Ready to Run Your Pool?
Settle Up Golf handles the draft, the live leaderboard, and the payouts — so you can actually watch the golf on Sunday.
Drafting pros with your buddies during Masters week is half the fun of watching golf. Here's how to set up a PGA Tour betting pool — and actually get paid at the end of it.
Every April, a group text lights up the week before Augusta. Someone says, "Are we doing a Masters pool this year?" and suddenly there are 14 people arguing about draft order, buy-ins, and whether Scottie Scheffler should count as a first-round pick or be banned entirely. That's a PGA Tour betting pool in its natural habitat — part fantasy draft, part office pool, part excuse to care deeply about a Thursday morning tee time in Georgia.
A PGA Tour betting pool is any friendly competition where a group of friends puts money into a pot and uses a PGA Tour event — usually a major, sometimes just a regular Sunday broadcast — to decide who wins. The core mechanic is almost always the same: everyone claims a pro (or a set of pros), the leaderboard decides the standings, and one person walks away with the pot.
These pools explode during the four majors — the Masters, PGA Championship, US Open, and Open Championship — because those are the weeks casual golf fans actually tune in. But there's no reason to stop there. A weekly PGA Tour pool works just as well for the Players Championship, a WGC event, or any tournament your group decides to care about. The format scales from three coworkers to a 40-person office pool without breaking.
There's no official rulebook for a golf betting pool with friends, which is both the blessing and the curse of the format. Here are the four structures that actually work.
Draft pick (one pro per person). The simplest version. Everyone takes turns picking one pro from the field — either by snake draft order or by auction — and whoever's pro finishes highest on Sunday takes the pot. You'll see this a lot during the Masters, where field size is small and the stars are easy to rank. It's quick, it's social, and there's zero math involved.
Survivor pool. Each week, every player in the pool picks one pro who has to make the cut. If your guy misses the cut, you're out. The last person standing wins. Survivor pools are perfect for a full season format — they reward research, punish chalk picks (you can only use each pro once), and generate drama every Friday afternoon when the cut line starts shifting.
Round-by-round pool. Instead of betting on the full event, pool members predict scores or leaderboard positions after each of the four rounds. This one works great for the US Open and Open Championship where cut lines are brutal and the leaderboard scrambles day to day. Points accumulate, and the total after Sunday decides the winner.
Full-event team draft. Each person drafts a team of three to five pros, and the best combined score (or top-X scorers) wins. This is the format of choice for larger groups — once you have more than 10 people in a pool, single-pro drafting gets thin fast, and teams spread the field out. A how-to-run-a-major-championship-pool primer for a group of 20 basically always lands here.
Running a PGA Tour fantasy pool isn't complicated, but the groups that enjoy it most are the ones that agree on the rules before the first tee shot. Here's the playbook.
1. Pick the event. Masters for maximum buzz, PGA Championship for a more unpredictable field, US Open if your group loves carnage, Open Championship if you want weather chaos. For a weekly pool, pick the highest-profile event on the schedule that week.
2. Decide the buy-in. Twenty bucks a person is the sweet spot for most friend groups. Enough that people take it seriously, not so much that anyone stresses out. Office pools sometimes go $10 to get more participants. Buddy groups running majors-only pools sometimes go $50 or $100.
3. Invite the group and lock entries. Group text, Slack channel, whatever your people use. Set a hard deadline — typically Wednesday night before the tournament — and no late entries. Nothing ruins a pool faster than someone trying to join Friday afternoon when their guy is on the leaderboard.
4. Run the draft or picks. Snake draft is the cleanest: everyone ranks from whoever won the coin flip, then reverse order round two, and so on. Auctions work for experienced groups who like the strategy. For survivor pools, people just submit their weekly pick by deadline.
5. Track the leaderboard. This is the part that historically killed PGA Tour office pools. The old way: one person maintains a shared Excel sheet, refreshes the PGA Tour website every hour on Sunday, and manually calculates standings. Someone inevitably misses an update, an argument breaks out, and the pool commissioner regrets volunteering.
6. Settle up on Sunday. Venmo, Zelle, cash — pay out the winners the same day. Don't let it drag into next week, or it never happens.
The tracking and settlement part is where a lot of pools break down. You want to watch golf on Sunday, not field texts asking "wait, where's Rory right now?" Apps like Settle Up Golf handle the pro draft, pull live leaderboard data automatically, and calculate the final payouts so the commissioner doesn't have to. You set up the pool once, invite your friends with a share code, everyone drafts inside the app, and standings update as scores come in. When the tournament finishes, the app shows exactly who owes whom and how much — one tap to settle, no spreadsheets, no "did I pay you for the Masters?" texts three weeks later.
Keep the buy-in reasonable. The goal is engagement, not ransom. A $20 Masters pool with 15 friends generates a $300 pot and real Sunday-afternoon stakes without anyone losing sleep. High-dollar pools tend to create arguments, especially the first time they happen.
Agree on tie-breakers before the draft. Two pros finishing T-8 happens constantly at majors. Decide in advance: do ties split the placement, does the pro with fewer strokes on Sunday win, or does the pro with the better starting draft position get the tiebreaker? Five minutes of clarity up front saves a lot of grief at 7pm Sunday.
Stick to one scoring method. If your pool uses "best finish wins," don't let someone argue that their pro had a better Friday. Pick one ruleset and stay with it across the whole event.
Settle the same day. Sunday night, winners get paid. The longer it lingers, the less likely anyone pays attention next time around.
A masters betting pool is fundamentally a reason for a group of friends to care about the same thing at the same time — and that's rarer than it sounds. You pick a guy on Wednesday, you watch him make a putt from 40 feet on Saturday that you didn't even know you cared about, and suddenly your group chat is chaos. The money is the excuse, but the real prize is the shared experience with your friends. Once you've run one, you'll run one every year. Just figure out the rules up front, settle up on Sunday night, and start planning the next one.
Set up a pool in minutes: Open Settle Up Golf →
Settle Up Golf handles the draft, the live leaderboard, and the payouts — so you can actually watch the golf on Sunday.