Golf Pool Formats Explained: Open, Tiered, Draft, One-and-Done, Handicap

Every golf pool is the same bet underneath: you pick some golfers, their real scores become your score, lowest wins. The format is just the rule for how you pick - and that one rule decides whether your pool is a coin-flip between twelve identical lineups or a genuine argument about who knows golf. Here are the six formats people actually run, what each one is good for, and the one question to ask before you choose.

The question that picks your format

How many people, and how much do they know? A pool of eight golf nuts wants a draft. A pool of forty co-workers who watch the Masters once a year wants something they can enter in ninety seconds and still have a chance in. Everything below follows from that.

1. Open picks (“pick five”)

Everyone picks any five golfers. Team score is the sum of their scores to par. Simple, fast, and the right default for a first pool. The known weakness: with no restriction, half the pool takes the same three favorites and the tournament comes down to the fourth and fifth picks. Fixes that keep it simple: a best-4-of-5 rule so one missed cut doesn't sink a team, and a sensible missed-cut penalty (more on that in the missed-cut article).

Best for: any size, first-timers, single tournaments. Watch for: duplicate lineups in big pools - use a tiebreaker.

2. Tiered picks (“pick one from each tier”)

The field is split into tiers by ranking or odds - favorites in Tier 1, long shots in Tier 5 or 6 - and each roster needs exactly one golfer per tier. Nobody can stack the favorites, so every team has a star, a sleeper and some judgment calls in between. It's the most common Masters pool format for a reason: it produces different lineups without asking anyone to sit through a draft. The “pick 6, use 4” variant (six tiers, best four scores count) is the same idea with a cushion for missed cuts.

Best for: 15 to 100+ people, majors, office pools. Watch for: tiers built from stale rankings - build them from the field the week of.

3. Live draft (“snake draft”)

Teams pick in order, and once a golfer is taken nobody else can have him. With 10 teams and 5 picks, the whole top 50 goes and every roster is unique - every missed cut and birdie run matters to exactly one person. Feels like fantasy football because it is. The cost is logistics: everyone at their phone for twenty minutes, in order, before the deadline.

Best for: 6 to 16 people who actually follow golf. Watch for: a pool bigger than about 16 - the late rounds run out of golfers anyone has heard of.

4. One-and-done (season-long)

One golfer per tournament, and once you've used him he's gone for the season. The pick is easy; the season is a puzzle about when to spend each name. Most office pools in America are this format whether they call it that or not. Scoring is traditionally prize money; a points-by-finish version works the same way and doesn't care what the purse was.

Best for: a group that wants one pick a week all year with zero roster management. Watch for: people forgetting the deadline - reminders are the whole job.

5. Handicap (“the Moving Day format”)

Anyone can pick anyone - no tiers, no draft - because every golfer's rounds are adjusted by where he sits in the field. Favorites give strokes back (+2 per round for the top band), long shots get strokes in hand (−2 per round for the bottom band). Stacking Scheffler, McIlroy and Schauffele isn't a strategy, it's a six-stroke-a-round tax. The pool becomes about who beats expectations, which is the most interesting question in golf anyway. It's the format Moving Day's own free public pools run on, tuned against a full season of results.

Best for: big open pools where you can't run a draft and don't want tiers to do all the thinking. Watch for: the missed-cut rule - it has to track the field, not a fixed cliff.

6. Season points (“the majors pool”)

Not a pick format so much as a wrapper: run any of the above across several tournaments - the four majors, the playoffs, the whole year - and award points by finish each week into one standings table. The two decisions that matter are whether rosters lock for the season or re-pick each week, and how steep the points are: in a big pool a straight line (1st 100, last near 0) makes winning a week barely worth more than finishing 10th, so use a top-heavy curve.

Cheat sheet

All six run on Moving Day with live scoring; the presets and pick formats are documented in Formats & Rule Presets.