Mandatory Versus Optional Events
Not every tournament is a free choice. The majors and the top tier of tour events are treated as compulsory for players ranked highly enough to gain direct entry, and the mechanism is simple: those events occupy countable slots whether or not the player appears. Skipping one does not free up the slot for a better result elsewhere, it carries a zero into the calculation.
Below that tier, the logic inverts. Optional events count only if they improve on what is already there, so entering carries no ranking downside at all. The cost of a bad week is limited to travel, fatigue and the risk of injury, not to the ranking itself. That asymmetry shapes schedules more than any other factor. A top player builds a season around the compulsory tier, adds the optional events that suit their game or historically produce good results, and treats the rest of the calendar as genuinely discretionary. A player outside the direct-entry band faces the opposite problem: no compulsory slots, so they must play a great deal to fill the countable ones at all.
