Weekend Shootout is the two-round pool format on OfficePoolGolf. The pool locks Saturday morning instead of Thursday, and rosters cover R3 and R4 only — the back half of a four-round tournament. Entrants draft after the cut has already been set, so the field is known, the storylines are already running, and the math compresses into two days of weekend golf.

A Weekend Shootout drafts after the cut, scores only R3 and R4, and locks at 7:00 AM Central on Saturday — built for groups who want the back-half drama without the Thursday-morning rush.

When Weekend Shootout makes sense

Standard four-round pools are the default for a reason — they cover the full tournament arc, reward the entrants who read the field correctly on Tuesday, and put the cut line in play as a real source of suspense on Friday night. Weekend Shootout is the alternative when the standard shape does not fit. Three groups in particular get more out of the two-round format.

Late deciders. The group that talked about running a pool on Wednesday, did not get to it on Thursday morning, and watched R1 tee off without an entry submitted. In a standard pool that group is out for the week. In a Weekend Shootout they have until Saturday morning to organize, send the link around, and draft against a field that has already been pruned to the survivors. Nothing about the format requires this — it is the most common reason groups choose it.

Cut-aversion. Casual groups often dislike the moment on Friday night when half the roster vanishes. The cut rule handles the math correctly, but the experience of watching three of your six golfers disappear over a single evening can sour a first-time entrant on the format. A Weekend Shootout sidesteps the cut entirely. Every golfer in the pool's field has already made the cut by the time entries open; nobody on any roster is going to disappear on Friday night because Friday night is already past.

Back-half drama. Some groups prefer the leaderboard concentrated on the weekend itself. R1 and R2 of a four-round major are the storyline rounds — leaders emerge, the cut line moves — but R3 and R4 are where the trophy actually changes hands. A Weekend Shootout puts the entire pool inside that window. The early rounds become spectator golf for everyone in the group, and the pool itself only starts on Saturday.

How scoring works in two rounds

The scoring engine is the same one How Scoring Works walks for standard pools, with two practical differences. First, the rounds being summed are R3 and R4 only — the engine ignores R1 and R2 entirely for purposes of team totals. Second, the missed-cut penalty math does not run, because the cut has already happened before the pool locked and no golfer in the field of a Weekend Shootout pool is in the missed-cut bucket on the day of lock.

Everything else carries over. Each entrant drafts a roster of pro golfers. The roster is larger than the team that counts — most pools use the same "pick six, count the top four" shape standard pools use — and after R3 and R4 the engine takes the lowest counting set from each roster and adds the strokes. Score-to-par is the display convention; raw strokes are the storage. The team total is the sum across the counting golfers across the two rounds.

Tiebreakers operate the same way they do in standard pools. best_single looks at the lowest counting round on either side; predict_winner checks each entrant's Sunday-winner pick against the actual winner; fewest_cuts and best_score_type and the rest of the cascade all run identically. Withdrawal and disqualification on the weekend still happen — golfers occasionally pull out between R3 tee-off and the trophy ceremony — and the engine handles those rounds the same way it would in any pool, by applying the commissioner's chosen cut rule to the missed weekend round.

Roster construction after the cut

Drafting a Weekend Shootout roster is a different exercise from drafting a standard pool. The field is smaller and the information is denser. The cut has set the upper bound on every golfer's worst-case scenario — nobody on the available list is going to shoot 79 on Friday and disappear, because Friday is already over. The remaining question is who plays the weekend well.

Already-cut golfers cannot be picked. The wizard filters the available player list to the post-cut field automatically, and the value bands re-rank against that smaller pool. Value caps still apply — the same trade-off that prevents a standard pool from stacking the top of the world ranking applies here, just against a different roster of available stars. If three of the favorites missed the cut, the cap math shifts; if the headline names all played their way through, the cap functions almost identically to a standard pool.

The strategic shift is from "who will survive the cut" to "who closes well." Pre-tournament drafting rewards groups who picked the field correctly on Tuesday — favorites at value, sleepers near the bottom, depth in the middle. Weekend drafting rewards groups who read R1 and R2 carefully — who got hot, who is on a quiet streak, who is putting the ball where it needs to land for the weekend pin positions. A first-time Weekend Shootout entrant tends to over-weight the obvious leaders; a returning one tends to back the golfer two shots off the lead who has been striking the ball cleanly all week.

Lock timing

A Weekend Shootout pool locks at 7:00 AM Central Time on Saturday — the morning of R3. That is 13:00 UTC, which works out to 8:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 AM Pacific, and 1:00 PM London. International groups should sanity-check the conversion against their own region. The lock time is firm; rosters are frozen at that moment regardless of where individual entrants are in their draft.

In practice this means rosters need to be in by the close of Friday evening in most time zones. Entrants who like to draft late on Saturday morning need to be ready before breakfast on the East Coast. The wizard surfaces the lock time on the pool page so there is no ambiguity, and pre-lock reminders go out (subject to each entrant's preferences) on Friday afternoon and evening.

Who runs Weekend Shootouts

The commissioner picks the format during pool creation. The wizard offers two options — standard four-round and Weekend Shootout — and the choice is made before rules and entry fees are configured. After the format is set, the rest of the wizard runs the same way it does for a standard pool. The full host-side walkthrough lives in the Commissioner Guide; the format choice is one screen inside that workflow.

Anyone can play. Weekend Shootouts are not tier-gated on the entrant side — players join for free, the same way they join a standard pool, and the same per-tier entry caps apply. A commissioner who already runs a standard pool for a tournament can also run a Weekend Shootout for the same tournament under a separate name; the two are independent pools that happen to share a field on the weekend.

Common questions

Set one up

If your group has been talking about running a pool and Thursday morning came and went, the Weekend Shootout is the format that puts you back in the game. Sign in, pick the tournament, set the format to Weekend Shootout in the wizard, and you have until 7:00 AM Central on Saturday to get your group drafted. The back half of a major is the part most groups gather to watch anyway — the format puts the pool inside that window.