If you are reading this, someone in your group probably said "we should do a pool for the next major" and the room nodded. Now you are the host. The commissioner role is mostly five minutes of setup, an invite link, and then a week of watching golf with your group while OfficePoolGolf handles the math. This guide walks through every choice you will make and what each one actually does.
Everything a host needs to set up, run, and close out a golf pool — from rules to payouts.
Setting up your first pool
The pool wizard lives behind a sign-in. Once you are in, you pick the tournament, name the pool, and step through a short set of configuration screens. Most fields have sensible defaults, and you can always copy a previous pool's rules forward when you run the next one.
The first decision is the tier. There are four — Par, Birdie, Eagle, and Albatross. Par is always free; higher tiers may carry a flat one-time setup fee that scales with capacity and feature scope. The tier governs how big the pool can grow, how many entries one entrant can submit, how many co-admins you can add, and how much configuration you have access to. Par is the most constrained: up to ten entries, one per person, fixed rules. Birdie opens up roster size, payouts, and tiebreaker choice. Eagle adds password protection, late entry, post-lock roster edits, and bulk payment actions. Albatross unlocks the full suite. Most office pools fit comfortably inside Birdie or Eagle; pick the smallest tier that gives you the features you actually want. Players never pay OPG anything — any tier fee is paid by the commissioner at setup.
After the tier, the wizard collects the rules, the entry fee (or zero if you are running a bragging-rights pool), and visibility. You can stop, save a draft, and come back — the wizard remembers where you left off until you publish.
The wizard also asks you to pick the format. The default is the standard four-round pool that locks Thursday morning. Weekend Shootout is the alternative — a two-round pool covering R3 and R4 that locks Saturday morning instead, so your group can watch R1 and R2 play out and then draft. Full mechanics, lock-time details, and roster-after-the-cut strategy live in The Weekend Shootout Format.
Choosing rules that fit your group
This is the heart of the job. The choices are not life-or-death — almost any reasonable configuration produces a fun pool — but a few decisions shape how the week feels.
Roster size and counting golfers. You pick how many golfers each entrant drafts (the roster size) and how many of those count toward the team score (the counting set). A common shape is "pick six, count the top four." Smaller counting sets reward concentrated picks; larger counting sets reward depth. New groups often start with four of six.
Value bands. Most pools have a value-band system: every golfer in the field is assigned a point value based on world ranking, and your roster has a point cap. The cap forces a trade-off — you cannot draft Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, and Jon Rahm all on the same team. Values are points, not dollars; they exist purely to balance roster construction. The wizard suggests a default cap that scales with roster size; tweak it if your group wants more or less freedom to stack stars.
Cut rule. When a roster golfer misses the 36-hole cut, withdraws, or is disqualified, OPG still needs a number for the rounds they did not play. Three modes:
worst_active— fill missed rounds with the worst score any active golfer in the pool posted that round. The most common choice. It scales with how the field actually played.fixed_penalty— pick a number (often 80) and use that for every missed round. The most predictable rule.field_average— fill with the average score of active golfers that round. Less common but legitimate.
The full mechanics live in How Scoring Works. Pick one and tell your group up front.
Tiebreaker. Pools at Birdie and above can choose a tiebreaker mode. best_single settles ties by the lowest single counting round on either team. predict_winner asks each entrant to pick the tournament winner at submission, and uses correct picks to separate ties. fewest_cuts favors teams that lost fewer golfers. best_score_type cascades through albatross → eagle → birdie counts. earliest_submission favors whoever entered first. none splits tied payouts. There is no wrong answer; best_single is the most common.
Payout structure. You pick how many places get paid (1 through N, depending on tier) and what each place gets as a percentage of the pool. Birdie supports up to five paid places; Eagle and Albatross go up to ten and twenty respectively. If two teams tie in a paid position, the combined payout for those positions is split equally — the engine handles the math.
For deeper configuration questions, the FAQ covers the long tail. Ready to host? Sign in and the wizard walks you through every choice above.
Visibility and invites
A pool's visibility controls who can find it.
- Public — listed on the public browse page; anyone signed in can join. Best for community pools or open-to-the-firm events.
- Unlisted — not shown on the browse page, but anyone with the share link can join. The default for most office pools. You email or text the link to your group and that is the gate.
- Password protected — Eagle and Albatross only. The link is open but the join screen prompts for a password you set during the wizard. Useful for company pools where you want to share the link in a wide channel but only the intended folks have the password.
Every pool generates a share link automatically. You can copy it from the pool's page once it is open. Birdie and above can also add a custom entry deadline if you want to close entries earlier than the default tee-off lock.
During the tournament
This is the part where the commissioner does the least. Once the pool locks, scoring runs on its own — leaderboards update through the week, position movement is tracked entry by entry, and round recaps go out (subject to entrant preferences) after each round closes. There is no manual score entry, no spreadsheet to refresh, and no end-of-day reconciliation. You watch golf.
The one thing worth doing during play is reading the room. If a celebrated pick withdraws on Wednesday or someone has questions about how the cut rule plays out, a quick group message from the commissioner builds trust. Eagle and Albatross pools can broadcast in-app announcements; smaller pools rely on the group chat you already use.
If something genuinely breaks — a scoring oddity, a player who looks miscategorized — contact us. We watch every active tournament closely and most issues are resolved within hours. The commissioner does not need to debug the data.
After the tournament
When R4 official posts and the math settles, the pool flips to completed. The final standings are frozen, the payout column lights up next to the winners, and a results email goes out (at Birdie and above) to the entries you opted in.
For the next year, the pool stays in your dashboard as a historical record. The leaderboard, the rosters, the round-by-round detail — all of it preserved. Copy the pool forward when the next tournament comes around and you keep the rules without rebuilding the wizard.
Running a clean pool is mostly the boring work of setting clear rules and communicating them up front. OPG handles the rest. When in doubt, default to the smallest configuration that gives your group what they want — you can always make next year's pool more elaborate.