Playing for points. Playing for cash. Playing for fun. Playing for detachment.
There’s a sea of reasons why people play the game of golf. Understand that Stableford is two things at once: it is an accounting standard—a way of scoring. But it is also a mindset. Like Robert Towne said about “Chinatown”—it’s not just a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It’s also a state of mind—a philosophy—a way of making decisions.
Stableford is also a way of making golf decisions. It’s a recruitment of effort around a goal slightly different from that of stroke golf. You can play a round of Stableford and not scribble on a card or even keep a total in your head. When you do that, you know you have a maximum number of strokes to sink the ball every hole. If you fail to accomplish that by the max strokes, you just move on. Even if you’re not scoring, I argue Stableford gives you a clear rule as to when to play on and when to move on.
Put it one more way, you can play Stableford and you can score Stableford but they are discrete things. Ideally if you’re considering the format, you try both, not just the accounting standard. That’s leaving out a big part of the appeal.