How Golf Tournaments Work

The idea

A tournament is a series of rounds with one leaderboard. Enter your players once, add rounds as the event goes along, and every card played by every group rolls up into a single set of standings — a weekend away, a club championship, a Ryder Cup, a season-long league.

How it differs from a scorecard

A scorecard is a card. A tournament is the competition the cards belong to. Playing eighteen holes with three mates on Saturday? Make a scorecard. If Saturday is one of four days, or one of six groups, make a tournament — the scorecards still get made, but the app makes them for you and adds them up.

The pieces

• TournamentThe event itself — one name, one set of standings, one link to follow it.
  • EntrantsThe people playing, with their handicaps. Entered once and reused by every round.
  • TeamsOptional. A permanent side an entrant belongs to for the whole event — Europe, the Blues, Thursday Club. Adds a team table beside the individual one.
  • RoundOne day, one format — “Saturday · Stableford”. Rounds are added as the event goes; you never have to know all of them up front.
    • BoardOne scorecard. A round has as many as it needs: six groups off six tees is six boards, and in match play a board is one match.
      • PairingOptional. Two players inside a board who share one score — foursomes, fourballs, a scramble pair.

A team is not a pairing

These are the two that get mixed up, and they answer different questions. A team is who you play for — it lasts the whole event, it has a colour and a name, and it gets a column in the standings. A pairing is who you play with today — two people on one card sharing one score, for one round.

They are independent. A Ryder Cup pair is both at once (two Europeans playing together for Europe). A buddies trip can draw new pairs every morning with no teams at all. And a team event can be played entirely as singles, with no pairings anywhere.

Recipe: a buddies trip

Four days, twelve players, a different course every morning and nobody agrees on the format.

1. New tournament → Points per round, Individual.
2. Paste the twelve names — one per line, with handicaps if you have them.
3. Set round 1's format and let the draw split the field into groups of four.
4. Add each day as it comes. Mix formats freely: Stableford Thursday, Stroke Play Friday. Position points make them add up anyway.

The one that separates a tie is worth agreeing up front — most round wins is the default and reads well on a trip.

Recipe: a multi-day club championship

36 or 54 holes of stroke play, one champion, no gimmicks.

1. New tournament → Cumulative totals, Individual.
2. Enter the field. Handicaps matter here — net or gross is set per round.
3. Every round is Stroke Play: each round's strokes carry straight into the total, exactly as a real championship scores.
4. Separate ties on final round score or a back-9 countback, the two rules clubs actually use.

Cumulative totals is the one template that insists every round measures the same thing — you can't add Stableford points to strokes. If you want a mixed-format event, use points per round instead.

Recipe: a pairs day

Foursomes or fourballs, where two players share one result all day.

1. Create the event as usual and add everyone to the roster.
2. On the round's draw, put players onto boards, then pair them up inside each board.
3. Choose whether the pair posts a combined score or its better ball.
4. Both partners carry the pair's points in the individual standings, and the Rules sheet says so in writing — two people showing the same number is the one genuinely surprising thing on a standings table.

Recipe: a Ryder Cup

Teams, sessions of matches, and a score that reads 8½ – 5½.

1. New tournament → Team match play. Name your teams — as many teams as you want.
2. Assign every entrant to a team.
3. Each session is a round. The draw arranges it into matches, two sides at a time, and each match becomes one board.
4. Winning a match is worth a point, halving it a half, losing it nothing. Team totals always add up to the number of matches played.

A match is two sides; an event is however many teams turn up. Three towns playing a full round-robin is the same template — the draw just arranges more matches per session.

How points are awarded

Every tournament answers two questions: what one round is worth (finishing position, the raw score, a match point, nothing at all) and how those add up into a total. Templates answer both for you, and most organisers never have to think about it. When you do — or when the app refuses a combination — the next article is the whole story.

Running it live

The draw turns the roster into this round's boards. Auto-fill splits the field in one tap; drag people between boards afterwards if the tee sheet says otherwise.

Add rounds as you go. Nothing needs to be decided up front — a fifth day, a decider, a practice round that doesn't count.

People drop out. Mark an entrant withdrawn, or eliminated after a given round; they move below a divider on the roster and stop being offered in later draws, without erasing what they already scored.

Corrections are priced. Re-drawing a round after scores are in tells you exactly what it costs, player by player, before you confirm — and a round everybody has signed for can't be re-drawn at all.

Sharing: two kinds of link

The tournament link follows the whole event — standings, schedule, roster, rules. Send it to everyone, including people who aren't playing. By default it is read-only on every card in the event.

Each board has its own link, and that is what lets a group enter scores. This is the combination that makes a sixteen-player event work: one link everybody follows, and four scoring links, one per group, so nobody can edit anybody else's card.

If your whole event is one group playing together, settings can widen the tournament scoring link to cover every board instead.

What it costs

Only the organiser needs Premium. Everyone you invite can enter scores and follow the standings for free, on any device, without an account — creating the tournament is the only part that's paid, and Premium is a one-time unlock, not a subscription. Ordinary scorecards stay free exactly as they are.