Race for Limited Sony Open Cards Begins

The peaceful royal palms and Pacific Ocean views at Waialae might fool you, but there’s an extra dose of pressure in paradise this year at the Sony Open.

For the first time in four decades, only 100 PGA Tour cards are up for grabs instead of the usual 125. That’s got everyone’s attention, even in January.

“There is a sense of urgency,” says Camilo Villegas. “You’ve got to play when you get in and you have to perform. It’s going to be a dogfight out there.”

You can feel it in the pre-dawn darkness, where players are already hitting balls under floodlights. The stakes are higher, and starting in 2026, tournament fields will get smaller too.

But Villegas isn’t sweating it. Fresh off a win in Bermuda that locked up his Tour card for two years, he’s all confidence: “I am going to keep my card,” he says with a smile.

The pressure’s off for Hideki Matsuyama, though. The world’s No. 5 player just crushed it at Kapalua last week, and now he’s trying to join some elite company. Only Justin Thomas and Ernie Els have ever won both Hawaii tournaments in the same year.

For everyone else, it’s a fresh start with some familiar nerves.

Keith Mitchell, starting his eighth year on tour, knows those feelings well. He missed last year’s playoffs by about three shots – the kind of narrow margin that keeps players up at night.

“Everybody is at zero,” Mitchell says. “Each week doesn’t feel as monumental as it does the last three or four weeks. The beginning of the season, people play a little more free.”

But those early-season shots count just as much as the ones in August. They might not feel as pressure-packed, but they all add up in the race for those 100 cards.

The next three tournaments are especially crucial. The top five players will qualify for $20 million “signature events” in California – the kind of opportunities that can make or break a season.

Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley remembers his rookie debut at Sony in 2011 like it was yesterday.

“It’s a scary feeling,” Bradley says. “I got here my first event, Ernie Els was on the putting green, and that was like a ‘Holy cow’ moment for me. But it’s a real daunting feeling because you worked your whole life to get here, and now you have to play the best golf of your life to keep your card.”

He looks at today’s rookies with mixed emotions. “Part of me is so jealous that they have all of this in front of them,” he says. “And another part of me is like, ‘Man, they’ve got a lot of pressure on them, starting right out of the gate.'”