college roommate in caddie overalls is invited to try a ten-footer while the gallery cheers.
- Nine holes playedThe player completes the course with his group and his chosen caddie.
- Every stroke his ownIf he has hit every shot and holed every putt himself, his total stands.
- Someone else hits oneIf a child, a spouse or a friend plays any stroke for him, the card does not count.
- Low score postedThe lowest official total wins, with ties going to sudden death when conditions allow.
The contest's working practice as players and the club have described it. A score that is not official is not a penalty or a disqualification in the punitive sense; the player is simply out of the competition.
For many players that is the entire point of the day. They decide before teeing off that the afternoon belongs to their families, and letting a child putt out on the last green is the photograph they came for. Rory McIlroy's young daughter holed a long putt on the 9th in 2025, to enormous noise from the banks around the pond. Her father won the Masters four days later, having never been a candidate for the Wednesday prize.
Others do it for a different reason, and they tend not to say so loudly. A player who finds himself four under through eight holes, with the jinx in mind, has an easy way out. He hands the putter to his caddie. Whether that is superstition or sportsmanship toward a playing partner's kid is impossible to tell from outside the ropes, and it does not matter. The practical effect is that the pool of players actually competing for the title is much smaller than the number on the course.
It helps to be precise about what this is under the Rules of Golf, because "disqualified" is the word usually used and it is slightly off. A stroke made by somebody else is not the player's stroke, so he has not completed the hole and has no score to return. The club does not treat that as an offense. It is a condition of the competition that everyone understands going in, the committee does not publish how many official cards came back, and a player may make the choice on the first green or the last.
Who plays in the Par 3 Contest, and who stays away
Three groups are eligible.
The first is the tournament field: everyone who has qualified for that year's Masters, professional or amateur. The criteria for getting into the field are set out in our explainer on how players qualify for the Masters. The second is past Masters champions who are no longer playing in the tournament proper. A lifetime invitation to the Masters extends to the Wednesday exhibition, and this is why men in their seventies and eighties appear on the par-3 course long after they have stopped trying to walk 72 holes on the big one. The third is the club's honorary invitees, a category that takes in past winners of the other major championships who are in Augusta as guests and not as competitors.
Amateurs have won it. Deane Beman, later the commissioner of the PGA Tour, took the second contest in 1961 while still an amateur.
Nobody is required to play, and a fair number of contenders do not. The reasons vary. Some want the afternoon for a last session on the practice range or the putting green. Some have a sore back and no wish to test it on a hillside in front of several thousand people. Some simply prefer to rest. And a few, without quite admitting it, would prefer not to tempt the record book. Tiger Woods went more than a decade without entering before coming back in 2015 with his children as caddies.
The opposite choice is just as common among the game's best. Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player played together on Wednesday for years after they had stopped competing in the tournament, and their threesome was the most watched group on the property. Skipping the Par 3 is not a sign of seriousness and playing it is not a sign of the reverse. The men who have won the Masters since the turn of the century include players who were out there on Wednesday with a child on their shoulders.
Walker's 19 and the afternoon of nine aces
April 6, 2016 was the strangest day the short course has had. Nobody has offered a convincing explanation for it. By the end of the afternoon the scoring record had fallen and the field had made nine holes-in-one, nearly twice the previous one-day best of five.
Jimmy Walker shot 19. Eight under par for nine holes, with an ace along the way, beating by a stroke the 20 that Art Wall Jr. posted in 1965 and Gay Brewer equaled in 1973. Gary Player made a hole-in-one at the age of 80. Rickie Fowler and Justin Thomas, playing in the same group as Jordan Spieth, made them on consecutive swings at the 4th.
The rest of the record book looks like this.
| Record | Holder |
|---|---|
| Lowest score | 19, Jimmy Walker, 2016 |
| Most wins | 3, Padraig Harrington, in 2003, 2004 and 2012 |
| Two wins | Sam Snead, Isao Aoki, Jay Haas, Sandy Lyle, David Toms, Tom Watson |
| Consecutive wins | Sandy Lyle, 1997 and 1998; Padraig Harrington, 2003 (shared) and 2004 |
| Oldest winner | Tom Watson, aged 68, in 2018 |
| Most holes-in-one in a contest | 9, in 2016 |
| Holes-in-one in total | 119, from 1960 through 2026 |
That last number moves nearly every April. Four more were added in 2026, one of them by Keegan Bradley, who had also made one the year before and so became the first player with aces in consecutive contests. In 2023 Seamus Power made two in one round, back to back, on the final two holes.
