Golf scoring sounds intimidating until you write it down. In an OfficePoolGolf pool, the math is short: each entrant drafts a roster of pro golfers before the tournament begins, the app adds up the strokes those golfers post over four rounds, and the lowest team total wins. Everything else — cut rules, tiebreakers, live updates — is detail layered on top of that single idea.

Total strokes, counting golfers, cut rules, tiebreakers, and how the leaderboard updates live during play.

Total strokes, by the round

A men's major runs four rounds: R1 on Thursday, R2 on Friday, R3 on Saturday, and R4 on Sunday. Each round is 18 holes, and every stroke a golfer takes is counted. A golfer who shoots 69-71-70-68 has a tournament total of 278.

OPG stores raw strokes for every counted golfer, but the leaderboard shows score-to-par because that is how golf is normally read. If the course par is 72, a 278 reads as 10-under (often written -10). Even par reads as E. The conversion is the same for individuals and for team totals.

The Weekend Shootout format is the exception. Those pools score R3 and R4 only — two rounds of competition rather than four — and rosters lock at Saturday tee-off rather than Thursday. The scoring engine still adds raw strokes; it just sums two rounds instead of four.

Counting golfers — pick more than you need

Most pools have you draft a roster larger than the team that actually counts. A common shape is "pick six, count the top four." Picking extra golfers buffers you against a bad week — if one of your six shoots a 78 on Thursday, the engine drops that round when it picks your counting four, and you are not punished for owning a golfer who happened to have a bad day.

The math runs at the player level. After every round, the engine ranks your six golfers by their total strokes so far, takes the lowest four, and adds those up. Your counting set can change from one round to the next as form shifts. If your number-three pick struggles into Saturday and your number-five pick catches fire, the engine swaps them automatically — there is nothing to manage.

Counting size is a commissioner choice. Smaller counting sets (two of five, three of six) reward concentrated picks and punish a single off week. Larger counting sets (four of six, five of seven) reward depth and reduce variance. Neither is "correct" — they make different pools feel different. New groups often start with four of six and adjust the next year.

Cut rules — what happens when a golfer misses the weekend

A standard PGA Tour major cuts the field in half after R2. Golfers above the cut line go home; everyone else plays R3 and R4. Some events (signature events, the Tour Championship) have no cut at all, and a few use a 54-hole cut after R3. OPG reads each tournament's actual cut policy from the data and applies it to your pool automatically.

When one of your golfers misses the cut — or withdraws, or is disqualified — the engine still needs a score for the rounds they did not play. Otherwise a roster that lost three golfers to the cut would post a misleadingly low team total. OPG offers three cut rules; the commissioner picks one when setting up the pool.

Worst active. For each missed round, the engine fills in the worst score posted by any active golfer in your pool that round. It is the most common choice because it scales with how the field actually played — a brutal windy day means a worse penalty than a calm one — and it always lands inside the realm of "a real score a real golfer shot."

Fixed penalty. The commissioner picks a number (often 80) and that number stands in for every missed round, every cut golfer. It is the most predictable rule and the most straightforward to explain to a new entrant.

Field average. The engine averages every active golfer's score in the round and uses that as the penalty. Lighter than worst-active in a tough round, heavier in a calm one. Less common, but legitimate.

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. It does the same for R4. The cut golfer is not erased; they are penalized at a level the field actually shot.

Tiebreakers

The probability of two teams finishing dead even on raw strokes is low but real, especially in larger pools. Pools can use no tiebreaker (ties split the combined payout, which is the default), or any of several rule-based options:

• Best single — whichever team has a single counting golfer with the lowest round wins. Often called "best round" in casual play.
• Predict the winner — each entrant picks the tournament winner when they submit their roster. Correct picks beat incorrect picks.
• Fewest cuts — whichever team had fewer golfers miss the cut wins.
• Best score type — a cascade through albatross → eagle → birdie counts. The team with more eagles beats the team with more birdies, and so on.
• Earliest submission — whichever entry was submitted earlier wins. Useful as a final fallback.

If a tiebreaker still cannot resolve the tie — say two teams both have the same best single round, the same number of cuts, and submitted simultaneously — OPG cascades through a default order until something separates them, and only ties the payout if nothing does. Most pools never hit the cascade; it is there so the leaderboard always has a defined order.

Live scoring during play

The leaderboard updates throughout the tournament as official scores post. Strokes per round, score-to-par, current position — everything refreshes as the tour publishes new data. There is nothing to refresh manually, no script to run, and no commissioner action required during play. You sign in, you watch, and you wait for Sunday.

A pool moves through five status states: setup while the commissioner is configuring, open once entries are accepted, locked after the entry deadline passes, active once R1 tee-off begins, and completed after the final scores post. A pool that is cancelled before play exits separately. The status drives what the page shows: an open pool surfaces the join CTA, a locked pool shows a countdown, an active pool shows the live leaderboard, and a completed pool shows the final results with payouts.

Want the host-side view of all of this? Read the Commissioner Guide. Want the end-to-end overview? Start with How to Run an Office Golf Pool.