BMW PGA Championship At Wentworth: The Complete Guide

The par five eighteenth at Wentworth's West Course bends right around a rise, climbs to a green cut into the slope below the clubhouse, and is reachable in two for anyone who has driven it well. That single hole has decided more European golf tournaments than almost any other piece of ground in the country. A player standing in the eighteenth fairway on a Sunday afternoon with a three wood in his hands and a one-shot deficit is looking at the most familiar situation in the British professional game.

The championship played there each year is the DP World Tour's own. Not a major, not a World Golf Championship, not one of the Gulf events that opens the season with the largest cheque — but the week the circuit treats as its home tournament, in the county where its headquarters sit, on a course whose finishing stretch was built for exactly this. That is the thing worth understanding about it before anything else.

From the British PGA's own title to the Tour's flagship

The championship began in the 1950s as the PGA Championship, run by the Professional Golfers' Association as the association's own title. It was, at the outset, a domestic tournament for a domestic membership, and it moved between British venues in the way that most tournaments of the era did. Royal Birkdale and Ganton are among the courses that hosted early editions.

Two developments then turned it into something larger. The first was the formalisation of a properly organised European circuit in the 1970s, which gave the tournament a structure to sit inside and a field drawn from across the continent rather than from British club professionals. The second was the move to a permanent home at Wentworth in the 1980s, which gave it continuity, a recognisable television picture, and the association with one course that every significant championship eventually needs.

Title sponsorship arrived in stages, as it did across professional golf. BMW took the name in the 2000s and has held it since, which is long enough that most followers under forty have never known the tournament by any other name. The formal title remains the PGA Championship, and the association's ownership of it is why the event sits slightly apart from the Tour's other properties even though the Tour stages it.

1. 11950sFounded as the PGA Championship, the association's own title for its own membership, moving between British venues.
2. 21970sA properly organised European circuit forms, giving the tournament a structure to sit inside and a continental field.
3. 31980sThe championship settles permanently at Wentworth, gaining continuity and a recognisable television picture.
4. 42000sBMW takes the title sponsorship, which it has held long enough that the older name has largely dropped out of use.

The sequence of the tournament's development; the decade labels are the periods described above rather than exact founding dates.

There is a naming confusion worth clearing up, because it catches people out. This is not the US PGA Championship, which is a major championship run by the American PGA of America. The two events share a name because both national associations named their championship after themselves, decades apart, without much thought for future television listings. The relationship between the majors and the European circuit is set out in the guide to English major winners in golf.

Why Wentworth's West Course became the permanent home

Wentworth Club sits at Virginia Water in Surrey, on the Berkshire border, inside the M25 and within reach of Heathrow. The estate carries three full courses; the West is the tournament course.

Harry Colt laid it out in the 1920s, and the nickname it acquired — the Burma Road — reflects how punishing the original was thought to be. Colt's routing runs through mature pine, birch and rhododendron on the sandy Surrey soil that produced so much of England's best inland golf, and it is the soil rather than the trees that matters most. Sand drains. A heathland course in October is playable when a clay parkland course is under water, and that has real consequences for a tournament staged towards the end of an English summer. The wider character of that ground is covered in the guide to the Surrey heath belt and, in more detail on architecture, the Wentworth West Course guide.

The course has not stayed as Colt left it. The most substantial modern reworking was led by Ernie Els, a multiple winner of the championship, and it was followed by further amendments to greens, bunkering and drainage after the first version drew criticism from players about green complexes that proved too severe for tournament conditions. That sequence is worth noting honestly: the redesign was revised because it did not initially work as intended, which is a more common story in golf architecture than the official histories usually admit.

Four things keep the tournament there. Proximity to the Tour's own headquarters on the estate. Drainage that permits play in wet weather. A layout with three par fives on the back nine, which produces volatile finishes. And an established spectator infrastructure — roads, walkways, grandstand positions, television camera towers — that takes years to develop anywhere new.

That last point is underrated. A championship venue is not just a golf course; it is a temporary town assembled and dismantled each year. Cable runs for broadcast, power distribution, water and waste for catering, crossing points that let thousands of people move between holes without walking across a fairway, and hard standing capable of taking heavy vehicles in wet weather. All of that is designed once and refined over decades. Moving a tournament of this size to a new site means starting that process again and accepting several imperfect years while it is learned. Clubs that have hosted for a long period accumulate an operational knowledge that does not transfer.

