Masters Cut Rule: Top 50 and Ties After 36 Holes
The Masters cut sends the low 50 players and ties to the weekend after 36 holes, with no 10-shot rule since 2020. How the Augusta National rule works.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Masters22 min read
- Cut made after
- 36 holes
- Weekend places
- Low 50 and ties
- 10-shot rule removed
- 2020
- First Masters cut
- 1957
The Masters cut rule is short. After 36 holes, the low 50 players and anyone tied for 50th place go on to play the third and fourth rounds; everyone else is done. Since 2020 there is no second test. The old 10-shot rule, which also kept any player within 10 strokes of the lead, has gone. The cut is set by Augusta National, which runs the tournament under its own conditions of competition, and it is the gentlest cut among golf's four men's majors because the field it applies to is so small.
Friday at Augusta National, April 2023. Storms had already toppled pines beside the 17th tee, the horn had sounded, and part of the field was stranded mid-round with the cut line still a guess. It was not settled until Saturday morning. That delay is unusual. The rule behind it is not.
The Masters cut rule in one line: 50 and ties after 36 holes
Thursday and Friday the whole field plays. When the last group finishes the second round, the committee ranks every player by his 36-hole total. The 50th-best total becomes the cut line. Anyone at or below that number plays the weekend.
That is the whole rule. No percentage of the field, no minimum or maximum, no tiebreak. If seven players are tied for 46th, all seven go through. If twelve are tied for 50th, all twelve go through and the weekend field swells to 61. The only way the rule produces exactly 50 players is if nobody is tied at the line, which almost never happens over 36 holes of stroke play.
What "ties" means in practice
Golf ranks totals, not players. A player who shot 148 is either inside the line or outside it, and so is every other man who shot 148. There is no countback on the back nine, no reference to Friday's score, and no playoff for the last places. The rule exists to avoid splitting players who have done exactly the same thing, and it means the number of weekend players is always at least 50 and sometimes noticeably more.
What the rule does not do
It does not look at the leader. Before 2020 it did, and that was the point of the change. A player 11 shots back in 40th place now plays the weekend; a player six shots back in a tie for 55th now goes home. Position is all that counts.
It also does not depend on who the player is. A past champion with a lifetime invitation is subject to the same line as an amateur in his first major. The cut decides who plays the weekend this year, nothing else, which is a point worth holding onto when the question of who gets invited back next April comes up further down.
Why the Masters cut is the gentlest in major golf
Fifty and ties looks stingier than 70 and ties. It is the opposite, once you look at the size of the field it is cut from.
The Masters is an invitational. Augusta National invites players through a published list of categories: past champions, recent major winners, the top 50 in the world ranking at fixed dates, PGA Tour winners, a handful of leading amateurs and the rest. There is no open qualifying and no fixed field size. The result is usually somewhere around 90 starters, sometimes a few more and sometimes a few fewer. Our explainer on every route into the Masters field goes through the categories.
The other three men's majors start 156 players. The U.S. Open, run by the USGA, fills about half of its field through local and final qualifying; the U.S. Open qualifying process is a story of its own. The PGA Championship, run by the PGA of America, sets aside 20 places for club professionals. The Open, run by The R&A, has its own qualifying series. All three are cutting from a field roughly 70 percent larger than Augusta's.
| Major | Run by | Usual starting field | Cut after 36 holes | Share of field guaranteed the weekend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Masters | Augusta National Golf Club | Around 90, by invitation | Low 50 and ties | More than half |
| U.S. Open | USGA | 156 | Low 60 and ties | Under 40 percent |
| PGA Championship | PGA of America | 156 | Low 70 and ties | About 45 percent |
| The Open | The R&A | 156 | Low 70 and ties | About 45 percent |
The shares are the guaranteed places divided by a full field, before ties. They are approximations by design: the Masters field moves from year to year, and ties always push the real figures up a little.
What that means for a struggling player
At the U.S. Open a player who is merely average for two days is usually in trouble, because more than three of every five starters go home. At Augusta a player who has been ordinary, neither good nor bad, is usually safe. Missing the cut at the Masters typically requires being in the bottom 40 or so of a field that is already selected from the top of the game, and that is a field where nobody is a pushover.
