Golf pool
One hundred and fifty six players tee off on Thursday and roughly half of them are gone by Friday night. That is what makes a golf pool different from every other pool your office runs, and it is the whole reason the cut line is the rule you have to get right.
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Every other pool your office runs is head-to-head: this team or that team. Golf gives you a field of 156 and asks you to select from it. That single difference is why golf pools attract people who do not follow golf, because picking four names out of 156 feels like a scratch ticket rather than an exam.
Split the field into tiers by ranking or form and make players take one golfer from each. It stops everyone picking the same four names, it guarantees every entry holds someone nobody has heard of, and it is what makes the leaderboard readable on Sunday.
At the end of the second round the field is cut. At the Masters that is the low 50 and ties, so more than a third of the field goes home. Every golfer on your roster who misses the cut produces nothing for two more rounds. Most golf pools are decided on Friday evening and only resolved on Sunday.
Decide up front whether you total every golfer on the roster or only the best few. Counting the best three of five is the standard fix, because it means one missed cut does not end a player's week and keeps people watching through Sunday afternoon.
A major runs Thursday to Sunday, which is the longest continuous stretch of attention any single event will give you. Leaderboards, groups and the Banter Board keep the conversation running across all four rounds rather than only on the final putt.
Golf scoring is unusual because a player can still be in your roster and contributing nothing. Every rule below exists to handle that.
The two honest options are a zero for the weekend, or an assigned penalty score so the golfer keeps hurting you. A zero is simpler. A penalty is more punishing and makes the Friday cut line genuinely terrifying. Whichever you choose, say so before entries open, because the first missed cut is when someone asks.
Counting every golfer is brutal and rewards the safest possible roster. Counting the best three of five, or the best four of six, lets people take a flyer on a long shot without ruining their week. It is the difference between a pool that is over on Friday and one that is alive on Sunday.
A free pick from the whole field means half your pool holds the same three names and the leaderboard is decided by whoever got the fourth right. Tiers force spread. They also mean the person who has never watched golf ends up holding someone genuinely interesting, which is most of the point.
Score on strokes relative to par and the pool tracks the tournament exactly. Score on finishing position instead and a one-shot gap becomes a real gap in points, which makes the leaderboard easier to read for people who do not know what nine under means.
A golfer who withdraws injured after one round is not the same as a golfer who misses the cut, and your rules should not treat them the same by accident. Decide whether a withdrawal scores as a missed cut or whether the entry gets a replacement, and decide it before the tournament, not during it.
Paid plans ship full white-label: your logo, your colours and your brand across every screen, every email and every notification. Pro and Enterprise add a custom domain and a custom email sender. A major gives you Thursday to Sunday of your audience choosing to open something with your name on it.
Unlike a season-long pool, a Masters pool starts and finishes inside one week. That makes it the easiest competition to sell internally, the easiest to get people to join, and a natural on-ramp into whatever you run for the rest of the year.
Offices, departments, clients or member groups each get their own standings and their own head-to-head against the others. In a pool where the overall winner is partly luck, the group leaderboard is the one people actually care about.
Six tours come off it: the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour, the DP World Tour, LIV Golf, the Asian Tour and the Japan Golf Tour. Fields, tee times, round scores, the cut line and the final leaderboard all arrive on their own across the four days. Nobody on your side is retyping a leaderboard at 9pm on a Friday to work out who survived the cut, which is exactly when a hand-run pool falls over.
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