What Colt's routing actually asks

Colt's design principles are visible throughout the West, and they explain why the course still functions against modern equipment despite being laid out in an era of hickory shafts. He routed holes to use the natural fall of the ground rather than cutting into it, set greens on plateaux and shoulders so that an approach missed on the wrong side leaves a recovery across a slope, and used the existing tree cover as strategic framing rather than as decoration. The result is a course where the tee shot dictates the hole. Miss a fairway into the pines and the second shot is not a question of distance but of whether a gap exists at all.

Modern length has compressed some of that. Holes conceived as three-shot propositions are now reachable, and several of the tee positions have been pushed back as far as the property allows. This is the ordinary condition of every classic inland course in England, and Wentworth has handled it more successfully than most, largely because the trees supply a defence that no amount of clubhead speed removes.

The estate around the course and what it constrains

Wentworth is not a golf course in open country. The West runs through a private residential estate laid out in the same period as the golf, and large houses sit behind screens of pine and rhododendron along a good many of the holes. The roads inside the estate are private. That one fact shapes the championship's operational plan more than anything else about the site.

It is why the car parks are temporary fields beyond the estate boundary rather than tarmac near the clubhouse, and why a shuttle bus is part of every spectator's day. It is why crowd movement follows established walkways and marshalled crossing points rather than spreading wherever the view is best. And it is a large part of why lengthening the course has limits: a tee can only go back as far as the property allows, and at several holes the property runs out before the modern game does. Trees, in that sense, are doing structural work that the deeds cannot.

The club itself is private and subscription-based, with three full courses on the estate — the West, the East and the Edinburgh — which is the arrangement that makes the championship possible at all. Members lose the West for a substantial part of the late summer while the rough is grown in, the greens are brought up to speed and the temporary town is assembled around it, and they play the other two. A single-course club could not give a tournament of this size the run of its ground for that long without effectively closing.

Build-up and breakdown take weeks either side of the four competition days. Cable is run, grandstand scaffolding is trucked in over ground that has to take the weight, hospitality units are erected on the same footprints used the previous year, and the whole of it comes down again afterwards with the turf repaired before the members return. Residents live alongside the process on an annual cycle, and the traffic management orders that appear on the local roads during championship week are the visible edge of a negotiation that runs all year. Anyone hoping to see the course outside the championship should read the visitor access guide for English clubs first, because a private estate with a private road network is not somewhere to turn up on spec.

The field: who qualifies and how the invitations work

The championship's field is assembled from several exempt categories rather than by a single qualifying event, and the categories are set out in the Tour's published regulations. The general shape is consistent even though the details are revised.

Route in	What it covers
Race to Dubai standing	Leading players on the current and previous season's ranking
Category exemptions	Tournament winners, past champions and long-term exempt members
World ranking	Leading available players in the Official World Golf Ranking
Invitations	A limited number at the tournament's discretion
Affiliated pathways	Places tied to specific tournaments and circuits

The practical effect is a field that is stronger than a standard Tour week and weaker than a major. Europe-based players will nearly all be there. Players based principally on the American circuit attend depending on scheduling, eligibility arrangements and their own season, and this has fluctuated considerably as the relationship between the circuits has shifted.

Invitations are the interesting category. A small number of places each year go to players the tournament wants present — a leading amateur, a returning former champion, a player whose story the week benefits from. Sponsor invitations to leading English amateurs have launched several professional careers, which is one of the quieter functions this tournament performs. The domestic amateur structure that produces those players is described in the guide to English amateur championships.

Format, prize structure and Race to Dubai weight

The championship is played as 72 holes of stroke play over four days, with a cut after 36 holes reducing the field for the weekend. That is the standard professional format and there is nothing unusual about it here.

• 72Holes played
• 36Cut applied after
• 3Par fives on the back nine

The format of the championship, which is standard for a professional stroke-play event; prize fund and points allocation are revised annually and are not shown.

