Pools on golfpools.co are scored by prize money, the same metric the PGA Tour uses to rank performance. Here's the math, with real numbers.
The core idea
Stroke-total scoring treats both equally, a stroke is a stroke. Prize money scoring captures the truth. At a typical PGA Tour event with a $20M purse:
Top of the leaderboard
$1.44M
Swing on 1 stroke (1st vs 2nd)
Bottom of the leaderboard
$2K
Swing on 1 stroke (49th vs 50th)
That's a 720× difference in value, on the same single stroke. Prize money scoring weighs that correctly. Stroke totals don't.
The PGA Tour uses standard payout percentages applied to each tournament's purse. For a typical $9M event:
Your team's total is the sum of your picks' projected earnings. Highest total wins. Percentages stay the same across tournaments; the dollar amounts scale with the purse. A signature event with a $20M purse pays more per position than a regular tour stop with a $6M purse.
When players tie, their prize money is averaged across the affected positions. Three players tied for 4th split the prize for positions 4, 5, and 6 equally, so each player's "score" is the average of those three payouts, not the 4th-place amount.
This matters because tied finishes are everywhere on Sunday. A major might have 8-12 players tied for various positions. The math handles this correctly so picking a player who finishes T20 with 5 others isn't penalized vs. a clean T20 finish.
If your pick misses the cut, withdraws, or is disqualified, their projected earnings drop to $0 for the tournament. The rest of your team continues earning normally, so one missed cut hurts but doesn't crater your week. Your other four picks can still carry you.
Some pool platforms use a "substitute the pick" rule for withdrawals. We don't. Once picks lock at Thursday tee-off, your roster is final. Keeps the rules simple and avoids commissioner refereeing.
The leaderboard polls live tournament data every 5 minutes during active tournaments. When you're viewing the page, it refreshes within about 60 seconds. Projected earnings shift every round as players move up and down. A sleeper who jumps from T30 to T8 might swing your team total by $100K+ in a single round.
If two teams end the tournament with the same total prize money, both get the same rank on the leaderboard with a clear tie indicator. For pools with stakes, the commissioner decides how to split the pot (usually 50/50). We don't use a secret tiebreaker like "whoever picked the winner". That would be opaque and disputable. The leaderboard just shows the truth.
Salary cap pools, where each player has a "price" and you build a roster under a budget, are a different format common in daily fantasy. We don't currently support them. The tradeoff: salary cap pools require constant price updates and feel more like daily fantasy than a friend pool. We picked tiered draft + prize money scoring as the right defaults for social pools, not competition-against-strangers play.
For more on why we picked this format, read why prize money pools beat stroke totals.