How to Run a Open Championship Pool: The 2026 Commissioner's Guide

The format decides everything else. Get this right and the rest of the guide is just paperwork. Get it wrong and you'll be apologizing to your group chat on Sunday night.

Five formats cover 95% of real-world Open Championship pools:

• Tier Draft (Pick 5). Split the field into tiers by world ranking. Each entry picks one golfer per tier (or within caps on the top tiers). Fastest to set up. Forces every entry to look different. Best for friend groups of 6–20.
• Pick 6, Use 4. Draft 6 golfers, only your best 4 to-par scores count. Built-in cushion against missed cuts. Best for office pools of 15+.
• Snake Draft. Random order, picks reverse each round. Once a golfer is taken, they're off the board. Best for 6–12 people who can do the draft live.
• Salary Cap. Each golfer has a dollar value; you build a lineup under a budget. Best for DFS-minded groups. Requires a tool — pricing the field by hand is a half-day job.
• Calcutta Auction. Auction every golfer pre-tournament; the owner of the winning golfer takes the pot. Best for in-person groups where the auction night is the event.

For the Open specifically: the morning/afternoon weather draw can flip a pool overnight. Skip the Cut and Final Stretch are popular here because they avoid penalizing entries that drew the bad-weather wave on Thursday or Friday.

For a deeper breakdown of all 10 formats, see The 10 Masters Pool Formats, Explained — the same taxonomy applies to every major.

The cardinal rule of running a Open Championship pool is: write everything down before Thursday. Every dispute you'll have on Sunday night is something you could have prevented with a 200-word document a few days earlier.

Five things to cover:

• Entry fee or free. Free pools sidestep state-by-state gambling rules entirely, eliminate Venmo-chasing, and let you invite anyone — including the kid cousin and the dad who hates apps. If you charge, $20 per entry with a 70/20/10 payout split is the office-pool standard.
• Cut penalty. Specify exactly what happens when a golfer misses the cut. Most common: +8 strokes, 80 strokes per round, or no penalty in weekend-only formats. Pick one. Write it down.
• Tiebreakers. Standard first tiebreaker: the entry whose best-scoring single golfer had the lower individual score. Second tiebreaker has two valid directions — favorite-wins (better top pick wins) or longshot-wins (deeper pick on the roster wins). Cut Line Club uses the longshot rule. Pick a direction before Thursday.
• WD/DQ handling. Treat withdrawals and disqualifications the same as missed cuts unless you have a strong reason not to.
• Late picks. Field-average score, lowest tier, or disqualification. Pick one and stop debating.

You have two real options for actually running the pool: a spreadsheet, or a free app.

Spreadsheet path. Build a Google Sheet with one tab for picks, one for scores, one for the leaderboard. Manually copy scores from pgatour.com after every round. Apply the cut penalty by hand. Field formula errors when someone enters “T-12” into a number column. Spreadsheets work fine for groups of fewer than 10, if you don't mind being the person who has to babysit it.

App path. Use a free pool app like Cut Line Club. Share an invite link, watch the live leaderboard. The app builds the field, enforces tier caps, scores the cut penalty, and posts results automatically. Setup takes about a minute. There's no cost. There's no payment, ever.

One caveat: Cut Line Club currently runs a tier-draft format only — Pick 5 with caps on the world top 5 and top 15. If your group wants snake draft, salary cap, calcutta, or another non-tier format, you're still in the spreadsheet world for now.

The Open Championship field is set in the days leading up to the tournament. Pull the official list from the tournament site or the OWGR rankings page. The hard part is tiering it.

Two reasonable tier structures:

• 4 tiers of equal size. Cleaner math, easier to draft. Pick one golfer per tier and you have a 4-pick entry. Add a fifth pick from anywhere in the field for a 5-pick entry.
• 6 tiers of equal size. More fine-grained, lets you put a hard cap on the elite tier. Best for Pick-6-Use-4 formats.

Open fields include international qualifiers and DP World Tour players who may not be in the OWGR top 100 but have strong links pedigrees. Don't tier strictly by OWGR — leave room for course-fit sleepers.

A free pool app does this automatically — Cut Line Club uses the OWGR top 5 and top 15 as caps so every entry has at least two picks from outside the top 15.

The single hardest part of running any pool is collecting picks on time. Three rules:

• Set a hard deadline. First tee time Thursday. No exceptions, no “just five more minutes.” The moment you make an exception once, the deadline is meaningless.
• Pick a single channel. Group text, Slack, email, or app. One channel. Confirm receipt of every entry with a thumbs up.
• Send three reminders. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday morning. Brief and unapologetic.

For late picks, default to disqualification. It feels harsh until the third year you let someone slide and they win.

If you're using a spreadsheet, here's the realistic Friday workflow: pull live scores from pgatour.com, copy each golfer's round score into your sheet, recalculate to-par, recalculate the team total, refresh the leaderboard tab, screenshot it, paste into the group chat. Repeat after every round. Time budget: roughly 20 minutes a round, four rounds, 80 minutes total — and that's before the cut penalty math.

Time spent so far if you're running this manually: ~9 hours. Time spent if Cut Line Club is doing it: about 12 minutes (mostly setup).

On Friday, after the cut, apply the cut penalty to every missed-cut golfer per the rules you wrote in step 2. This is where most spreadsheet pools fall apart — the formula breaks, two people get the same score by accident, and someone on the cut bubble argues about the cut number.

On Sunday, post the final leaderboard before the last group putts out, so people can sweat the closers in real time. That's the moment the entire week pays off.

Four edge cases will absolutely happen. Plan for them:

• A golfer withdraws mid-round. Treat as a missed cut: 80 strokes (or your equivalent penalty) for every round they don't complete.
• Weather delay pushes play to Monday. Wait for the official PGA Tour ruling on whether the tournament is final, then score it the same way.
• Score dispute. Point at the rules document from step 2 and move on. If the rules don't cover it, default to the official tournament scorecard.
• Missed picks. Apply the rule you wrote in step 5.

Time zone friction is the #1 thing that goes wrong for North American Open pools. Lock picks the night before, post leaderboards on the lunch break, and accept that Sunday morning here is Sunday afternoon there.

Sunday evening, after the final putt: post the final leaderboard with the winner highlighted, the cut-penalty math visible, and a one-line congratulations. Tag the winner in the group chat. If there's a tiebreaker, show the work.

Pay out within 48 hours if there's a payout. If your pool runs on bragging rights, screenshot the final board and pin it to the group chat — that's the trophy.

The best gift you can give next year's commissioner — even if it's you — is a clean handoff. Save the rules document, the final leaderboard, and the contact list of everyone who played.

If you're running it on Cut Line Club, your club persists year over year. Re-running takes about ten minutes instead of two hours.

Spreadsheets are fine if you have nine friends, infinite patience, and a free Sunday night. For everyone else, commissioner work is the actual cost of running a pool — and it's a cost a free tool can wipe out.

Cut Line Club is the version of this guide where you skip steps 3 through 7. It builds the field, enforces tier limits at draft time, scores the cut penalty automatically, and posts the live leaderboard for you. Free forever. No credit card. No payments through the app — ever.