The Majors and the Courses That Host Them

Four tournaments own men's professional golf: the Masters in April, the PGA Championship in May, the U.S. Open in June, and the Open Championship in July. Win one and you're set for life — literally, in the case of the lifetime invitation Augusta hands its champions. But here's the thing most new fans miss: the four majors aren't just four big tournaments. They're four completely different ideas about what a golf course should do to the best players in the world, and the venues are the whole story. One major never moves. One rotates through a short list of ancient seaside courses. Two roam the United States with very different agendas. Once you see that, watching a major stops being "golf on TV" and starts being a plot you can follow.

The Masters: the only major with a home address

The Masters has been played at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia every year since 1934 — it's the only major contested on the same course every single time. That permanence is its superpower. Because the venue never changes, the tournament has a memory. You know that the 12th is a short par 3 over Rae's Creek where the wind swirls and Sunday leads go to die. You know Amen Corner — holes 11 through 13 — by heart even if you've never set foot in Georgia. You know a roar from the 15th sounds different from a roar at the 16th, and the players know it too.

Fixed venues produce drama through familiarity. Every shot has a ghost attached: Tiger's chip on 16, Phil's shot from the pine straw on 13, Jordan Spieth rinsing two balls on 12. When a leader stands on the 12th tee with a one-shot lead, you're not just watching him — you're watching him against ninety years of players who stood in exactly that spot. No other sporting event gets to build that kind of compounding narrative, because no other major venue holds still long enough.

The Open: a rotation of old links, and the weather votes

The Open Championship — the oldest major, dating to 1860 — works the opposite way. The R&A rotates it through a small pool of links courses in Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland, currently: St Andrews (Old Course), Muirfield, Carnoustie, Royal Troon, Royal Lytham & St Annes, Royal Birkdale, Royal Liverpool, Royal St George's, and Royal Portrush. Courses drop off and rejoin the rota over the decades — Turnberry is the famous current exile — but the core is remarkably stable. St Andrews gets a regular slot roughly every five years because it's the home of golf, full stop. Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland is the only venue outside Scotland and England to host — 1951, 2019, and 2025.

The rota model gives you variety inside a strict identity. Every Open course is true links golf: firm, fast, treeless, built on sandy coastal ground where the ball bounces and runs and the wind is the real course architect. The drama here doesn't come from memory — it comes from chaos. A morning tee time can play five shots easier than an afternoon one if the weather turns. Players hit 4-irons from 160 yards and putters from 40 yards off the green. It's the one week a year where the world's best have to play golf along the ground instead of through the air, and some of them simply can't. If you want to understand why, pull up Carnoustie in one of our GSPro bays, turn the firmness up, and try landing a wedge next to the pin. Watch it bounce over the green. Now you get it.

The U.S. Open: anchor sites and the art of suffering

The U.S. Open used to wander freely, but the USGA has moved to an "anchor site" model: a handful of proven venues booked decades out, with Pebble Beach, Pinehurst No. 2, and Oakmont at the core — those three alone account for roughly half of the confirmed venues stretching toward 2051. Shinnecock Hills, Winged Foot, Oakland Hills and a few others fill in around them.

The U.S. Open's brand is difficulty. The USGA sets these courses up to make par a genuinely good score — narrow fairways, brutal rough, greens running at the edge of fair. The drama is attritional: you're not watching birdie contests, you're watching who can suffer the longest without cracking. Oakmont is maybe the hardest course in America on a calm day. Pinehurst No. 2 has domed "turtleback" greens that shed decent shots into shaved collection areas. Winged Foot produced the famous line "we're not trying to humiliate the best players in the world — we're trying to identify them." When you watch a U.S. Open, root for the guy grinding out pars. That's the plot.

The PGA Championship: the traveler with something to prove

The PGA Championship is the fourth major and the least tied to any venue identity — and honestly, that's become its charm. It moved from August to May in 2019, it reliably has the strongest field of the four (nearly all of the top 100 in the world), and it goes places the other majors won't. It shares some venues with the U.S. Open (Oakmont, Southern Hills), but it also takes swings on newer or long-dormant sites: Aronimink outside Philadelphia in 2026, hosting for the first time since 1962, then Fields Ranch East at PGA Frisco in Texas in 2027 — a Gil Hanse course that opened this decade at the PGA of America's new headquarters.

Because the setup is usually a notch less sadistic than a U.S. Open, the PGA tends to produce shootouts and Sunday leaderboard pileups. It's the major where a great putting week can beat a great résumé. If the Masters is memory and the Open is chaos and the U.S. Open is suffering, the PGA is pure competition — the deepest field on a stern but fair test, may the hottest player win.

How to use this in a bay

Here's the fun part: you don't have to watch this from the couch. GSPro has faithful versions of most of these courses, and playing them is the fastest way to understand why each major feels the way it does. Book a bay and play three holes at Carnoustie, then three at a U.S. Open-style parkland course, and feel how differently your misses get punished. During major weeks, playing the actual host venue the weekend of the tournament is one of the best things a sim can do — you'll bogey the 18th at Carnoustie on Saturday, then watch a pro do the same thing on Sunday, and you'll understand exactly how it happened. That's when major championship golf stops being background TV and becomes something you're in on.

One honest tip: if you're new, don't set the sim to "U.S. Open rough" difficulty your first time out. Even the pros hate it. Work up to the suffering — that's tradition too.