Don’t be fooled. Q School is not the golden ticket to the promised land that everyone thinks it is

It’s the most nerve-shredding time of the year, or the DP World Tour Qualifying School as it’s more commonly known.

It is the qualifying tournament where, come November 12, the top 20 players and ties will get Category 18 status on the DP World Tour for 2026.

This is a status that certainly isn’t as decent as it used to be. Will Besseling, who received the second-to-last card this time last year, received only 11 starts. There is also the small matter of the £2000 entry fee, which many golf fans may not be aware of.

So, don’t think that that card automatically means they’ll get into every event on tour next year. It won’t. In fact, far from it. Instead, the harsh reality is that in the 2026 season, most will get into fewer than 20 of the 42 tournaments on the schedule.

15 years ago, it would have been around 25; while 20 years ago, it was nearer 30.

So what’s changed? When did your hard-earned Q School card suddenly become, if not worthless, then a basically gateway to next year’s Q School?

Because quite simply, fewer tournaments means less chance to earn enough Race To Dubai points to actually keep it, and it’s the word ‘points’ that’s everything here. Back in the day, the Order of Merit, as it was then called, was determined solely on money earned: the top 120 money earners kept the cards for the next year.

These days, however, it’s all based on points: Race To Dubai points. Coupled with the fact that most ‘regular’ tournaments offer the same number of R2D points, this basically sounded the death knell for the Q School card.

So no longer do the better players skip the early-season tournaments down in South Africa and Australia, where the prize money is pretty low. Instead, they play because the points they win could be the difference between playing in the DP World Tour Play-offs and keeping their cards or not.

That means there are simply way fewer spots open to the lower-ranked players in these tournaments.

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Then, you have to factor in that these tournaments are now almost exclusively co-sanctioned with the Australian and Sunshine Tours, meaning half the field is filled by players from that tour, again reducing the playing opportunities for guys with a Q School card. The ‘line’ on the entry list never seems to drop like it used to.

Daylight is limited in some of the countries in which we play early season, which again means fewer spots. And even when the tour does return to Europe in early springtime, it’s a while before there’s enough daylight for a full field of 156.

So what happens is that Q School guys arrive at the mid-point of the season, having had precious few opportunities to actually tee it up and amass some much-needed points.

Not that things get too much better when the main full field events actually do start in Europe, because that’s when our old friend the Strategic Alliance with the PGA Tour comes out of the woodwork, and takes their quota of 10 spots every week. 10 spots to them means the entry list does go down as far as it used to. Again, bad news for anyone still clutching that shiny Q School card.

Just as you think things can’t get any worse, more bad news is also but a glance at the size of the Winners’ Category on the entry list away. Here, you now see way more names than you used to.

That’s because guys who you used to win a couple of times a year are now playing on the PGA Tour, opening up ‘wins’ to guys who might not necessarily have won had these other guys still been playing in Europe. More guys in Categories 3 and 4 means the red line on every entry list stays higher than it used to.

Speaking of the PGA Tour, seven of the 10 guys who gained PGA Tour cards from the DP World Tour in 2024 kept those cards, meaning only three came back to the DP World Tour for 2025.

This year, it was only one, meaning nine come back for 2026, or nine fewer spots if I’m looking at the entry list with my Q School card beside my MacBook.

So little wonder Besseling is probably spending the rest of the year asking himself whether it was all really worth it in the first place.

What’s not changed, though, is that if you have a Q School card, when you do get an opportunity to play, you have to take that opportunity and play well.

That is basically the only way to turn your Category 18 card into a Category 10 (full) card for 2027, opening up a full schedule.

This is what the likes of Joe Dean and Ben Schmidt have done across the last couple of years, marking them, and anyone else who does this, as a serious player.

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