Record-setting purse!

October 12, 2022 by Justin Westfall in Preview with comments

For a third consecutive year, the Disc Golf Pro Tour will be awarding a record payout to their MPO and FPO tour champions. $35,000 will be going to the winners, and $302,000 in total will be dispersed amongst the 16 FPO and 32 MPO players who qualify for the event. Five of those players (Ella Hansen, Kat Mertsch, Maria Oliva, Ezra Aderhold, and Brodie Smith) are guaranteed the highest payout of their career simply by showing up to the tournament.

If you are unfamiliar with the tour championship format, players are seeded based on the points they earned throughout the season, with the top players earning a bye to the quarterfinal or semifinal rounds. The top four scores from each round will advance to the following round, with tiebreakers being decided by the player’s seed, making regular season results very important. Each day, scores reset.

A tie at the end of the final round will result in a standard playoff until a winner is declared. What’s new for this season is a play-in round taking place on Wednesday, featuring six FPO and six MPO players. The top two finishers from each division will earn a spot in the Tour Championship.

Last year, Nathan Queen ran the table and became the third MPO player in five years to win the tour championship all the way from the opening round. Queen was truly phenomenal on the Hornets Nest course, shooting the hot round three out of four days despite being the 28th seed in the division. As the 3rd seed in FPO, Missy Gannon had a bye to the semifinal round. She tied the hot round and advanced to the finals, where she won by a margin of four strokes and earned the moniker “Big Money Missy” after cashing a $30,000 check.

Past DGPT Championship Winners

Three Things We’ll Be Watching

1. History tells us there is a very good chance that an MPO player seeded 17-32 will make the finals on Sunday — and potentially even win the event. In the five years since the pro tour started using a four round MPO championship format, one player from the opening round has made the finals in four of those years. Chris Dickerson did so twice, going on to win the event, as did Nathan Queen…