2026 Golf Draft Kit: One-and-Done Strategy

If you could pick Scottie Scheffler to win one tournament all year, which one would it be? The Masters? THE PLAYERS Championship? Of course it would be great to choose Scheffler almost every time out, but in One-and-Done contests you can pick him only once all season.

That speaks to the beauty of One-and-Done pools: The format is so simple yet the strategy can get quite complex.

One-and-Done (OAD) pools are the cousins of the Survivor pools popular in NFL circles -- with one very big difference. Generally in Survivor contests, if you misfire on one pick, you are, in fact, done. Even if it's Week 1. That's not the case in OAD.

In this game, you get to play the whole year no matter what, making it entirely more satisfying and likely even less stressful. But not any easier. In some ways, it's far harder than the football version.

There really isn't anything more basic in the ever-expanding world of sports wagering than OAD pools. They are easy to understand, making it open to the masses and, well, easy to get a new pool off the ground.

Let's get into it.

THE BASICS

It might be easiest to explain things using RotoWire's One-and-Done pool as an example, though you can customize the settings in your contest to your liking.

The 2026 PGA Tour regular season will encompass 29 full-points, stroke-play events from the lid-lifting Sony Open in mid-January to the Wyndham Championship in early August. The three playoff tournaments follow, and they surely can be a part of your pool, giving you a nice, even number of 32. We will explain why shortly. Along the way, there are four alternate-field events, which the RotoWire pool does not include. The same goes for the Zurich Classic team event. But that's entirely up to the discretion of the league manager. There are dozens of nuances in fantasy football leagues -- scoring variables, roster sizes, etc. -- and there's no one-size-fits-all in golf pools, either.

In the RotoWire OAD pool, we pick one golfer each week and can't pick him again the rest of the season. There, in one simple sentence, lies the meaning of the "one" and the "done."

Whatever money your golfer earns that week, that's what you earn. And at the end of the year we total up all the earnings. Unlike NFL Survivor contests in which your team that week has to beat only one other NFL team, in golf your goal is to have your guy beat maybe 155 others. Sounds hard. It is, brutally so. If someone picks three winners all season, that is an outstanding result. Two is very good. Some of us get shut out -- not that I'm bitter or anything.

Like many fantasy leagues in different sports, you can fall behind pretty fast. But it's a bit easier to make up ground in OAD because of the extreme winner's shares that have become more prevalent in recent years. Besides, we in the RotoWire pool have devised ways to incentivise everyone to stay the course of the eight-month season by giving them a chance to win something even if they have fallen far behind. No, not everyone gets a trophy.

There are season-long winners in our pool -- say, the top five finishers -- but also quarterly winners and an aggregate winner for the four majors. We have a nominal, $50 entry fee. The quarterly component is an especially good feature to keep those who have fallen behind interested until the very end. This is an important point: It's imperative that everyone keeps trying, even if far behind, to maintain the integrity of the pool. You'd hope people would do that anyway, but the quarterly segments give them a strong impetus. And the aforementioned 32 tournaments makes a very neat eight per quarter.

At the end of the season (or quarter), all you do is add up the money earned by each of your golfers across all tournaments and the player with the most cash wins. If your guy misses a cut that week, you get what he gets: ZIPPO.

Here's an example of a payout structure. Let's say there are 25 players and the entry fee is $50 -- $1,250 total.

• 1st place: $500
• 2nd place: $250
• 3rd place: $125
• 4th place: $75=
• 5th place: $50
• Four quarterly winners and the overall major winner: $50 apiece

That's about it. There are not a lot of moving parts in One-and-Done pools. So we have just a few tips.

MULTIPLE STRATEGIES

First off, think about how many tournaments you want to include in your pool.

To have a quarterly component, 32 is a good number. The TOUR Championship is tricky, with only 30 golfers and a non-traditional purse.

It's simple to think that, cool, I'll just go with the 32 best golfers in the world. But that's not necessarily a viable plan. There are lesser tournaments with few or no big-name golfers. Guys slump, they get hurt, they move in and out of the top 32. That said, there's rarely a reason to stray outside the top 50 or 60 of the world rankings, except maybe one of the two or three weakest tournaments all season.

