Golf PGA Tour Events Information 2024

In the world of professional golf, there are two major organising bodies of men’s golf, the European Tour and the PGA Tour – well three really if you also include the Japan Tour.  Lets face it though the PGA sits at the top of that triangle when it comes the most coveted events and golfers.

Established by the Professional Golfers Association of America, which it is named after, in 1929, it became a spin-off entity responsible for tour players rather than club professionals in December of 1968.

On this page you will find information that can be useful when betting on PGA tour events, you can also find details on how PGA tour events are run, history, prize money, venues and more

If you are looking for majors or the Ryder Cup however we have separate pages on those that can be found on our major events page.

PGA Tour Operated Events

The PGA Tour organises major golf events for both the regular tour and what is labelled as the PGA Tour Champions, which is for golfers over 50 years of age. There’s also the Web.com Tour, which is for professionals who have not yet been able to qualify for the full tour, as well as variants in Canada, Latin America and China. Based in the Jacksonville district of Florida, it is a non-profit organisation.

Despite not being responsible for the management of any of the four Majors in golf nor the women’s game, the PGA Tour still operates a huge chunk of the sport’s events. These include the likes of the FedEx Cup, the Presidents Cup and the Players Championship.

The PGA Tour operates six different tours, three of which are international and three of which are based in the United States. In terms of the latter, these tours are the PGA Tour itself, the PGA Tour Champions and the Web.com developmental tour.

When it comes the international tours, these are the PGA Tour Canada, the PGA Tour China and the PGA Tour Latinoamérica. Self-explanatory though they may be, the first of these involves golf tournament in Canada and came under the PGA Tour’s responsibility in November of 2012.

The PGA Tour Latinoamérica involves nine tournaments across Latin American countries, whilst the PGA Tour China was launched in 2014 and is a separate entity to the China Tour that filed in 2009.

Getting On To The Tour

There is a Qualifying Tournament that is known in the industry as ‘Q-School’ and involves 6 rounds of gold being played in autumn. It took on the moniker of the Web.com Tour Qualifying Tournament in 2013, having previously been known as the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament. The top 25 finishers are invited to play on the PGA Tour the following year.

Golfers that win a PGA Tour event are given a tour card for at least 2 years, with another year added on if they win again within the next 5 years. There are exceptions to that, though, with victors in the likes of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Memorial Tournament and the World Golf Championships all getting 3 year exemptions and the winner of the Players Championships being exempt from qualifying for 5 years.

At the end of the season the golfers that finish within the top 125 of the FedEx Cup receive the right to play on the Tour the following year, as well as making it through to the FedEx Cup Play-Offs. Those that aren’t already members of the PGA Tour can become so by finishing in a position that is equal to or better than the player who ended in the 125th position on the FedEx Cup points score.

Priority Ranking System For Tour Events

When it comes to the players that are invited to take part in any given PGA Tour events, the PGA uses a priority ranking system that, as the name suggests, gives priority to certain players.

Here are the top ten priorities:

• The winner of the PGA Championship or the US Open before 1970 or from the current season and 5 previous seasons
• Players Championship Winner from that season and the previous 5
• Masters Tournament winner, again from the previous 5 season and the current one
• The Open Championship winner from the past 5 and current seasons
• The Tour Championship winner from the current season and the previous 3
• World Golf Championships events winners from the current and previous 3 seasons
• The last 3 seasons worth of winners of the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Memorial Tournament, as well as this season’s
• The previous 5 seasons’ FedEx Cup Points List leaders
• The PGA Tour Money List leaders since 2017 and the subsequent 5 seasons
• Winners of tournaments over the previous 2 seasons that are either co-sponsored by the PGA Tour or else officially approved

When you consider that there are 37 different criteria for making it onto the priority ranking system you can see why we’ve decided to only show the top 10!

The Courses and Venues

Obviously the very nature of the PGA Tour, with the fact that countless events are played under its banner both nationally and internationally, means that it is impossible to talk about just one venue. There are, however, a couple of events that are hosted by the same golf course every year and can be used as examples of the sort of venues that are considered to be host courses for PGA tournaments.

One such example is the Arnold Palmer Invitational, which was established in 1966 and has been played at Bay Hill Club and Lodge every year since 1979. More than 7,000 yards long and boasting a par of 72, the Florida-based course was designed by one of America’s leading golf course designers, Dick Wilson, in 1961. It was owned by Arnold Palmer himself between 1974 and his death in 2014, hence it being used for the Invitational.

Another such example is the Memorial Tournament, which was founded by Jack Nicklaus almost exactly ten years after the Arnold Palmer Invitational was first played. It takes place at Muirfield Village Golf Club, which was designed by Nicklaus and named in honour of the privately owned links course in Scotland. It has a par of 72 and is stretched over 7,392 yards of Ohio turf.

As well as the Memorial Tournament it has also been the location of the Ryder Cup, the Solheim Cup and the Presidents Cup at various times.

Prize Money

Money earned to end of 2021 season

As with the venues, it’s difficult to talk about the prize money associated with PGA Tour events because there are so many of them and they each have their own winnings. What we can tell you is that the amount of money won by players has increased beyond all recognition in the years since the PGA Tour was first started.

In 1934, for example, Paul Runyan won 7 events and finished as the best paid golfer on the Tour. He earned $6,767. In 2018, by contrast, the winning golfer was Justin Thomas who took home $8,694,821 in prize money for his 3 event victories. That was actually a drop from the $9,365,185 he earned the year before when he won 5 tournaments.

The most successful golfer in the history of the PGA Tour is Tiger Woods, who won the most money for the 10th time in 2013 when he walked off with $8,553,439. An impressive amount when you consider that he won $2,066,833 in his first season as the tour’s most successful golfer in 1997, but actually not as much as the $10,867,052 that he earned in 2007.