It cuts both ways. The Masters field contains a group of past champions in their fifties and sixties and half a dozen amateurs, players who are expected to fill many of the places below the line. Take them out, and the cut for the touring professionals in the field is tighter than the headline numbers suggest. A world-ranked professional who misses at Augusta has usually been beaten by most of the men he plays against every week.
Why the club keeps the number low
Augusta National has never published its reasoning in detail, but two pressures are obvious. The course has limited daylight in April, and the weekend at the Masters is played in twosomes off a single tee. Fifty-odd players in pairs is a weekend that fits comfortably in the light. Seventy-odd would not, at least not without starting the leaders much later or splitting the tee.
How the Masters cut rule got here, from no cut to 50 and ties
For the first twenty-odd years the Masters had no cut. Everyone who started played four rounds, which was workable when the field was small and the tournament was still a gathering of Bobby Jones's friends as much as a championship. The first cut came in 1957 and took the low 40 and ties.
| Period | Who played the weekend |
|---|---|
| 1934 to 1956 | Every player in the field; there was no cut |
| From 1957 | Low 40 and ties |
| From the early 1960s to 2012 | Low 44 and ties, plus anyone within 10 strokes of the leader |
| 2013 to 2019 | Low 50 and ties, plus anyone within 10 strokes of the leader |
| 2020 onward | Low 50 and ties only |
The 1957 date and the 2013 and 2020 changes are fixed points in the club's records. The exact year the club moved from 40 to 44 and added the 10-stroke provision is less often stated, and the table gives it as the early 1960s rather than pretend to more precision than the public record easily supports.
The two changes that matter for anyone watching now
The move to 50 and ties in 2013 widened the weekend modestly. It reflected a field that had grown somewhat and a game with more depth at the top, and it brought the Masters closer to the other majors in the share of players who survive.
The removal of the 10-shot provision in 2020 was the bigger change in principle, because it removed the leader from the calculation altogether. The first tournament under the new rule was the November Masters of 2020, played in the autumn because of the pandemic. Dustin Johnson won it, and nobody outside the line spent Friday evening hoping his lead would shrink.
The 10-shot rule: what it did and why Augusta dropped it
Under the old rule a player made the cut in either of two ways. He finished in the top 44 and ties (later 50 and ties), or he finished within 10 strokes of the 36-hole leader. Either was enough.
The second test sounds generous. Often it was not. Ten strokes is a big gap after 36 holes at Augusta, and in a year when the top 44 or 50 and ties already reached 10 shots or more behind the lead, the second test added nobody. In other years it brought in a handful of extra players. Which kind of year it would be depended on the shape of the leaderboard.
A bunched leaderboard swelled the weekend
Picture a cold, windy Friday. Nobody goes low, the leader is at two under, and a huge crowd of players sits between three over and eight over. In that year the top 50 and ties might be everyone at five over or better. But the 10-shot rule also took everyone at eight over or better, which could add a dozen or more players. The weekend field ballooned.
A runaway leader shrank its effect to nothing
Now picture the opposite. A player shoots two brilliant rounds and leads by five. The 10-shot window is measured from him, so it reaches only a short way into the field, and the top 50 and ties is the binding test. The provision does nothing at all.
The old two-part test, worked through
Take an invented 36-hole leaderboard to see both tests at once. The leader is at six under. The player in 50th place, counting ties, is at four over, ten shots back. Under the pre-2020 rule both tests point to the same number, so the weekend field is the top 50 and ties and nothing else changes.
Move the leader. If he is at eight under, the 10-shot window reaches only to two over, well inside the top-50 line, and again the window adds nobody. Now drag the leader back to level par on a brutal Friday. The 10-shot window reaches to ten over. If the top 50 and ties only reaches seven over, every player between eight and ten over suddenly survives on the second test. On a day like that the number could run into the high sixties or beyond.
The pattern is the one that mattered. The provision was close to irrelevant in good scoring years and enormous in bad ones, and it always pulled in the same direction: more players, on the days when the course was slowest to play.