A hundred and nineteen aces in 64 contests is close to two a year, which sounds extraordinary until the conditions are counted up: eighty or so professionals and former champions, nine attempts each, from wedge distance, to holes cut where a ball will feed toward them. The main course tells the more usual story. On the 12th hole of the Masters, a par 3 of similar length to the longer ones here, there have been three holes-in-one in the tournament's entire history.
The moments that turned it into television
For its first 48 years the Par 3 Contest was seen only by people standing beside it. There was no broadcast. Patrons with Wednesday tickets saw it, newspapers ran the result in a paragraph, and the wider audience knew it mainly as the source of a superstition.
That changed in 2008, when the contest was televised live for the first time. The timing suited everyone. The club gained a family-friendly program on the eve of the tournament, and viewers at home got their first long look at a part of the property they had only heard about. What the cameras found was better television than anyone had planned for, because the content was not really golf. It was the greatest players in the sport's history being grandfathers.
Three moments did most of the work.
The Big Three. Palmer, Nicklaus and Player going around together, needling each other on every tee, became an annual fixture. In 2015 Nicklaus, then 75, made a hole-in-one on the short course, something he had never done at Augusta. Palmer's failing health in his last years gave those rounds a weight nobody mentioned on air and everybody understood.
The grandson. In 2018 Nicklaus let his 15-year-old grandson, who was caddying for him, hit the tee shot at the 9th. The boy had never made a hole-in-one. The ball landed past the flag, spun back and dropped. Nicklaus, who won six Masters, said afterward that it ranked at the top of his memories at Augusta. Under the format that shot made his grandfather's card unofficial, which bothered no one. Watson won that afternoon at 68.
The ankle. The same day, Tony Finau made an ace at the 7th, set off running down the fairway in celebration, turned to jog backward and dislocated his ankle. He pushed it back into place on the spot. He then played the Masters, his first, and finished in the top ten. It is the only known case of a Par 3 Contest injury becoming part of a player's legend.
None of this would register without the access. Because the contest is relaxed, some players wear microphones, talk to commentators mid-round and let cameras come closer than they ever would on Thursday. It is the one afternoon when Augusta National lets television behave the way television likes to.
The years the contest was not played
Three blanks appear in the list of results.
The first is 2017. Storms moved through Augusta on the Wednesday, the club cleared the grounds for safety, and the contest was called off. It was the first cancellation since the event began, 57 years earlier. No attempt was made to reschedule, because there was nowhere to put it: the tournament started the next morning.
The second and third are 2020 and 2021. The 2020 Masters was moved to November and played without patrons, and an exhibition whose whole purpose is the crowd and the families made no sense in an empty property. In April 2021 the tournament returned to its usual date with limited attendance and distancing rules still in force, and the club left the contest off the schedule again. It came back in 2022 and was promptly cut short by weather, which is why that year's title is shared.
The details of that 2022 return are telling. Bad weather arrived partway through the afternoon, and play was stopped with Hughes and Weir tied at four under. Nobody was asked to come back early on Thursday to settle it. Two Canadians were declared co-winners and the week moved on.
What those gaps show is the contest's standing. The Masters itself has been interrupted only by the Second World War. Rain has pushed final rounds to Monday. The club has never canceled the tournament for weather and never would. The Par 3 Contest, by contrast, is dropped as soon as conditions make it awkward, without a makeup date or an asterisk and with no suggestion that anything essential was lost.
That is the right way to think about it. It is an exhibition the club stages for its guests. Its results are kept and its winners are listed in the media guide, but it sits outside the championship in every sense that counts. No ranking points are awarded and no exemption follows, and the money on offer is zero.
Where Wednesday sits in Masters week
The contest makes more sense once the week around it is laid out. Masters week has a rhythm that has been fixed for decades, and Wednesday afternoon is the hinge.
- Monday and TuesdayPractice rounds on the main course, with patrons on the grounds and cameras permitted.
- Tuesday eveningThe Champions Dinner, hosted in the clubhouse by the defending champion for past winners.
- Wednesday morningThe last practice on the main course and the chairman's annual press conference.
- Wednesday afternoonThe Par 3 Contest on the short course, with families caddying.
- Thursday morningHonorary starters hit the opening tee shots and the first round begins.
The customary order of Masters week at Augusta National. Times and details are set by the club each year and weather can rearrange any of it.
The practice days are the only time ordinary patrons may bring a camera through the gates, and Wednesday is the most sought after of the three because it includes the contest. How those tickets are allocated is covered in our guide to the Masters ticket application.