What is unusual is the weighting. As an elevated event, the championship carries a substantially larger prize fund and a substantially larger Race to Dubai points allocation than a standard Tour week. Both figures are revised from season to season, so the specific amounts should be taken from the tournament's own published information rather than assumed. The mechanism is the point: a strong week here moves a player up the season standings by an amount that would take several ordinary tournaments to match.

That weighting cascades into everything else. Players build schedules around it. Sponsors pay more for it. World ranking points follow field strength, so a deeper field generates more ranking points, which attracts a deeper field the following year. The full mechanics of the season-long ranking, including how the standings determine card retention and playing categories, are set out in the guide to DP World Tour events in England.

A pro-am is played in the days before the competition rounds, and it is a genuine part of the week rather than an afterthought. It is also, for spectators, an unusually relaxed way to see the course and the players at close range.

The cut deserves a word, because it determines the economics of the week for most of the field. A player who misses it earns nothing and has paid for flights, accommodation and a caddie regardless. The professional calculation on a Friday afternoon at the cut line is therefore not the same as the calculation of a player in contention, and it explains behaviour that can look strange from a grandstand — a conservative line taken by someone six over par, a putt struck with what appears to be excessive care. He is not playing for the tournament. He is playing for a weekend's earnings and a set of points he needs by November.

Ties at the top are resolved by a play-off, played over designated holes rather than as a full round, and at Wentworth the eighteenth is the natural stage for it. A sudden-death play-off on a reachable par five is a peculiar test, because the aggressive option that would be reckless in regulation becomes close to compulsory when a single hole decides everything.

What the points actually decide

Season standings at this level are not a table for its own sake. The Race to Dubai position determines who keeps a card for the following season and who returns to qualifying school, and it sets the playing category that governs which tournaments a member can enter at all — a distinction that matters far more to the middle of the field than to the leaders. It settles the field for the season-ending event in Dubai. In several seasons it has also carried a route onto the American circuit for the leading players not already exempt there, though the number of places and the terms of any cross-circuit arrangement have been renegotiated repeatedly, and the current version should be read from the Tour's regulations rather than remembered.

Ryder Cup qualification runs on its own separate points list with its own qualifying window, so a large week at Wentworth can move a player up two ladders at once. That overlap is a good part of why the move to September sharpened the tournament rather than diminishing it. A player in September is often chasing a card, a Dubai place and a captain's attention in the same four rounds, and the golf that produces on a course with three par fives on the back nine is not cautious.

The par-five finish and the golf it produces

The back nine at Wentworth contains three par fives, and the last of them is the eighteenth. That is an architectural decision with enormous consequences for how the tournament plays out.

A course that finishes on a par four of any real length tends to protect a lead. A player one ahead plays conservatively, aims for the middle of the green, and takes his four. A course that finishes on a reachable par five does the opposite. The leader cannot play safe, because the man behind him can make an eagle. Both are pushed towards a shot they might not otherwise attempt, and the hole is designed so that the aggressive option carries real risk — the green sits above the fairway with trouble short and a slope that rejects anything under-hit.

The seventeenth compounds it. Another par five, doglegging left, with the second shot the decisive one. A player who has been three behind with three to play can genuinely still win, and that possibility keeps the tournament alive later than most.

The result is that Wentworth Sundays produce more eagles, more disasters and more late lead changes than a typical Tour venue. Television has noticed. The finish is one of the reasons the championship holds its position in a crowded calendar, and it is a reasonable argument that the eighteenth hole has done as much for the tournament's status as any sponsor.

What the setup asks of a player

The West Course does not principally test length, though length helps at the par fives. It tests driving accuracy into narrow tree-lined corridors, control of trajectory beneath and around the pines, and putting on greens that run considerably faster than a member will ever see. The rough is grown in for the week, the fairway lines are pulled in, and hole locations are cut close to run-offs that would be considered unfair for ordinary play.

Weather is the other variable. September in Surrey can deliver anything, and the course changes character completely between a dry week and a wet one. Wet, and the par fives become genuinely reachable only for the longest players. Dry and firm, and the tee shot becomes the whole problem.