Why the club removed it
The two pictures together show the problem. The provision produced the biggest weekend fields in the hardest conditions, exactly when the club had the least daylight and the slowest play to work with. It made the size of the weekend unpredictable, which matters at a tournament that plans tee times, television windows and patron movement to the minute. Augusta National announced ahead of the 2020 Masters that it would use 50 and ties alone. The club did not set out its reasoning at length, but the effect is a weekend field of a reliable size.
The change also removed a strange feature of the old rule: a player's fate could depend on the leader's last hole. If the leader birdied the 18th on Friday evening, the 10-shot line moved by a stroke and someone else could be cut. That is not a sensible way for a cut to work, and few people miss it.
How the Masters cut line moves on a Friday afternoon
The cut line is a projection until the last group finishes. That is true at every stroke-play event with a cut, but at Augusta it gets particular attention because the field is small and every place is visible on the big leaderboards.
Through Friday, broadcasters and the club's scoring show a "projected cut," which is simply the score of the player currently in 50th place if everyone finished where they now stand. Players still on the course can change it in either direction. A birdie by someone outside the line can push it lower. A bogey by someone inside can push it higher, by dropping him into a tie at the old number or pulling the 50th score up.
- Morning waveHalf the field starts the second round. Their totals give the first rough idea of where the line will fall.
- Afternoon waveThe rest of the field plays. The projected cut is recalculated after every hole any of them completes.
- Last groups on the back nineThe players still out can push the line up or down by a stroke with a single score.
- Last puttWhen the final player holes out, the 50th-best total becomes the cut. Every player at or below it qualifies.
- Committee confirmsAugusta National publishes the weekend field and the third-round pairings in twosomes.
The order in which the cut is determined at Augusta National. It describes the mechanism, not any year's scores.
How one bogey can let a dozen men in
The tie rule produces the most striking Friday swings. A hypothetical example shows the mechanism. Suppose that with one group left, 49 players are at four over or better, and the 50th-best score in the clubhouse is four over, held by one man. A big crowd, say a dozen players, is sitting at five over, one shot outside.
Now suppose the last player on the course, standing at four over, makes bogey on the 18th. He drops to five over. The 50th-best total is now five over, and every one of the dozen players at five over is suddenly inside the line along with him. One bogey has added about a dozen players to the weekend.
It works the other way too. A birdie on 18 from a player at five over can tighten the line by a stroke and leave a crowd of players a shot short. That is why players who finished in the morning sit in the clubhouse or on the range watching the afternoon scores, and why it is common to hear of a man who left Augusta on Friday night because he thought he was out, only to be told he had made it.
When weather pushes the cut to Saturday
If play is suspended and the second round cannot be finished on Friday, the cut waits. In 2023 storms halted play on Friday afternoon, falling pines beside the 17th tee made the decision for the officials, and the second round was completed on Saturday morning. Only then was the line set and the field re-paired for the third round. Players who had finished on Friday spent the evening not knowing whether they had a tee time.
What making the Masters cut is worth at Augusta
The obvious answer is prize money. Only players who make the cut share in the purse; the purse is set each year and has risen sharply, so this page does not quote it. What matters is the structure. Finishing 50th pays a sum that, by any normal standard, is substantial, and the gap between making and missing the cut is large.
The less obvious rewards matter more to some players.
World ranking points and season points
The Official World Golf Ranking awards points to players who complete the tournament, scaled by finishing position and the strength of the field. A missed cut earns nothing. For a player near the top-50 boundary in the world ranking, a Masters weekend can be the difference between automatic entries to the other majors and a summer of qualifying.
PGA Tour members who make the cut also earn season-long points toward the playoffs; the majors carry among the highest allocations in the schedule, and our explainer on how the FedEx Cup points race works shows how much a good finish in April can count by August.
A return invitation
The Masters invites the top 12 finishers, including ties, back the following year. It is one of the club's invitation categories and one of the few that can only be earned at Augusta. A player who is not otherwise qualified, perhaps outside the top 50 in the world, can lock in next year's place with a good weekend. That reward is available only to players who are there on Saturday and Sunday.
The amateurs' prize
For amateurs the cut is everything. The low amateur at the Masters receives the Silver Cup and the runner-up the Silver Medal, and both require the player to complete 72 holes. An amateur who misses the cut cannot win either, however he played. The low amateur also gets to sit in Butler Cabin during the presentation, a moment that a handful of later champions experienced first as amateurs.