Okay, so the season begins and you start picking golfers. What's your strategy? Well, you want to pick a golfer you think can win, obviously. How to do that? Find a guy who is playing well coming in. On the other hand, there are guys who traditionally do well at certain events, the proverbial "horses for courses."

In years past, examples were Jon Rahm at Torrey Pines (Farmers Insurance Open), Rory McIlroy at Quail Hollow (the Truist nee Wells Fargo), Scheffler at Augusta (the Masters) -- in truth, Scheffler almost anywhere. There are others, and it's not an absolute every year -- especially with Rahm and others now with LIV Golf -- but you get the idea. Those are all big-name guys. Even lesser golfers could fit the mold, as K.H. Lee did in winning consecutive Byron Nelson Classics at TPC Craig Ranch in 2021-22. Sometimes there's more than one horse per course.

Webb Simpson used to be money at two tracks, Harbour Town (RBC Heritage) and TPC Sedgefield (the Wyndham), but he has been fading for a few years and no longer can be expected to deliver. If a guy you are considering played poorly at his dominant course last year, maybe don't discount him. Two years? Be done with him.

You'll want to keep some top options in reserve for the Signature Events and majors, and to make sure you haven't left yourself short of good players toward the end of your season. The Signature Events have really thrown a haymaker into OAD golf. There are now enormous $20 million purses, of which $3 million or more goes to the winner. The money for winning a tournament is so extreme that you absolutely will have to win multiple times over the course of the season to compete for the top prize. While picking a guy who, say, finishes 10th in a given week is a pretty good accomplishment, you could finish 10th every week and not even be close to the top of your pool. So every single week you have to pick a guy you think has at least some chance to win.

It's possible to map out an entire season in advance and pencil in golfers at specific events. In theory, that sounds good, but it's hard to keep that going all season long. Every golf season is organic and goes in its own direction. We have to allow for current form, strength of the field and, especially, injuries. Also: sleepers/rookies come along every season and become viable considerations.

Just last year, Thomas Detry won in Phoenix, Joe Highsmith won the Cognizant, Ryan Fox won in Canada, unheralded Brian Campbell won the John Deere and Aldrich Potgieter won in Detroit. If you had any of them, take a bow.

A season-long cheat sheet, even if you don't follow it lockstep, could help because it's quite possible to lose sight of the big picture over the course of the eight months. For instance, you come to a tournament toward the end of the season but you discover you already used the course horse earlier in the season because he seemed like a good fit that week. Sure, that might have been the prudent play. Just be mindful of this possibility.

MORE STRATEGY THAN IT APPEARS

It may look as simple as checkers, but it's really more like chess.

Here are some other scenarios to consider.

If you see a lone golfer among the top 10 of the OWGR in a weak event with a smaller purse, do you pick him? Or save him for a major or other big event, where you know the winner will probably come from a small pool of top golfers and the payoff is bigger? Plus, under the RotoWire OAD format, it could be a two-pronged win at a major because of the bonus given to major winners. The top guys don't partake in most smaller events, but some have allegiances to certain tournaments because of their sponsors, because it's in their home state or because they really like the course. That last one would, in theory, lead to a better result.

Here's my thinking: If you can get a top golfer in good form in such a scenario in which he is a clear-cut favorite out on an island by himself, go with him. That was more commonplace before the Signature Events came along, but it still happens a few times a season.

Deciding whether to "burn" a top guy early in the season or save him for a big event is always a tough call. There's no right or wrong answer. But we will say that there are too many good golfers to fit into just the biggest events, including the playoffs. You can and should use a top-10 guy in a "regular" tournament.

Picking the flat-out winner of a golf tournament is remarkably hard, even if the field is 72 or 90, much less 120, 144 or 156. Other than Scheffler, McIlroy or Xander Schauffele, the next guy could be at least 20-1 on the betting board. It's far from a sure thing. As we mentioned, if you can get two or perhaps three outright winners all season, you will be way ahead of everyone else. That said, someone selected the winner a record SIX times in the RotoWire pool four years ago. That participant did win the overall title, but not by much. The next two finishers had three wins and 12 top-5s apiece.