Wind behaves oddly at Wentworth for a reason that is easy to miss on television. The pines are tall enough to shelter a fairway completely while the wind runs unimpeded across the tops, so a shot played from a still fairway can be knocked sideways once it climbs above the tree line. Players who know the course well flight the ball lower than the yardage suggests, and caddies who have worked the week for years are noticeably better than newcomers at judging it. That local knowledge is one reason the same names recur near the top of the leaderboard.

The greens are the other technical problem. Colt's putting surfaces were built with pronounced internal movement, and the modern rebuilds retained a good deal of it while adding speed. A hole location cut on the wrong side of a ridge turns a straightforward two-putt into a genuine hazard, and approach play at Wentworth is therefore about which portion of the green you are on rather than whether you are on it. Missing in the correct place is a skill the course rewards heavily.

British and English winners, and what a home victory means

Luke Donald's back-to-back wins in 2011 and 2012 are the clearest recent example of an English player taking the title, and they came during the stretch in which he reached world number one. Winning the Tour's flagship at home, twice, in consecutive years, is about as strong a statement as the European circuit allows.

The tournament's honours board carries a considerable number of the leading names in European golf across its history, including players who won it at Wentworth and players who won it at the earlier venues before the move. Ernie Els won it more than once and later reshaped the course. Colin Montgomerie's association with the event was long and successful. Seve Ballesteros won it during his prime.

One pattern in the honours board is genuinely informative rather than merely decorative: multiple winners are common. A course that demands specific local knowledge — the flight beneath the trees, the correct side of each green, the wind above the pine line — rewards familiarity, and familiarity compounds. A player who has contended at Wentworth once tends to contend again. That is the signature of a course with real character, and it is the opposite of what happens at venues where the winner is essentially whoever putted best that week.

A caution is worth entering here rather than glossing over it. Precise winner-by-year detail across a championship of this age is exactly the sort of thing that gets misremembered, and this page will not attempt a full list from memory. The Tour and the PGA both maintain the official record, and anyone wanting the complete sequence should take it from there.

What a home win means is easier to state. For an English professional, this is the tournament the people they grew up playing with will have watched. It is the one their home club will have on in the bar. Winning a Gulf event in January is worth more in ranking points to a career; winning at Wentworth is worth more in the parts of a career that ranking points do not measure. The parallel with the Ryder Cup from an English perspective is close — both are events where the meaning outruns the mathematics.

How the tournament setup differs from a members' day

A visitor who plays the West Course outside tournament week is playing a substantially different golf course, and the differences are worth understanding because they explain why professional scores look the way they do.

Element	Members' and visitors' conditions	Championship week
Tees	Forward of the championship markers	Full length, back tees
Rough	Cut to normal playing length	Grown in for weeks beforehand
Green speed	Comfortable for daily play	Markedly faster, rolled and cut low
Hole locations	Sensible positions on flatter ground	Close to slopes and run-offs
Fairway width	Full width	Lines pulled in, first cut narrowed
Ground firmness	Depends on season	Managed towards firm where weather allows

There is a further difference that no table captures, which is the surrounding infrastructure. A member playing in February walks a quiet course through pine woods with almost nobody in sight. A professional in September plays the same holes lined with rope, grandstands, camera towers, scoreboards and several thousand people, with every shot recorded. Those are different sports played on the same ground, and the psychological gap between them is a large part of what separates a good club golfer from a Tour professional.

Green staff begin preparing many months in advance, and the club's own membership plays around that preparation for much of the season. Understanding this is the difference between reading a professional's score as a comment on the course and reading it as a comment on a temporary condition imposed on the course. Anyone planning to play it should read the visitor access guide for English clubs and the note on green fees, because access at a venue of this profile is not straightforward.

Attending: ticket types, ballots, hospitality and access

Tickets are sold in advance through the tournament's official channels. The structure is generally a day pass, priced separately for practice days and for each of the four competition rounds, with weekend days costing most and selling first. Ticket prices change annually, so the tournament's own site is the only reliable source.

Options beyond general admission usually include:

• Practice day passes. Considerably cheaper, far less crowded, and the best access to players you will get.
• Hospitality packages. Ranging from a shared marquee with catering to private boxes overlooking the closing holes.
• Debenture and member arrangements. The club's own structures, which sit outside general sale.
• Concessions. Junior and under-age arrangements have typically been generous, often with free entry for accompanied children up to a stated age.
• Multi-day tickets. Where offered, better value than buying days separately.