What missing the cut costs, and what it does not touch
A professional who misses the cut at the Masters does not go home empty-handed. The club has long made a payment to professionals who do not qualify for the weekend, a fixed sum that has risen over time. Amateurs, who cannot accept prize money, receive nothing of the kind.
What the player loses is the weekend's money, points and invitations, and a weekend at the most watched event in American golf. There are subtler costs. A missed cut at Augusta comes in early April, when many players are building toward the summer, and two lost rounds on a course of that difficulty are two lost rounds of competitive practice under pressure.
What the cut never affects
A past champion's invitation. Masters champions are invited for life. A former winner can miss twenty cuts in a row and still receive an invitation the following January. Nothing in the cut rule touches that status; the only thing that ends a past champion's playing career at Augusta is his own decision, discussed further down, and the club's informal encouragement.
The cut also does not affect the other invitation categories that look backward over a longer period. A player who earned his place by winning a recent U.S. Open or PGA Championship keeps that place for the years the category covers, whatever happens at Augusta on Friday.
Masters cut records: Woods's streak and the oldest weekend players
Records at the Masters are kept by the club, and the totals below move whenever a player extends one. They are stated as they stood through the 2025 tournament.
The headline record belongs to Tiger Woods. He missed the cut in 1996, as an amateur. He did not miss another in a tournament he entered for the rest of his career at Augusta. When he made the weekend in 2024, his 24th consecutive made cut, he passed the 23 in a row shared by Gary Player and Fred Couples. The streak survived long gaps: years he did not enter because of injury do not break it, because a streak of made cuts counts only events a player starts.
- 24Tiger Woods
- 23Gary Player
- 23Fred Couples
Counts only tournaments the player entered. Woods's streak stood at 24 after the 2024 Masters; he did not play in 2025, so the figure was unchanged through that tournament and can still rise.
The oldest players to make the weekend
The age record has been broken several times in recent decades, which says something about how well some champions have aged. Bernhard Langer made the cut at the November Masters of 2020 at 63, and Fred Couples went past him in 2023, also at 63 but some months older. Both were past champions with lifetime invitations, playing a course far longer than the one they won on, and both outlasted dozens of players half their age.
Highest and lowest cut lines
The cut score itself varies far more than the rule. In warm, calm years with soft greens it has fallen to within a stroke or two of par; in cold and windy years it has drifted toward double figures over par. The club records each year's line, but the figure says more about the weather than about the field, and comparing lines across decades runs into a problem: the course was a very different length in the 1960s than it is now. Our explainer on how a course setup sets scoring covers why the same hole can be a stroke harder from one day to the next.
Weekend pairings after the Masters cut
Once the cut is made, the field is re-paired for Saturday by score, and the format changes.
On Thursday and Friday the Masters plays in threesomes, with groups chosen by the committee. On the weekend it plays in twosomes. The pairings are set by 36-hole totals: the leaders go out last, the players who scraped in on the line go out first, and players on the same score are paired together, with the committee deciding the order within a score. Sunday's pairings are set the same way from the 54-hole totals. Our page on how tour pairings are determined covers how the PGA Tour handles the same problem at its regular events.
- Cut confirmedThe low 50 and ties are listed by 36-hole total.
- Twosomes by scorePlayers are paired by total, the worst scores together and the best together.
- Reverse orderThe pairs are sent off the first tee with the highest scores first and the leaders last.
- Odd numberIf an odd number made the cut, the first player off goes out with a non-competing marker.
- SundayThe same process is repeated from the 54-hole totals, ending with the final pairing.
The standard procedure for the weekend at Augusta National. Weather can force threesomes or a split tee, but this is the normal order.
The marker
If an odd number of players qualify, somebody would have to play alone. The Masters solves this with a non-competing marker, an Augusta National member who plays with the first player off on Saturday or Sunday, keeps his score and posts no score of his own in the tournament. Through the 2010s the club's best-known marker was Jeff Knox, a member with a celebrated knowledge of the greens. In the third round in 2014 Knox famously shot a lower score than Rory McIlroy, who was paired with him, and McIlroy was gracious enough to say he had learned something about the putting surfaces.