Tuesday night belongs to the past champions. The dinner is private, the menu is chosen by the man who won the previous April, and what is said in the room mostly stays there. Our guide to the Champions Dinner goes through its rules and its better-known menus. Many of the same men are on the par-3 course less than a day later, which gives Wednesday something of the feel of a reunion that has moved outdoors.
Then the mood changes fast. By Wednesday evening the main course is closed, the grounds crew is setting Thursday's hole locations, and the families have gone back to their rented houses. The next thing that happens at Augusta National is the honorary starters walking to the first tee at breakfast time. The white overalls on a four-year-old and the first tee shot of a major championship are about sixteen hours apart.
Wednesday was an exhibition day before there was a short course to hold one on. By the club's account, in the tournament's early decades it filled the eve of the Masters with long-driving contests, approach-and-putt competitions and clinics given by the leading players, staged on the main course and the practice ground. The Par 3 Contest replaced those in 1960, two years after the new course opened, and proved so much more popular that the older events were not missed.
The club has more of these rituals than any other venue in the sport, and our guide to the traditions of Masters week collects them.
What the winner of the Par 3 Contest gets
Crystal, and his name on a list.
The winner is presented with a crystal bowl. Every player who makes a hole-in-one receives a piece of crystal too, and so does whoever finishes closest to the pin on each of the nine holes, which means a good afternoon can send a player home with several boxes. Augusta National likes crystal as a prize. During the tournament proper it gives it for eagles, for holes-in-one, for double eagles and for the low round of each day.
There is no check. Nothing carries forward into Thursday: no strokes, no tee-time preference, no seeding. A player who shoots 19 on Wednesday starts the Masters level with a player who spent the afternoon in a rented house with his feet up.
No other men's major has an equivalent. The U.S. Open and the Open Championship go from practice rounds straight into competition, and the PGA Championship has at times run a long-drive contest during its practice days without it ever becoming part of the week's identity. The Par 3 Contest is unusual in being an exhibition with a record book, a list of winners going back more than six decades and a reputation of its own.
What the winner does get is a line in a very long record. The list starts with Sam Snead and takes in major champions, Ryder Cup captains and a few players remembered for little else. Art Wall Jr. is on it. So is Isao Aoki, twice. For someone like Aaron Rai, who shot 21 to win in 2026, it is a piece of Masters history with his name attached, whatever happens on the main course.
The contrast with Sunday's prize is the whole joke of the jinx. On Wednesday the reward is a bowl a player can take home and put on a shelf. On Sunday it is a coat he must give back after a year and can then wear only at the club, an arrangement described in our guide to the green jacket and its rules. Most of the field would take the second deal.
Whether the curse is real: what the numbers suggest
Almost certainly not, and the reasoning does not require any mathematics beyond counting.
Through 2026 the contest has been completed 64 times. A Masters field usually runs to about ninety players. If the Par 3 winner were chosen at random from that field, and the Masters winner were too, the chance of the same name coming up in a given year would be around one in ninety. Over 64 years the expected number of doubles would be less than one. A record of zero is what chance alone would most likely produce.
The real odds are longer than that, for reasons already covered on this page. Start with who wins on Wednesday. The list is full of players who were never likely to contend on Sunday: veterans in their fifties and sixties, former champions playing only the exhibition, journeymen having a hot afternoon with a wedge. Watson was 68 when he won in 2018 and was not in the Masters field at all. A Par 3 winner who is not playing the tournament cannot win it.
Then there is the self-selection. Several of the leading contenders skip the contest every year. Many of those who play have given up their official score by the 9th green, deliberately. So the group that is both trying to win on Wednesday and capable of winning on Sunday is a small slice of a small slice.
Nine holes of wedge shots also measure a different skill from 72 holes at Augusta National. The main course rewards length off the tee, long-iron play into par 5s and nerve on greens that punish the wrong side of the hole. Being sharp from 110 yards is useful there, but it is a minor part of the examination.
So the jinx is a base rate dressed up as a spell. Still, it would be a mistake to call it meaningless. It changes behavior. A player in contention on Wednesday who hands his putter to his daughter has made the streak slightly more likely to continue, and each year it continues the story gets better and the next player is a little more tempted to do the same. A superstition that sustains itself that way is a real thing, even if the cause is not supernatural.
Nothing in the format prevents it from ending. A player in form could win on Wednesday without thinking about it and win again on Sunday, and Augusta would have lost one of its better stories. The rest of our golf coverage is on the site's golf section.