2025 GOLF ONE AND DONE STRATEGY + PME HOT LINKS
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2025 ONE AND DONE STRATEGY
Throughout the course of the year, whenever I bring up picks for a “One and Done” contest, I’m always hit with one of two of the same questions.
What is “One and Done”?
How can I play “One and Done”?
While there are myriad variations on the “One and Done” format, in its most simplistic form, it’s about as basic of a game as it gets. You select one golfer per tournament; once you select that golfer, they cannot be used again. Your team earns the same amount of money as the golfer you selected in that event and whoever has the most total money at the end of the season wins the top prize. It’s akin to an NFL survivor pool, except you are never in fear of being eliminated with a bad pick.
While this rarely came up pre-2024, you need to remember amateurs don’t earn money for their results. If you had taken Nick Dunlap for his win at the American Express you would have found yourself with a health $0 in earnings. Normally, you’d chalk this up as the outlier it was, but later on in the season Luke Clanton started churning out Top 10s and was one of the five favorites to win some tournaments. Clanton remains an amateur to begin 2025 so he will not accrue any money for the One and Done until he turns professional.
The beauty rests in the difficulty — it’s tough to pick winners on a given week given 10 choices, it’s far more strenuous when you must narrow your selection down to a single golfer per event.
If you used Dustin Johnson at The Northern Trust in 2020, your team would have netted a cool $1.7M. Had you have used Johnson at The Memorial Tournament, you would have left holding the bag with a big, fat zero for your squad. Timing is everything. Ask anyone who used Scottie Scheffler in a week when he didn’t win in 2024. This variance makes the One and Done accessible to both seasoned players and newbies alike. It levels the playing field.
As for how to get in on a league like this, you best be looking at the beginning of the year. One-and-Done leagues typically start sometime in January and run through the remainder of the PGA season. This year’s massive One-and-Done formatted league is being hosted by the Fantasy Golf Championships and branded “The Race for the Mayo Cup”.
This is the fifth year of the contest, and had grown to have $1,000,000 guaranteed in the prize pool with first place taking hime a cool $100,000. Everyone inside the Top 12 will win at least five-figures in 2025. Starting at the Sony Open (January 9, 2025), you can enter up to five times at $250 per entry.
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GET A FREE ENTRY (If You're Reading this before January 6)
Now that the RACE FOR THE MAYO CUP is OVER 71% FILLED I’m encouraging you to get some entries NOW for yourself or someone you know before it all fills up in advance of the Sony Open.
I'll announce the final two winners Monday January 6, so there still time to get in the draw
Reply to this article with a screen shot of your entry for this year and you'll get in a draw for another . If you’ve already sent in your screenshot, you remain in the draw!
For you who don’t want to shell out the $250 for the season (about $7 a week), I’m giving one FREE ENTRY to the people who Sub, rate and review the PME audio podcast on Apple and Spotify. And to anyone who subscribes to the PME on Youtube.
So if you want to try and get realllllllllllyyyyyy lucky, do that and have a chance to freeroll $100K...
Apple: http://bit.ly/PMEiTunes
Spotify: https://goo.gl/VboemH
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MayoMediaNetwork
btw if you live in a place where you can’t legally play, if you happen to be traveling, sign up in that place and you can make picks from anywhere all year long.
Strategy
There is no one strategy to trump them all as it pertains to “One and Done,” but there are a few things to consider before making picks. And it’s the same as every single other sports contest ever created: Know the rules.
Competing in the giant contest against over 4,000 other entries is a lot different than trying to win a league against six of your friends. The fewer the entries, the more forgiving the error. It’s a lot like playing a lineup on DraftKings. The strategy behind winning a single-entry tournament that only has 200 other entries is a lot different than how you think about navigating a field of 175,000 lineups when other people can submit up to 150 teams. That said, there are basic rules of thumbs.
Make sure to use the use the best players. Seems obvious, I gather that, but anyone who routinely wagers on golf can tell you how often the +10000 long shot actually ends up hoisting a novelty check come Sunday afternoon. Since a “One and Done” tournament is all based around picking winners, don’t be scared to stick to a plan and simply choose the best talent.
This is more difficult to do than you’d think. Everyone wants to be a genius so they can showcase how smart they are to the world. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. One year I used Russell Knox in the second tournament of the season. My gut said Knox would be able to compete in a weaker field at the American Express, and my research gave me the statistical and course backing that that it was a smart pick. Spoiler: It wasn’t.