Why twosomes and a single tee
Twosomes are faster than threesomes, by a good margin on a course with greens as demanding as Augusta's, where every player in a group may spend a long time over a putt. Cutting the field to 50-odd players is what makes twosomes possible: 25 or 30 pairs, sent off at intervals of around ten minutes, fit into a day of play from the first tee alone. A weekend of 75 players would mean either threesomes or a second starting tee, and Augusta National dislikes both.
The single tee also gives the weekend its shape. Every player starts on Tea Olive, the first hole, and the round builds toward the second nine in the same order for everyone. Television has learned to rely on that order. The leaders reach Amen Corner in the last hour or so of the broadcast on Sunday, a timing that a split tee would scramble. When weather threatens on the weekend the club will reluctantly send threesomes off both the first and tenth tees, and the fact that this is treated as an emergency measure says a great deal about how much the routine matters.
The marker is the same instinct on a smaller scale: the club would rather put one of its own members on the tee than send a lone player off or break the twosome format on a Saturday.
Past champions and the cut: when does a winner stop playing
The lifetime invitation is one of the most cherished privileges in golf, and it leaves the club with a recurring awkwardness. A champion of 1970 is welcome to play in 2026, but the course he would be playing is hundreds of yards longer than the one he won on, and there comes a point where a former winner's rounds become a ceremony rather than a competition.
The 2002 letters
The club confronted the issue directly once. In 2002 Hootie Johnson, then the chairman, wrote to several older champions, among them Billy Casper, Doug Ford and Gay Brewer, suggesting that their playing days at the Masters were over. The reaction from other champions and much of the press was hostile, and the club backed away from imposing an age limit. Since then the approach has been informal: champions are left to decide for themselves, with gentle encouragement from Augusta when the time seems to have come.
Billy Casper's last appearance, in 2005 at the age of 73, is the case usually cited. He shot a high score in the first round, did not return a card, and withdrew. He was not embarrassed into retirement; he had simply wanted to play once more.
Retirement as a ritual
Most champions now choose a final year and announce it in advance, often with a standing ovation up the 18th fairway. Arnold Palmer played his 50th consecutive Masters in 2004 and stopped. Jack Nicklaus played his last in 2005. Gary Player retired after 2009, his 52nd appearance and a record. Sandy Lyle chose 2023 as his last.
Why the cut keeps them trying
For a past champion in his sixties, the cut is the measure that still means something. He is not going to win. But making the weekend at Augusta at 63, against the best players in the world on a course of more than 7,500 yards, is a real achievement, and the Langer and Couples cuts were celebrated for exactly that reason. The rule that cuts a 25-year-old touring professional on Friday is the same rule a past champion is trying to beat, which gives the weekend at the Masters a quiet subplot most viewers barely notice.
The Masters cut compared with the weekly PGA Tour cut
Most American golf fans see a cut nearly every week on the PGA Tour, and the Masters rule looks familiar for that reason. The tour's standard rule at full-field events takes the low 65 and ties after 36 holes, from fields of around 144 to 156 players. Several of its elevated events with smaller fields have used no cut at all, and some have used a cut of 50 and ties combined with a 10-shot window, an echo of the old Augusta rule. The full details of the tour's version are in our guide to the PGA Tour cut rule.
The differences that matter
The Masters field is smaller and stronger, so the line falls in a different place relative to the quality of the field. There is no "made cut, did not finish" provision that thins the weekend field, as the PGA Tour once had at some events; at Augusta, 50 and ties play all 36 weekend holes. And the Masters makes no exception for anyone: no sponsor invitation, no exemption from the line.
The judgment
The 2020 change was the right one. The 10-shot rule dated from an era of smaller fields. It produced unpredictable weekend fields for no clear sporting reason, and made one player's score on Friday depend on another's. Fifty and ties is simple and fair, and it still sends more than half the field to the weekend. For a tournament whose rules are often accused of being opaque, the cut is the one thing anyone can explain in a sentence. More on the week as a whole sits in our golf section and on the United States sports hub.