The AIG Women's Open runs July 30 to August 2 at Royal Lytham & St Annes with a record $10 million purse. Nelly Korda chases a third major of the season, and Jenny Shin arrives off a Scottish Open win.
Charley Hull putts at the 2022 Dana Open LPGA Tournament (file photo). Photo: David Wilson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The AIG Women's Open runs Thursday, July 30, through Sunday, August 2, at Royal Lytham & St Annes in Lancashire, with a record $10 million purse on the line. Nelly Korda arrives chasing a third major of the season, and Jenny Shin arrives off a Scottish Open win nobody had at the top of their board a week ago.
Jenny Shin won the Scottish Open at 9-under 279 at Dundonald Links, holding on despite a closing 75 to take her second LPGA title and her first win in over a decade. It's a full-circle result: Shin shared the first-round lead with Lauren Coughlin in our recap of that opening round, and she's the one who turned it into the trophy.
A Lim Kim finished runner-up at 7-under, with Pajaree Anannarukarn third at 5-under and Esther Henseleit fourth at 4-under. Miyu Yamashita and Lauren Coughlin tied for fifth at 3-under. Nelly Korda finished tied 16th at 2-over, well off the pace that mattered, and Lottie Woad, the defending Scottish Open champion, finished tied 37th at 7-over. Neither of the two players carrying the heaviest major-week attention into Lytham had the week their form suggested they might.
That's worth sitting with heading into this week. A closing 75 that still wins by two isn't a dominant final round, it's a survival act, and it says something about how firm and unpredictable Dundonald played down the stretch. Whatever Shin figured out over the weekend, she figured it out under exactly the kind of pressure a major will apply again.
The AIG Women's Open carries a $10 million purse this year, the highest in the championship's history, across a 144-player field at Royal Lytham & St Annes. Miyu Yamashita defends the title she won in 2025 at Royal Porthcawl, arriving at a different course but the same pressure of trying to repeat.
Lytham has hosted this championship before. Georgia Hall won here in 2018, and she's back in the field eight years later, a full-circle storyline of her own that's easy to miss next to the bigger names in this week's draw.
Korda is the obvious center of the story. She's already won the Chevron Championship and the U.S. Women's Open this season, and a win at Lytham would give her a third major of 2026 and the fifth of her career, a run that would put her in territory very few players ever reach in a single year.
Shin arrives with something harder to quantify than a stat line: real form, earned under real pressure, the week before a major. Charley Hull plays as the home favorite in front of a British crowd that will be loud for her all four days. Behind them sits a field deep enough to produce a surprise winner on its own: Lottie Woad, Lydia Ko, Jeeno Thitikul, Lilia Vu, Brooke Henderson, Carlota Ciganda, and Mimi Rhodes all have a real path to the trophy on a course this demanding. I'll admit which storyline I'm drawn to here isn't the smart pick, though: Korda is the correct favorite by any reasonable measure, but I find myself pulling for Shin's version of this week, a player rediscovering her level after a decade rather than a player extending a run she's already deep into, and that preference says more about which stories I like than about who's actually going to win.
Royal Lytham & St Annes is a proper links course, and it's one of the most heavily bunkered venues in the championship rota, a course where a shot that misses by a few feet can end up in sand instead of rough. That combination, firm turf plus a field of bunkers that punish anything slightly off-line, rewards precision over raw power all week.
Wind is the other variable that will shape the leaderboard more than anything printed on a yardage book. A calm morning wave and a windy afternoon wave can produce two entirely different courses on the same day, which is exactly the kind of test the Scottish Open was designed to rehearse. Players who can control trajectory and flight a ball low under pressure, the skills covered in how to hit a bunker shot and how to play golf in the wind, have a real structural advantage this week that a hot putter alone won't overcome.
Charley Hull putts at the 2022 Dana Open LPGA Tournament (file photo). Photo: David Wilson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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