WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship

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The WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship is one of the annual World Golf Championships for male professional golfers. It is a knockout event and is staged in January or February each year. It is sponsored by and named after Accenture, a consulting firm.

From its inauguration in 1999 through 2006 it was hosted every year by La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California, except in 2001, when it was hosted by the Metropolitan Golf Club in Victoria, Australia.

In 2007 the event moved to The Gallery Golf Club in Marana, Arizona, a suburb northwest of Tucson, for two years. All three of the individual World Golf Championships events will be played in the United States from 2007, which has attracted criticism from some golfers, including Tiger Woods and Ernie Els, and in the media outside the United States. PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem has responded by insisting that playing in the U.S. is best for golf as more money can be made there than elsewhere. [1]

For 2009, the tournament moved to the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, a Jack Nicklaus-designed course at Dove Mountain in Marana.

The Championship is a single-elimination match play event. The field consists of the top 64 players available from the Official World Golf Rankings, seeded according to the rankings. The prize money for 2007 was $8 million, with the winner taking $1.35 million (both figures U.S. dollars) and the Walter Hagen Cup. Prize money is official on both the PGA Tour and the European Tour. All matches leading up to the final match are 18 holes, while the final match is 36 holes. In addition, the losers of the semifinal matches play an 18-hole consolation match for third place. The five-day, six-round tournament begins on Wednesday, with a round per day through Friday. The quarterfinals and semifinals are played on Saturday; the finals and third-place match conclude the tournament on Sunday.

It is the successor event of the Andersen Consulting World Championship of Golf, a 32-man, unofficial money, match play event played from 1995-98.

[edit] Winners

Year	Player	Country	Runner-Up	Score
WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship
2008	Tiger Woods	United States	Stewart Cink	8 & 7
2007	Henrik Stenson	Sweden	Geoff Ogilvy	2 & 1
2006	Geoff Ogilvy	Australia	Davis Love III	3 & 2
2005	David Toms	United States	Chris DiMarco	6 & 5
2004	Tiger Woods	United States	Davis Love III	3 & 2
2003	Tiger Woods	United States	David Toms	2 & 1
2002	Kevin Sutherland	United States	Scott McCarron	1 up
2001	Steve Stricker	United States	Pierre Fulke	2 & 1
WGC-Andersen Consulting Match Play Championship
2000	Darren Clarke	Northern Ireland	Tiger Woods	4 & 3
1999	Jeff Maggert	United States	Andrew Magee	38 holes

[edit] Records

• Championship match - 8 & 7, Tiger Woods over Stewart Cink (2008)
• All matches - 9 & 8, Tiger Woods over Stephen Ames (2006, 1st round)

[edit] Prize money and FedEx Cup points breakdown

($1.46740188 = 1 Euro)

• Sources: ^[1][2]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official site
• This Week on the European PGA Tour - The Tour's weekly newsletter. Editions presented in downloadable PDF file format.
• February 19th 2008 edition - 2008 Prize Money Info is on page 2.