Of course, if your golfer finishes second or third in a given week, that's still pretty good. As mentioned earlier, the money drops off quickly after you get past the top finisher on the leaderboard. What you really want to avoid are missed cuts. There is nothing worse in OAD golf than burning a top guy and getting nothing for it.

SHAMELESS PLUG

This is a good time to point out that the RotoWire OAD pool uses Run Your Pool via Splash Sports. Yes, it's more than football and completely customizable to your specifications.

There are big advantages to this website at a small cost per entrant. It does all the math and keeps track of everything. It tells you who you've taken and who you haven't, and it can actually block you from taking a guy twice if that's the way your commissioner has set it up. One other thing I like about this website is that it also tells you site-wide who the popular guys will be that week. You won't know specifically who everyone in your pool is taking until after the first tee time, but general rostership levels still have value.

So for instance, if you want to play Collin Morikawa, you can see how many other people in your pool selected him earlier in the season. If a lot of players have already burned him, that could be a good time to jump in. If your guy happens to win that week, it's great no matter what, but even more so if you are all alone. This strategy works much better deeper in the season than earlier.

One more advantage of a service -- there can simply be too many players to keep track of without assistance. The RotoWire pool, for instance, is at 50 participants and growing.

LET'S TALK LIV

No matter where you stand on LIV, there are some stars there who can't be ignored. They absolutely can impact who wins a One-and-Done pool. As of now, they get to play a maximum of four events per year -- the majors.

There are, most notably, Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau. You can play them only in the majors so ... why not use LIV guys in all four majors, or at least some of them? That way you can save the Schefflers and McIlroys for other big-purse tournaments.

If you played a LIV guy in every 2025 major, well, you could've had Patrick Reed finishing third at the Masters, DeChambeau posting a co-runner-up at the PGA and Tyrrell Hatton or Carlos Ortiz notching T4 at the U.S. Open. There was no high LIV finisher at the Open Championship (DeChambeau was tops at T10). Rahm had a couple of top-10s in the majors.

LIV golfers didn't win a major last year, but DeChambeau is capable of winning multiple majors in a season, and maybe Rahm is, too. I'm almost certain I will pick DeChambeau at a major in 2026.

LATE-SEASON MACHINATIONS

If you are trying to rally toward the end of the season, you definitely could go away from the pack just in hopes of being the only one -- or one of the few -- to pick a certain golfer and hopefully make up big ground.

Even though there aren't a lot of moving parts to OAD pools, that doesn't mean there's not a lot of strategy.

BACK TO OUR OPENING QUESTION

Knowing what you know now, where would you pick Scheffler? He won eight times in 2024 and six times last year. As dominant as he has been, we're talking eight out of 32, or six out of 32. Okay, he doesn't and won't play all 32. He played 20 times last year, 19 if you exclude a fall-season event. Even six out of 19 is super hard. Over the past two years, Scheffler has won only one tournament twice: the Memorial.

So that wouldn't be a bad pick, what with it being a Signature Event with a $4 million winner's share. But other tournaments offer more, and Scheffler has either won them or come close. The Masters offered $4.2 million, the U.S. Open $4.3 million and THE PLAYERS $4.5 million. Scheffler didn't win any of them last year -- though he did win the other two majors.

So, as you see, there's no easy answer to our Scheffler question. And if you don't get a win the week you pick him, you most surely will be playing from behind. No pressure!

CODA

That's it. Like a golf season or even a golf tournament, your strategy will change at different parts of the One-and-Done season. We've been doing the RotoWire OAD pool for eight years now, and we're still learning the nuances, figuring out new things every year. Just never be rigid, even if you go into the season with a cheat sheet and a plan. There are too many variables and unknowns in a given golfer as well as a golf season.

You won't master it all at once. Being right more than wrong is something good to shoot for.

For up-to-the-minute updates on injuries, tournament participation and overall golfer performance, head to RotoWire's latest golf news or follow @RotoWireGolf on X.