As with all other golfers at the top of the money list since 1981, Woods was given the Arnold Palmer Award each time he topped the list.

Non-Monetary Awards

Whilst most golfers are happiest when they take home million dollar cheques, that’s not the only thing available to them throughout the Tour.

There are numerous different awards that are also given out over the course of the year, with the most prestigious being the PGA Player of the Year Award.

This is figured out according to a points-based system that sees points awarded for a player’s scoring average over the course of the season, their position on the money list and the number of wins achieved during the year.

There’s also the Jack Nicklaus Trophy, which is better known as the PGA Tour Player of the Year. First given out in 1990 and administered by the PGA Tour, this is awarded according to the results of a ballot of the players on the tour. No information is given out about the result apart from the winning player.

It’s common for the PGA Player of the Year and the Jack Nicklaus Trophy winner to be the same player, which was the case from 1992 to 2018.

1990 also saw an award handed out to the Rookie of the Year, which is rather obviously for the best rookie golfer. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean young player but rather a golfer that hasn’t been on the PGA Tour for very long.

Players are eligible provided that they have competed in fewer than 7 events from any season prior to their first season of membership of the PGA.

Previous PGA Tour Winners Since 2010

• Tiger Woods has won the PGA player of the year award more times than any other golfer, 11 times.  This is 5 times more than Tom Watson in second place.
• Tiger Woods has also won the money list the most times, on 10 occasions, Jack Nicklaus is in second with 8 wins.

The History Of The PGA Tour

There are, in essence, two types of professional golfers: those that go on tour around the country and those that are based at specific clubs. It’s a little more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the principle of it.

Touring players, who move from tournament to tournament, wanted to separate themselves from club pros for some time before the expansion in television coverage, and increased revenue as a result, finally caused a rift at the end of the 1960s.

Things came to a head in the wake of the PGA Championship of July 1968 when a number of leading pros on the tour circuit felt that there were too many club pros playing and that the venue had been a poor choice.

The tournament pros formed their own governing body called the American Professional Golfers, Inc. based in New York, which was independent of the PGA of America. This chasm continued until December of 1968 when it was agreed that the APG would be abolished in exchange for a Players Division being added to the PGA.

The Tournament Players Division Is Formed

The new Tournament Players Division was given its own 10-member board, which was responsible for ensuring that things ran smoothly from the point of view of the touring players.

The board featured 4 players who were on the tour, 3 executives of the PGA of America and 3 outside members, originally made up of businessmen. The first commissioner was the former executive director of the United States Golf Association Jospeh Dey, who came on board in January of 1969 and signed a 5 year contract.

Deane Beman replaced Dey in 1974 and one of his first duties was to change the name of the organisation to the PGA Tour, which happened in 1975. He would go on to be the commissioner of the tour for 20 years, not relinquishing his position until Tim Finchem took over in 1994 (Finchem would actually go on to outdo Beman, remaining in his post until Jay Monahan took over from him in January of 2017).

One of the issues Beman had to deal with was a dispute in 1981 that saw that PGA Tour change its name to the TPA Tour because of a disagreement over marketing.

The PGA Of America Holds On To Two Events

The separation of the tour players from the PGA of America meant that it became little more than an association for the country’s club professionals, linked only casually to the professional tour. It did, however, maintain control of two events that allowed it to have a modest income in the years after the separation.

The first was the PGA Championship, which had already become a Major by the end of the 1960s and was much loved by golf fans. The other competition was one that wasn’t much loved because of its predictability, a little-known event called the Ryder Cup.

Back then the Ryder Cup was a match play event for teams that golf fans didn’t really enjoy watching because it was obvious that the United States would win every time. The PGA wasn’t being asked for the rights to the Ryder Cup, such was the extent to which other events were seen as more important.

That all changed in 1979, however, when European golfers were added to the event and the television coverage expanded. Indeed, nowadays the Ryder Cup is seen as one of the most thrilling tournaments in the sport and is one of the chief revenue streams for the PGA of America.

Changes To The Way The Tour Operates

In March of 2012 the PGA Tour confirmed that it was planning to introduced huge changes to the way in which the season worked, starting in the 2014 season.

The most major change that was introduced was the fact that it would be based over two years rather than one. Previous to this alteration the entire PGA Tour was based over a calendar year.

Nowadays it begins in October of one year and concludes after the final FedEx Cup Play-Off in August of the following year.

There were also big changes to the way in which players qualified for the Tour, with the top 125 players on the FedEx Cup list getting a Tour card and the next 75, as well as the top 75 on the Web.com Tour, could play in the Web.com Tour Finals in September. The top 50 at the end of these Finals get a Tour card.

2013 also saw both the HSBC Champions event and the CIMB Classic, held in China and Malaysia respectively, became full PGA Tour events in 2013, getting the associated prize money for the first time. Prior to that a victory in one of these events would see players amply rewarded but not actually have the winnings count towards their PGA Tour earnings.

Women And The PGA Tour

There isn’t actually anything in the rules of the PGA Tour that says that the event is limited to male golfers only. Babe Zaharias became the first woman to compete on the Tour in 1938 and then 7 years later she made the cut on one of the Tour events, becoming the first woman to do so. She remains the only woman to have made the cut, though not the only one to have competed on the Tour.

All of Annika Sörenstam, Suzy Whaley, Michelle Wie and Isabelle Beisiegel have played on the Tour at various times, with Beisiegel becoming the first woman to gain a Tour card when she did so for the PGA Tour Canada in 2011. The majority of female golfers choose instead to compete on the LPGA Tour, which is organised by the Ladies Professional Golf Association and is limited to female players only.