Five Strategies for Winning Your Golf One And Done Pool

Want to win your PGA golf One And Done pool? Make smarter picks by incorporating these strategy tips and data-driven advice.

Xander Schauffele looks to build on his impressive 2024 season. (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire)

Golf One and Done pools blend strategic planning with the thrilling unpredictability of the PGA Tour, offering a unique and engaging way to enjoy the sport. Participants must carefully navigate the highs and lows of each tournament, balancing the challenge of selecting the right players with the opportunity to maximize their winnings.

Whether you’re a dedicated golf enthusiast or a casual fan seeking the excitement of sports contests, Golf One and Done pools provide a dynamic and rewarding experience. The format demands foresight, flexibility, and a big touch of luck—qualities that make every pick and tournament a pivotal moment in the season-long journey.

Golf One And Done Picks

Golf One And Done Picks 2025

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Golf One and Done Pool Basics

A Golf One and Done pool operates much like an NFL survivor pool but with a distinctive twist. Participants select one PGA golfer for each tournament, with the catch that each golfer can only be used once per season. This constraint requires careful planning to determine when to “burn” top players while leaving room for later opportunities.

Unlike survivor pools, where a single misstep can lead to elimination, Golf One and Done pools are more forgiving. Even if some picks underperform, a few big wins can propel you to victory. The challenge lies in navigating golf’s inherent unpredictability, where even the strongest players often have modest chances of winning any given tournament.

Success in this format depends on blending strategic decisions with the patience to endure setbacks and the foresight to capitalize on key opportunities. While luck will always play a role, a sound strategy can significantly increase your chances of coming out on top at the end of a long PGA season.

Top Tips for Golf One and Done Success

  • Know Your Specific Pool Rules
  • Understand What Wins Golf One and Done Pools
  • Save the Best Golfers for the Biggest Purse Events
  • Adjust Strategy Based on Standings
  • Stay Engaged and Do Not Surrender

With the right approach, you can turn the ups and downs of the PGA season into a rewarding journey. The better your strategy, the less you’ll rely on luck to claim victory.

1) Know Your Specific One and Done Pool Rules

The standard “One and Done” Pool requires players to pick one golfer each tournament, and limits you to picking each golfer once per season. But there are a lot of variations, and all of them can impact your strategy. Some potential variations include:

  • The specific tournaments included
  • The scoring format used
  • Whether some tournaments require more than one pick
  • Whether some golfers can be re-used
  • The number of prize payout spots or percentage of pool that gets paid out
  • Rules on substituting or replacing golfers that withdraw
  • Whether there are season segments that have their own prize structure

Based on our research, lots of One and Done pools start in January and early February, and most of them extend through the FedEx Cup Playoffs. But there is plenty of variability regarding which specific tournament they start with, and also on whether or not they include the final TOUR Championship event (since it has a unique prize structure).

The exact number of tournaments included in your pool, and how many players you have to pick in total over the length of the contest, can significantly impact your ideal pick strategy.

The most common scoring format is to use the prize purse money won by the golfer in that event for the score, but there are also variations on that theme which might cause you to approach your pick making at least somewhat differently.

2) Understand What Wins One and Done Pools

In the typical Golf One and Done Pool that uses prize money won as the scoring metric, picking golfers that win tournaments is the key. Let’s take a look at the prize purse payouts for The Masters in 2024 as an example:

  • Scottie Scheffler, 1st place: $3,600,000
  • Ludvig Aberg, 2nd place: $2,160,000
  • Tommy Fleetwood, Max Homa, Collin Morikawa, tied for 3rd place: $1,040,000 each
  • Bryson DeChambeau and Cameron Smith, tied for 6th place: $695,000 each
  • Xander Schauffele, 8th place: $620,000
  • Tyrell Hatton, Cameron Young, and Will Zalatoris, tied for 9th place: $540,000 each

The difference between finishing 1st place and tied for 3rd place, in terms of prize money, was greater than the difference between 2nd place and someone who missed the cut.

Our One and Done Product will show you the betting market odds to win the tournament for each golfer, and allow you to track your entries to see how much money each has won automatically, once you tell us which golfer you picked for each event.

Analyzing Top-Performing vs. Average Entries

We scrutinized both the top-performing entries and entries with average scores in a prominent national One and Done Contest from 2023. If you looked at a typical week, you might not be able to tell them apart, and you certainly could not do so by their worst weeks.

On average, the top entries missed the cut in 5.0 tournaments, while the average-finishing entries missed the cut in 5.4 tournaments.

The difference was at the top, in a handful of tournaments. The top entries had a week where they earned more than $2 million in prize money 4.2 times (basically, a 1st or 2nd place in the biggest money events), compared to 0.6 times for the average entries.

