Commissioner's notes, Tuesday, September 21. Gopher won his fourth event of the year at Bay Hill on Sunday, a 14-under that finished three shots clear of the field. Full results are on the leaderboard page.

This week it's back to the Old Course. It's the last regular event of the season. After this one, the top 30 on the money list go to the Tour Championship: two rounds at Bay Hill, both due Sunday, October 10, with a $2,000,000 purse. If you're anywhere from 25th to 35th on the money list, this week matters.

Real-world note: the Ryder Cup is this weekend at Brookline, and I know half of you will be watching it on Sunday instead of recording your round. Record it Saturday.

Anybody with Links LS 1999 can play. We have about forty regulars right now, from Georgia to Oregon and two from Canada. There's no fee. The money is play money. The bragging is real.

1. E-mail me with the handle you want to play under. One player per handle, one handle per player.
2. Each week, set up the game with the settings listed under This Week, with recording turned on, and play one round of 18 holes.
3. Save the recorded game and e-mail the file to me as an attachment, with your handle and the event number in the subject line. Example: SandWedge - Event 27.
4. I play back every recorded round before I post it. If the file won't play back, I'll write to you, and you'll have until Monday night to send a good one.
5. Results go up by Tuesday night.

1. Tournament settings. Use the tees, wind and other settings for the week exactly as posted. If I see the wind turned off on playback, the round is disqualified.

2. Wind on. Always. This is golf.

3. No mulligans. Not one. If you hit it in the water, you take your drop like a man, or like a woman, as the case may be. We have four of those and they are some of our best players.

4. One recorded round. Your first recorded round of the week is your round. Play practice rounds all you want with recording off, but once you turn it on and tee off, that's your entry. If you start a recorded round and quit partway through, tell me. I'd rather have an honest player shoot 80 than a dishonest one shoot 64.

5. Swing method. The standard three-click swing only. If your version of the game offers any other way of swinging, or any help with the swing, don't use it for tour rounds.

6. Ties for first. Decided on the card: best back nine, then best last six holes, then last three, then the 18th. Ties anywhere else stand, and the money for the tied places is added up and split evenly.

7. The commissioner's word is final. The commissioner also shoots about plus-two every week, so nobody needs to worry about him rigging anything.

Every event has a play-money purse, $1,000,000 for a regular week and $1,500,000 for our three majors. The top 20 places get paid, on a sliding scale: in a regular week the winner gets $230,000, second $138,000, third $87,000, and so on down to $15,000 for 20th. Majors pay half again as much at every place. Tied players split the money for the places they tie for, rounded down to the dollar.

The money list is our points list. It decides who gets into the Tour Championship, and the leader at the end of the season is our Player of the Year. His name goes at the top of this page for all of next year, which is the only prize I can afford.