The WGC Match Play Championship is a 5-day tournament with a format unlike any other. The 64-player field is divided into sixteen 4-player groups. Each group will play round-robin matches within their group on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The player with the best record in each of the four groups advances to the round of 16 for single-elimination match play (in the event of a two-way tie in a group, head-to-head results will be used as the tiebreaker. A three-way tie will require a sudden-death playoff. The round of 16 is played Saturday morning, followed by the quarterfinals with 8 players remaining on Saturday afternoon. By Sunday, there are only 4 players left with the semi-finals in the morning, followed by the championship and 3rd place consolation matches in the afternoon. This year's bracket can be found here.

To be clear, you are not filling out a bracket for this week's tournament. You are simply picking golfers like you do every week in your PTFG league. Just understand that this week's PGA tournament is run differently than the other weeks.

The total purse for 2024 is $20 million with the winner taking home 3.5 million and the Walter Hagen Cup:

Place	Earnings
1st	$3,500,000
2nd	$2,220,000
3rd	$1,420,000
4th	$1,141,000
5-8	$643,000
9-16	$366,000
17-27	~$225,000
28-37	~$150,000
38-50	~$100,000
51-64	~$70,000

PTFG Strategy & Tips:

WGC Match Play Basics
In Match Play, players aren’t competing for the lowest total score amongst a field of 140+ golfers. Instead, the field is broken down into head-to-head pairings where each golfer simply competes for a better score on each individual hole. Every hole is its own contest, and it can either be won, lost or halved (when both players shoot the same score). The player who wins the most individual holes wins the match.

The scoreboard looks a little different for match-play events. Rather than the traditional score-to-par notation (-4, for example), matches are tracked only by the relative score of two players. You may see a player listed as 3 Up meaning they’ve won three more holes than their opponent. How many strokes that player has actually taken is irrelevant.

The Match Play format also means that some pairings won’t need to play the full 18 holes. If the same player wins each of the first 10, the match is already decided. That’s a rare extreme, but it would result in a winning score of 10 & 8, meaning the player is ten holes ahead with only eight to play. Ties, called halves are possible if both players win the same number of holes.