A golf pool is built on a small number of rule choices. The names are short, the decisions take five minutes, and the wizard gives the host a sensible default for every field. But the rules are doing real work — they decide who has a chance to win, how dramatic the leaderboard feels by Saturday, and whether the pool resolves with a clear winner or a four-way split. This guide walks through the choices a commissioner faces and what each one signals about the pool's character.
Rules are the lever a commissioner uses to shape the feel of the pool. There is no right answer; there is a right answer for your group.
The five rule choices
Every OfficePoolGolf pool exposes the same set of five rule choices in the wizard. Each one is independent of the others; the host can take any combination.
Roster size and counting set
How many golfers each entrant drafts, and how many of those count toward the team total. "Pick six, count four" is the most common shape. Larger rosters with smaller counting sets reward diversification; tighter rosters with full counting reward concentrated picks. The shape determines how punishing a single missed cut feels and how much room there is for an underdog roster to win.
Cut rule
What happens to the score of a golfer who misses the cut, withdraws, or is disqualified. Three modes are available; the choice changes how much variance the pool absorbs versus passes through.
Tiebreaker rule
How the pool resolves two rosters that finish on the same raw total. Five rule-based options plus a default split. Detailed in Tiebreakers Explained; the short version is that the default split is the right answer for casual groups and
best_singleis the right answer for groups that want a single winner.Payout structure
How many positions get paid and what each position receives. The wizard handles the math; the host picks the number of payout positions (one to twenty, tier-dependent) and the percentage split. Bragging-rights pools set the entry fee to zero and skip this entirely.
Lock and visibility
When the pool stops accepting entries (default: Thursday tee-off; Weekend Shootout pools lock Saturday morning instead) and who can find the pool (public, unlisted, or password-protected on Eagle and above).
Cut rules in depth — the choice that matters most
The cut rule is the choice most likely to surprise a first-time commissioner, because it does the most work on the leaderboard. When a roster's golfer misses the cut, the engine still needs a score for R3 and R4 (otherwise the cut roster would post a misleadingly low team total — fewer strokes is better in golf). The cut rule decides what that filler score is.
| Mode | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
worst_active | For each missed round, fills in the worst score posted by any active golfer in your pool that round. | Most pools. Scales with how the field actually played. The default. |
fixed_penalty | A commissioner-set number (often 80) stands in for every missed round on every cut golfer. | Pools that want predictability and a rule new entrants can recite from memory. |
field_average | The engine averages every active golfer's score in the round and uses that as the penalty. | Pools that want a middle-ground penalty — lighter than worst-active in tough weather, heavier in calm. |
A worked example. Say your roster is six golfers, you count four, and one of your six misses the cut in a worst_active pool. After R2 the engine sees five active golfers and one cut. For R3, it picks the worst of your five actives — say 78 — and assigns that as the cut golfer's R3 score for ranking purposes. It does the same for R4. The cut golfer is not erased; they are penalized at a level the field actually shot.
The cut rule only matters if cut, withdrawn, or disqualified golfers are among your counting four. If your bottom two are the ones who missed, the engine drops them when picking your counting set and the cut rule never fires. This is why "pick more than you count" works so well — it limits how often the cut rule actually punishes a roster.
Payout structures and what they signal
OfficePoolGolf supports percentage-based payouts (the entry pot multiplied by each position's percentage). A typical three-position split: 60% to first, 25% to second, 15% to third. Five-position splits flatten the curve; one-position splits make every entrant a long shot.
The payout curve signals the pool's character. A steep curve (70/20/10) signals "swing for the fences"; a flat curve (30/25/20/15/10) signals "consistency wins." Most groups land somewhere in the middle. There is no right curve; there is a curve that fits your group's tolerance for variance.
Tied payouts split the combined positions. Two rosters tied for first in a top-three payout split the first-and-second slots evenly; third place is unaffected. The tiebreaker rule, if set, can resolve the tie before the split applies — see Tiebreakers Explained.
Lock time and pool visibility
The default lock is Thursday at the tournament's first tee-off — once one ball is in the air, no more entries. The host can set a custom deadline on Birdie and above; common custom locks include Wednesday evening (give the host the night to chase down stragglers) and Thursday at noon Eastern (split the difference between East-coast offices that want to draft over morning coffee and West-coast offices that want until lunch).
Weekend Shootout pools lock at 7:00 AM Central on Saturday, regardless of the actual R3 first tee-off. This is intentional — the format is built around late deciders and cut-aversion, and locking Saturday morning gives the room two rounds of evidence to draft against. Full mechanics live in The Weekend Shootout Format.
Visibility runs on three settings: public (anyone can find and join), unlisted (the join link is the only way in), and password-protected (Eagle and above). Most office pools run unlisted — the host shares the link in a group chat and that is the whole onboarding flow.
House rules — the free-text field
The pool page includes a house-rules text field (Birdie and above) where the commissioner can write down the rules that do not fit the wizard's fields. Common entries: "if Scheffler withdraws after Thursday tee-off, every roster gets a one-time edit"; "ties resolve via best single round, then earliest submission, then a coin flip via group text"; "winner sets the next pool's tournament."
The house-rules field is plain text — OPG does not enforce what is written there. Its purpose is to give the room a shared written reference for the agreements that exist in conversation. Pools without house rules have a tendency to relitigate the same edge case every year; a single paragraph in the house-rules field is the lowest-effort cure.
Closing thoughts
Rules are the lever a commissioner uses to shape the feel of the pool. The same field, the same golfers, and the same week can produce a sleepy four-way split or a Sunday-night nail-biter depending on what the wizard captures on Tuesday. The defaults are good. Specific overrides can be great. Wholesale rebuilds of the rule set usually are not — they introduce edge cases nobody in the room is ready to argue about.
Want the host's full workflow? Read The Commissioner Guide. New to all of this? Start with What Is a Fantasy Golf Pool.