Practical points for the day itself. Bag size is restricted and published in advance. Folding chairs of certain designs are permitted and others are not. Phones are generally allowed on silent, with restrictions on photography during competition rounds. Ground conditions can be soft, and the West Course involves a substantial amount of walking on undulating terrain, so footwear matters more than it does at a stadium sport.

Getting to Wentworth from London by rail and road

The venue's location is one of its practical advantages: it sits close to London without being in it.

By rail, Virginia Water station is on the line served from London Waterloo, and Sunningdale is the neighbouring station. Both are within a short distance of the club, and the tournament normally runs a shuttle service from a designated station during the championship. Rail is the sensible option for a spectator day, because it avoids the car park problem entirely.

1. 1RailWaterloo to Virginia Water or Sunningdale, with a tournament shuttle running from a designated station during the week.
2. 2RoadM25 junction 13 or the A30, then a marshalled temporary car park in fields with its own shuttle to the entrance.
3. 3GateTicket scan and a bag check against a size limit published in advance, with restrictions on chairs and on cameras.
4. 4DepartureThe heaviest crush follows the last putt, and a weather delay moves the shuttle timetable with it.

The normal shape of a championship day at Wentworth; station shuttles, parking arrangements and gate times are confirmed by the tournament each year.

By road, the venue sits close to junction 13 of the M25 and near the A30, with Heathrow a short drive away. Parking during the championship is in temporary fields with a shuttle to the entrance, and the walk plus the shuttle adds meaningful time at both ends of the day. Departure after the final group finishes is the worst part of the experience, and leaving twenty minutes early or waiting half an hour afterwards both beat joining the exodus.

One caution about the shuttle timetable: it runs to the expected finish, and a weather delay pushes everything back. If you are catching a specific train, check the last realistic connection before you set out.

On-site experience, spectator zones and where to actually watch

The tented village at Wentworth sits near the clubhouse and the closing holes, and it has grown into a substantial operation with food, retail, sponsor activations and screens. Some spectators spend most of the day there, which is a legitimate way to use a ticket and not what this section is about.

For watching golf, three approaches work:

Take a grandstand seat early and stay. The stands around the closing holes fill long before the leaders arrive on a Sunday. If you want to see the finish from a seat, you commit to it by mid-afternoon and accept that you will see nothing else.

Find a convergence point. Places where a green and the next tee sit close together, or where two holes run alongside each other, let you watch multiple groups without moving. These are the best value positions on any golf course and they are rarely the busiest.

Follow a group early. On Thursday and Friday morning the course is comparatively empty and it is possible to walk with a group inside the ropes' edge and actually see the shots. By Saturday afternoon this is no longer realistic for the leaders.

The practice ground is worth an hour on any day. It is where the technical detail is visible — a player working a wedge ladder, a caddie stepping off numbers, a coach filming from behind — and it is far less crowded than the course.

Where the championship sits in the British sporting calendar

The championship's date has moved. It was for many years a May fixture, and it was later shifted to September, a change that altered its character considerably. A September date puts it after the majors have been decided, later in the Race to Dubai when card retention has become urgent, and into a part of the British calendar crowded with the start of the football season and the end of the cricket summer.

Both dates have arguments behind them. May gave the tournament clear air in the domestic sporting week and warmer ground for spectators. September gives it a more consequential position in the season's narrative, with players fighting for Ryder Cup places, card retention and season standings simultaneously. The Tour has been open that scheduling is a continuing balance rather than a solved problem, and further movement would not be surprising.

Against the broader English sporting summer, the championship occupies a particular niche: a four-day event at a Surrey venue that draws a large crowd without ever competing for the mainstream attention that The Open commands. It is the domestic professional game's own occasion rather than a national one. That is not a diminishment. A tournament that the players themselves treat as their championship, at a course they know intimately, finishing on a hole that refuses to allow anyone to play safe, does not need to be anything more. The wider English golf calendar and the game's history in this country run through the England hub, the golf section and the English golf history timeline.