Alfred Dunhill Links Championship 2026 Preview

The DP World Tour heads back to Scotland this week for the 25th playing of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, and the field is stacked enough that the celebrity am-pairings almost feel like the undercard. Matt Fitzpatrick arrives as the betting favorite off a win in France, Tommy Fleetwood is still chasing his first individual title at an event where he's finished runner-up twice, and Robert MacIntyre returns as the defending champion after his 2025 win over Tyrrell Hatton. Add Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith, Bubba Watson, and Justin Rose to a 168-player field, and this is as deep a lineup as the tour puts together outside the majors.

• What: The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, the DP World Tour's 25th-anniversary staging of its three-course pro-am, returns to Scotland with a 168-player field headlined by Matt Fitzpatrick, Tommy Fleetwood, and defending champion Robert MacIntyre.
• When: Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4, 2026.
• Where: The Old Course at St Andrews, Carnoustie Golf Links, and Kingsbarns Golf Links, rotating for the first three rounds before the field converges on St Andrews for the final round.
• Format: A dual competition. Professionals play a standard 72-hole individual event, while each pro is also paired with an amateur partner for a team score, taken as the lower of the two players' net scores on each hole.
• Stakes: A $5 million purse, DP World Tour Rankings points, and a title MacIntyre is defending after last year's four-shot win over Hatton.

What's happening this week

This is the event's 25th edition, running from its original 2001 debut into a fixture that now anchors the tour's autumn Scottish swing. The professional field draws from 28 nations and includes seven players from the top 50 of the Official World Golf Ranking, which is a deeper cut of ranked talent than most DP World Tour stops attract outside the Rolex Series. Fitzpatrick heads into the week as the short-price favorite after his win at the FedEx Open de France, with Fleetwood next on the board, and Hatton and MacIntyre sharing the following spot.

The pro-am side is just as loaded. Actor Bill Murray is making his 11th appearance, and the amateur field includes Ronan Keating and Sir Steve Redgrave alongside the usual mix of tour sponsors and club pros. It's part of what makes this event distinct from a standard tour stop: the team scoring, where a pro's net score is compared hole by hole against his amateur partner's and the better of the two counts, runs alongside the individual tournament rather than as a side novelty.

One name worth flagging for context: Josh Hill, fresh off winning the Walker Cup, makes his professional debut in this field. It's an unusually high-profile stage for a first paid start.

The three-course rotation, and how the cut works

The format here trips up newer viewers more than most previews acknowledge, so it's worth spelling out plainly. For the first three rounds, the field is split across three different courses: the Old Course at St Andrews, Carnoustie, and Kingsbarns. Each player rotates through all three venues over rounds one through three rather than playing the same course repeatedly, which means a player's early scoring says as much about which course he drew that day as it does about form. Carnoustie is the most demanding of the three off the tee, Kingsbarns is the most exposed to the wind coming off the North Sea, and the Old Course sits in between, tricky mainly around its blind approaches and double greens.

After the cut, which trims the field ahead of the final round, everyone remaining converges on the Old Course at St Andrews for Sunday. That means the back nine of the tournament is decided on a single course rather than three, and a player who scored well at Kingsbarns on a calm day faces a genuinely different test once the field is standardized. The Old Course itself has also been lengthened for this year's staging, with new bunkering and a championship yardage now stretching to 7,375 yards (6,744m), so Sunday's conditions won't be identical to prior editions even for players who know the course well.

Our full breakdown of the Old Course at St Andrews covers what makes it play differently from a typical links course, which is useful background before watching Sunday's final round.

Who's chasing the title

MacIntyre's title defense is the obvious storyline. He won the weather-shortened 2025 edition by four shots over Hatton, becoming the fourth Scot to win his national pro-am and the first since Colin Montgomerie. Playing a defense in front of a home crowd, across courses he grew up watching on television, adds a layer to his week that most fields don't carry.

Fleetwood's case is different and, in its own way, more interesting. He's never won this event individually despite two runner-up finishes, a third, and seven top-10s here, which is an unusually consistent record without a title to show for it. A tournament this deep rewards that kind of course knowledge, and if the accumulated near-misses are going to turn into a win, this is the kind of field and setup where it happens.

Fitzpatrick's form is the sharpest storyline on paper. He arrives having just won in France and sits as the shortest price in the field, and a second consecutive victory would be a real statement heading into the European end-of-season events. Hatton, fresh off his own runner-up finish here last year, and Koepka, one of more than 20 LIV Golf players in the field this week, round out the group worth tracking beyond the leaderboard's top line. I'll admit the team-scoring column is the one I check purely for entertainment value, since a mid-handicap amateur occasionally outscores his pro partner on a given hole, and that's a wrinkle no strokes-gained model captures.

What to watch this week

Beyond the individual leaderboard, three things are worth tracking as the week plays out. First, how the weather behaves across the three courses on any given day, since a calm morning at Kingsbarns and a windy afternoon at Carnoustie can separate a round of 68 from a round of 74 for reasons that have nothing to do with form. Second, whether Fleetwood's course history finally converts, given how unusual his runner-up-heavy record here actually is. Third, how the field looks once everyone is standardized on the Old Course for the final round, since scores that looked separated after three courses often compress once every player faces the same test.

For a look at how another DP World Tour pro-am week played out this season, our Amgen Irish Open 2026 preview covers a similar new-venue format shift earlier this year. The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship is still very much in play, so this preview stops short of predicting a winner. Round 1 tee times and the full pairings sheet are available on the DP World Tour's own site.

Feature photo: "Hell Bunker, 14th hole, Old Course, St.Andrews" by Scott Cormie, CC BY-SA 2.0 (license), via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.