Knox was fine that week. He made the cut and bagged $29,815 for himself and my team at PGA West. Based on the amount of total money it takes to finish in the money in a season-long “One and Done,” $29,815 may as well be zero. Now, you’re going to have bad finishes many times throughout the course of the year. Even that week, you could have selected Paul Casey, who was the third-favorite by the betting odds (+2200) and only banked $63,399. Better than Knox, but not significant in the grand scope of the season. Plus, then you never got to use Casey again.
It didn’t matter, though. The part I didn’t think through was the number of times I’d actually have to pick a player. In this year’s contest, there are 31 events that count toward the standings. It may it seems like it, but it’s unlikely you’ll actually ever run out of good players to choose. So what if I burned Casey? Point is, I never should have been using Knox in the first place. If there are only 31 picks to make, why am taking the 225th-ranked player in the world? Because I wanted to be sneaky and find a winner no one else had and vault myself up the standings. Instead i just fell further behind by choosing the player who was the 32nd-favorite (per the betting odds) to win that week.
That’s not to say you should never take a chance. Andrew Landry won that week, and he was +20000 before the event started, one of the biggest longshot winners of the year. The problem with players from that range is that there are so many of them. It’s not like Landry was one of two +20000 players in the field. There were 60 or so players valued at +20000 or higher. So you not only had to pray it was a tournament where a long shot won, but you also had to pick the needle in the haystack among the long shots.
There is no one optimal strategy for a league like this, but the most success I’ve had in years of playing “One and Done” is pretty basic. Try not use a player outside the top 60 in the world rankings (unfortunately, that likely won’t be possible in weaker-field tournaments), and try to take one of the least popular options inside the top-five or top-10 in betting odds of that week. By doing this it always guarantee your team a quality golfer for the week, and if you zig slightly where others zag, if your golfer wins, you’ll still create a large chasm in the overall standings. And this way, you can actually select golfers who have a higher than 0.05% chance of winning before the event actually begins.
There are always exceptions to this. For example, if you’re $5M behind the leader by the time The Masters comes around, well, then you need to start swinging for the fences with every pick and hope no one else takes that golfer. That’s the only path to recovery. Hopefully, you won’t find yourself in that situation because of sensible selections to begin the year.
Looking back at the 2024 contest (with 4,440 entries) no one in the contest picked more than five winners over the year. Now, that’s lower than a lot of year because a few factors. Super long shots won the month of the season, and Scottie Scheffler won so many events. And since you can only use Scottie one time, you had no chance of a top pay day in those other events.
Also, it never hurts to plan in advance. Obviously, the Majors, PLAYERS and signature events have a larger purse than most other events, so saving the truly elite players for those tournaments makes a lot of sense, but don’t let it hamstring you into saving too many of the top end talent.
The signature events are all limited field events, and all but there (Genesis, Bay Hill & Memorial) feature no cut line. Everyone who hits a shot gets paid. They also have some of the largest purses of the year. In past years, there were fewer big purse events so using a Patrick Cantlay-type in a lesser event where he was one of the favorites made some sense. In 2025, the discrepancy between the big money events and the other tournaments is so vast that you need to give some consideration to which good players you want to burn in the lower stakes tournaments.
For example, in the third event of the contest in 2025 — The aforementioned American Express — Scottie Scheffler, Justin Thomas, Sam Burns, Xander Schauffele, Tom Kim, and Patrick Cantlay will all be in the field. The purse for the American Express this year is $8.8M with 156 players in the field. Two weeks after the AMEX they’ll all play at Pebble Beach against stiffer competition, but only around 70 players for a purse of $20M.
The winner of the American Express made $1.5M in 2024. Third place at Pebble made $1.3M. Wyndham Clark earned $3.6M for his victory. Sixth place at AMEX was $310K; 6th place at Pebble Beach was 642K. If you think you’ll be using one of those players at on of the big money events at some point, you may want to skip out on them in tournaments like the American Express.
That’s a rule of thumb, though. I’d rather burn an elite player in a lesser event over getting deep into the season and having too many of the elite player remaining to actually play.
This is the single biggest mistake made every year in One and Done: Not using the full complement of elite players. Don’t paint yourself into a corner where there are six events remaining and you have 12 of the 20 best players in the world at your disposal.
Although not optimal, you would have been better off using all of them at some point over the Russell Knox types. Make certain to maximize starts from your studs. And if you’re mapping everything out in January about who you’re going to select in August, remember, there’s always the Russell Henley, Harris English, Billy Horschel, Kevin Na, and Chris Kirk types who emerge as legit talents by the time the FedEx Cup Playoffs begin. So you’re never actually out of viable options.
Finally, there’s the LIV factor. LIV players only get to play in Major Championship so you’ll have the pick of anyone you want from that tour four times during the year.
— PM