About 65% of the points for a top-finishing entry came from their best five events for the season, and 96% of the points came from the upper half of outcomes.

The top entries averaged a stretch of at least 4+ tournaments consecutively where they never earned more than $200,000 with a golfer. The difference was in the handful of events they did hit big.

In short, hitting tournament winners and other high value top results is what wins One and Done pools—it’s a home run game. Avoiding players who miss cuts? Not so much. That happens to winners and losers alike.

3) Save the Best Golfers for the Biggest Purse Events

So how do you give yourself the best chance to win big purses? For starters, use the best golfers in events where they have the potential to win the most money when they succeed.

Although One and Done pools typically necessitate making picks across 30 or more tournaments, it’s essential to recognize that not all tournaments are equal in terms of prestige and prize purses.

About half (or more) of tournaments in a typical One and Done will have significantly lower prize purses. The biggest purse events (e.g. the Majors, The Players Championship, what the PGA Tour calls “Signature Events,” and the FedEx Playoff Tournaments) have much larger prizes for first place than other tournaments.

Picking a golfer that wins one of those higher-value events can be worth more than double the value of picking the winner in another event. Getting a 2nd or 3rd place finisher can also be worth more than picking a tournament winner in a lower-value tournament.

In our Golf One and Done product, we provide several tools to help you make your decisions to maximize this. Those include:

  • A tournament summary that tells you where that event ranks (relative to all remaining events that you tell us are used in your pool) in terms of prize money;
  • A Data Grid for each tournament that shows our “Strokes Gained” rank for each golfer, along with other data, like their betting odds to win, course history, and recent performances;
  • Pick grades based on the value of the tournament, the golfers relative rank compared to where the tournament ranks, and the odds to win; and
  • A Season Planner tool, that lays out an overview of the remaining tournaments, organized into tiers by our golfer rankings.

Why Matching Golfer Quality Matters

Think of competing in a One and Done Pool as trying to do well on two different dimensions. First, you want to get more points than your opponents in that particular tournament. Second, and especially for the top golfers, you want to get more points when you use that specific golfer, than your opponents do when they use the same golfer in a different tournament.

Those goals can sometimes conflict, and you are forced to prioritize one. With 30+ golfers to pick, you cannot take the best option each week.

In plenty of weeks, you have to pick a golfer who is not the favorite, hoping for an outlier result. To minimize the downside, you also want to concentrate those picks on the events where the downside is lowest: the lower-money events, where the difference between finishing well and poorly is reduced.

Conversely, choosing a top-performing golfer in an event with a capped maximum earning, such as $1.4 million to first place, often results in automatic disadvantage. In this scenario, you are inherently conceding points to a segment of the pool that selects the same golfer in a different, potentially more lucrative, tournament.

The Xander Schauffele Example

Let’s use the example of picks on Xander Schauffele in the 2024 PGA season.

Schauffele won two tournament events, finished in second (solo or tied) in three more, and top five in four others. So there were multiple tournaments where he finished highly. Not all of those finishes were equally beneficial to One and Done players, though.

Here was the prize money he won in all top five finishes:

TournamentFinishMoney Won
PGA Championship1$3,300,000
The Open Championship1$3,100,000
Wells Fargo Championship2$2,160,000
The Players ChampionshipT2$1,981,667
FedEx St. JudeT2$1,760,000
Genesis InvitationalT4$866,667
BMW ChampionshipT5$728,750
American ExpressT3$635,600
Valspar ChampionshipT5$298,725

Schauffele, like most of the top golfers, played in mostly the Majors and biggest purse events, but he did play in four different ones where the purse was smaller.

If you used Schauffele at the American Express or Valspar, you ended up with a really good result, but it probably cost you in terms of your overall odds to win your One and Done. Schauffele won at least one million more dollars at five other events. Even if he had won the American Express or Valspar, he would have made far less than his other wins at the PGA Championship and The Open Championship. Top golfers like Schauffele will be used across all the big events they play. So at least some of your pool competitors most likely got significantly more points when they chose to pick Schauffele.

You don’t want to limit your upside with the best golfers by using them in events where their winnings are capped at lower amounts, even if it’s tempting to do so when they are heavier favorites against weaker fields.

4) Adjust Your Strategy to the Standings As The End Game Nears

Because One and Done pools are heavily influenced by hitting tournament winners, and because you are competing in a pool against others, you always need to think about how your opponents are likely to behave.

Early on in the pool, you shouldn’t obsess about this as much, though. The top golfers in a given week are likely to have higher popularity, but it’s all relative. There are more options to pick from in a Golf One and Done pool than in an NFL survivor pool, for instance, so you are less likely to see something like 40% of your pool’s picks concentrated on one specific choice (which does happen in NFL survivor pools).

