Watching the first two rounds of a professional golf tournament always comes with one big question: Who will be around for the weekend? Understanding how the cut is calculated adds a whole new layer of drama to Thursday and Friday golf. This guide will walk you through exactly how pros make the cut, from the standard PGA Tour rule to the special variations you see in major championships.
In the simplest terms, the "cut" is a mechanism used in most professional stroke-play tournaments to reduce the size of the playing field after the second round (following 36 holes of play). A typical PGA Tour event starts with roughly 144 to 156 players on Thursday, and a cut is made on Friday evening to trim the field significantly for the final two rounds on Saturday and Sunday.
But why do they do it? There are a few very practical reasons:
This intense pressure creates the drama of the "cut line," an imaginary line on the leaderboard that players anxiously watch on Friday afternoon. Every single shot counts as they try to stay on the right side of it.
For most regular-season events on the PGA Tour, the cut rule is straightforward and has been the standard for several years: the top 65 players and any players tied at that score advance to the weekend.
Let's break that down with a clear example. Imagine the leaderboard late on Friday afternoon looks something like this:
Here’s how you would calculate the cut:
Step 1: Identify the score of the 65th-ranked player. In this scenario, the player sitting in 65th place has a 36-hole score of +1.
Step 2: Apply the "and ties" rule. The rule isn't just "the top 65 players." It includes anyone tied with that 65th player's score. Looking at our leaderboard, there are four other players who are also at +1 (T-66, T-67, T-68, and T-69).
The Result: The official cut line is +1. All players with a score of +1 or better make the cut and will play on Saturday and Sunday. In this case, that means a total of 69 players advance. The player in 70th place at +2, along with everyone else with a higher score, misses the cut.
Because of this "and ties" rule, the number of players making the cut is almost always more than 65. It's common to see fields of 70 to 75 players advance to the weekend.
While "Top 65 and ties" is the norm, it's not universal. The most famous and prestigious tournaments in golf each have their own unique cut rules that you'll need to know.
The four men's major championships are the pinnacle of the sport, and three of them have stricter cut rules than a standard PGA Tour event.
Some special events throw the cut rule out the window entirely. At these tournaments, every player in the field is guaranteed to play all four rounds, meaning a guaranteed paycheck for everyone involved.
Historically, these have included:
More recently, the PGA Tour introduced "Signature Events" with massive purses and elite fields. Most of these, like The Sentry, are no-cut events. However, a few of the more historic invitationals kept their traditional cut. For example, The Genesis Invitational (hosted by Tiger Woods), the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and the Memorial Tournament (hosted by Jack Nicklaus) all maintain a cut to the top 50 and ties.
The LIV Golf League operates with a completely different model. Every LIV event is a 54-hole invitational tournament with just 48 players competing. There is no cut in LIV Golf, all players compete for all three rounds.
If you're a long-time golf fan, you might remember the "10-shot rule." For many years, an additional provision existed alongside the primary cut rule: any player within 10 strokes of the leader's score after 36 holes also made the cut, regardless of their position on the leaderboard.
For example, if the normal cut line was at +3 but the leader was at -8, any player at +2 or better (i.e., within 10 shots of -8) would make the cut, even if they were outside the top 65. This rule was designed to keep players in the tournament who were still reasonably close to the lead, even if the scoring was difficult overall.
However, this often resulted in very large weekend fields (sometimes over 90 players), which slowed down play. Over time, tournaments began to phase it out. By 2019, the PGA Tour and all majors except one had eliminated it. The Masters was the last holdout, finally removing the 10-shot rule in 2020 to standardize its cut to simply the top 50 and ties.
Calculating the cut rule boils down to knowing the specific rule for that week’s tournament - usually Top 65 and ties on the PGA Tour, with notable exceptions for the majors and special tour events. For the players, it is a line that separates a successful week from a disappointing one, often determined by a single tense back-nine putt on a Friday afternoon.
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