In looking over the 2024 pick data, in most tournaments we did not have an individual golfer with popularity over 20%, and those that did have a popular one tended to top out below 30%.

With so many tournaments and so many players to consider, the odds of your picks exactly duplicating an opponent’s entry over most of the season is slim. Entries will have natural variation, even if taking semi-popular options regularly.

As you get deeper into the PGA season, though, you need to think about how overall pick popularity in your pool will go. If you are in a leading position, going with a more popular pick can keep you in front of a larger segment of the pool.

If you find yourself trailing in your pool’s leaderboard, on the other hand, you may need to pick a winner that few others will pick, giving yourself the chance to make a last-minute leap in the pool standings if the popular picks struggle, and your pick hits.

In our Golf One And Done Picks, we provide an estimate of pick popularity, based on data we are receiving from pool hosting sites, as well as projections based on how picks have been made in the past. You can then choose to use that information as part of your pick strategy, when evaluating the golfers.

The LIV Player Example

LIV Golf players present a unique dynamic in One and Done pools. Due to their limited appearances on One and Done schedules, they’ll be a strong focus in Major tournaments, likely becoming highly popular picks. This creates both opportunities and challenges.

Whether you consider them as your picks depends on your place in the pool standings. If you are trailing your pool’s leaders by a large margin, it may make more sense to fade the popular option and hope they do not win the event. But if you are in need of selecting a winner to rise in the standings, the opposite is true, as there are only limited opportunities to pick some of the best golfers in the world.

Last year’s U.S. Open featured DeChambeau as a popular pick, and he won the tournament. The most significant value he added to a One and Done lineup was that tournament, and he was only available to use a few times last season. Those who picked him at the U.S. Open would have risen on the leaderboard in their specific contests.

When To Think About Strategy Adjustments

The optimal time to think about adjusting your strategy to avoid or pick popular options when available is entry-dependent. Things like the distance behind a prize position, number of big events left, and how many others in your pool still have a certain golfer to pick all play a role.

That said, Memorial Day is probably a pretty good time to assess where you stand and think about any strategy shifts. The stretch of big June events that starts with The Memorial, followed two weeks later by the U.S. Open, and then the Travelers Championship represent three of the bigger money events.

Once those tourneys have passed, most One and Done Pools will be down to The Open and the two FedEx Playoff events as the only remaining big money events, and 80% of the big purse events will be completed.

5) Do Not Surrender

Finally, what is possibly the most important piece of advice in One and Done Pools: Don’t Surrender when there are still holes left to play.

There’s a saying in sports, that the best ability is availability. The corollary for One and Done pools is that the best ability is simply showing up each week to put in a pick.

We are astounded, in looking through historical One and Done pool pick data, at the number of entries that fail to get picks in, or simply give up when early results do not go their way. It’s a not insignificant number, and players who exhibit such behavior make contests +EV for you if you just stay the course.

In one pool we analyzed about 10% of the starting entries were not making a pick in the tournament halfway through the schedule!

Have a Routine

Unlike NFL survivor pools, where you can get eliminated by a single unlucky play, in One and Done pools you are alive until you can no longer mathematically catch the leaders. And just a few lucky picks can mean the difference between finishing in front of thousands of entries or being middle of the pack. In that situation, just showing up matters a lot.

Of course, everyone would rather get off to a hot start and hit some winners early, and yes, that’s always a better outcome. But winning entries can get their winners from any part of the tour calendar. Every entry is going to have stretches of poor performances, and in most weeks, the golfer you pick won’t be in contention on Sunday.

If you’re going to play a One and Done, make sure you go into the contest understanding these dynamics, and develop a routine to get your picks in week in and week out.

Get the PoolGenius Advantage

At PoolGenius, we have been helping people win sports pools for well over a decade. We have a history of success when it comes to NFL Survivor Pools, Football Pick’em Pools, College Football Bowl Pools, and NCAA Bracket Pools, with our subscriber base winning pools about 3x as often as expected.

For the 2025 PGA season, we are building on the success of our first-ever golf product: Golf One And Done Picks.

As the season progressed last year, we enhanced our product to provide the tools and data necessary for making the most informed picks in your One And Done pool. As with our other products, you can easily set up your One and Done pool(s) within the system. This allows for customized analysis based on the unique features of your pool.

We also asked our first-year subscribers of the One and Done Picks to tell us how they did. Collectively, they reported winning a prize in over 20% of One And Done pools they played in.

Building upon the foundation we established last season, we’re excited to continue providing you with the tools and data-driven insights that helped you make informed picks in your One and Done pool. We’re committed to helping you make the smartest decisions and maximize your success.

Golf One And Done Picks

Golf One And Done Picks 2025

Get an edge in your golf One and Done contest with customized pick advice and data-driven tools. Free access available.

Learn MoreGet Picks Now