The 2026 BMW Championship runs Thursday, August 20 through Sunday, August 23 at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, and it is the last cut of the season that actually eliminates anybody. Fifty players are left, there is no 36-hole cut, and only the top 30 in FedExCup points on Sunday evening board the plane to East Lake. Scottie Scheffler arrives having just dismantled the field in Memphis by eight shots, defending a BMW title he won at Caves Valley a year ago. Behind him sit Rory McIlroy chasing a record fourth FedExCup, three multiple winners from a loaded 2026 season, and a cutline so tight that 30th place is two points clear of 31st. Here is the full preview: the course, the field, the stakes, the community odds board, and where the market is stretched.
Quick comparison: who to watch at Bellerive
| Player | Angle |
|---|---|
| Scottie Scheffler | Defending champion, FedExCup leader, coming off an eight-shot win in Memphis |
| Rory McIlroy | Back-to-back Masters winner chasing a record fourth FedExCup, but 66th in Memphis |
| Matt Fitzpatrick | Second in points with three 2026 titles, including a playoff win over Scheffler |
| Chris Gotterup | Three wins this season, more than anyone else on Tour except Fitzpatrick |
| Patrick Cantlay | Two-time BMW champion and the last man to defend this title, in 2021 and 2022 |
| Rickie Fowler | Sitting exactly 30th, two FedExCup points from missing East Lake |
Event: 2026 BMW Championship, PGA Tour FedExCup Playoffs, $20 million purse
Dates: Thursday, August 20 to Sunday, August 23, 2026
Venue: Bellerive Country Club, St. Louis, Missouri (par 70, 7,448 yards)
Watch: ESPN 10 a.m. to noon ET (9 to 11 a.m. CT, 7 to 9 a.m. PT) and Golf Channel 3 to 7 p.m. ET (2 to 6 p.m. CT, noon to 4 p.m. PT) on Thursday and Friday. Saturday is Golf Channel 1 to 3 p.m. ET (noon to 2 p.m. CT, 10 a.m. to noon PT) then CBS 3 to 6 p.m. ET (2 to 5 p.m. CT, noon to 3 p.m. PT). Sunday is Golf Channel noon to 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. to 1 p.m. CT, 9 to 11 a.m. PT) then CBS 2 to 6 p.m. ET (1 to 5 p.m. CT, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT)
Stream: PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET Thursday and Friday and 9:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET on the weekend, with radio on SiriusXM
Tournament overview: 50 players, no cut, 30 tickets
The BMW Championship is the middle leg of the FedExCup Playoffs and the only one with genuinely brutal math. Seventy players teed it up in Memphis last week. Fifty are here. Thirty go to the Tour Championship at East Lake on August 27 to 30, where the format is now straight 72-hole stroke play with everyone starting level and $10 million going to the winner out of a $40 million purse.
The purse this week is $20 million, with $3.6 million and 750 FedExCup points to the champion. There is no 36-hole cut, so every one of the 50 plays four rounds and every shot on Sunday afternoon moves somebody up or down a standings page. The $100 million FedExCup bonus pool is distributed once this event ends, which means Sunday is a payday as well as a qualifier.
The prize beyond the money is exemption security. A top-30 finish in the standings buys 2027 spots in the Masters, the U.S. Open and the Open Championship, plus PGA Tour exemptions running through 2028. That is why a player sitting 34th plays this week completely differently than a player sitting 12th.
Sungjae Im was the only player in the field who played his way in, jumping from 53rd to 40th with a T5 in Memphis. The names that came up short are a reminder of how thin the margin is: Keith Mitchell finished 51st, Jordan Spieth 52nd, Max Homa 53rd, Harris English 54th and Corey Conners 59th. Matt McCarty held the 50th and final spot.
The course: Robert Trent Jones with the rough grown back
Bellerive is a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design on ground the club has occupied since 1959, opened in 1960 and renovated by Rees Jones in 2006. Jones Sr. built to a philosophy of hard par and easy bogey, and the place earned the nickname the Green Monster of Ladue for good reason: big bunkering, water that actually costs strokes, and rough that has real length.
It plays as a par 70 at 7,448 yards this week, which is 132 yards longer than the PGA of America set it for the 2018 PGA Championship. Fourteen holes are longer, though only five stretched more than seven yards. The par-5 17th took the biggest addition, 27 yards out to 624. Crucially there are only two par 5s in the whole rotation, so the birdie inventory is thin compared with a normal Tour stop and par 4s do most of the scoring damage.
The setup details matter here. The greens have been rebuilt with T-1 bentgrass and are expected to run around 12.5 on the stimpmeter, and the primary rough is a fescue and bluegrass mix grown to roughly four inches. Fairways are zoysia. That combination punishes a miss without being unfair about it, and it flattens the usual advantage of raw distance because a bomber in four-inch rough is wedging out sideways like everyone else.
Three holes decide the week. The par-3 sixth at 215 yards played as the hardest hole at the 2018 PGA. The 11th is the only driveable par 4 on the property and produced as many eagles as double bogeys in 2018, thanks to a pond short and right of the green. Then there is The Ridge, holes 14 through 16, running along the highest ground on the course and usually into a southerly breeze, with a 495-yard par 4 and a 237-yard par 3 back to back.
The history says Bellerive is scoreable but not soft. Gary Player won the 1965 U.S. Open here in a Monday playoff to complete the career Grand Slam. Nick Price took the 1992 PGA. Brooks Koepka won the 2018 PGA at 16 under 264, with Tiger Woods closing in 64 to finish second at 14 under. When the BMW Championship last came here in 2008, Camilo Villegas won his first Tour title at 15 under, two clear of Dudley Hart. Bellerive also hosts the 2030 Presidents Cup.
Weather: warm, still, and no obvious defense
The forecast does not give the course much help. Daytime highs are expected to top out in the 80s across all four days, and the notable absence is wind: there is no gusty afternoon on the board this week. On a course whose primary defenses are length, rough and green speed rather than exposure, a calm week means the field will find the number. Twenty under is unlikely on a par 70 with two par 5s, but low double digits is very much in range.
Contenders to watch at the BMW Championship
Scottie Scheffler: the defending champion who just won by eight
Scheffler leads the FedExCup with 4,873 points, roughly 1,400 clear of the field, after taking the FedEx St. Jude Championship by eight shots at TPC Southwind. He tied the course record with a 61 on Friday and closed with a 66 to finish 17 under. It was his second win of 2026 and the 21st of his career, making him the third-youngest player to reach 21 Tour titles behind only Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus. He also finished runner-up at the Masters.
He won this event last year at Caves Valley by two shots after Robert MacIntyre could not hold a four-shot lead. No player has defended the BMW Championship since Patrick Cantlay went back to back in 2021 and 2022. Bellerive is new to essentially the whole field, which removes the course-history edge that sometimes cuts against a favorite, and a long par 70 with thick rough is closer to major-championship conditions than the birdie-fests where his advantage compresses.
Rory McIlroy: the Masters champion with a problem in the playoffs
McIlroy won the 2026 Masters by a shot over Scheffler, becoming one of only four players to go back to back at Augusta alongside Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods. He is chasing a record fourth FedExCup title. The rest of the season has been uneven. He was second at the Genesis, then T7 at the PGA, T32 at the U.S. Open and T40 at the Open, and this is only his 13th start of the year against Scheffler's 19.
Last week was worse: rounds of 74, 70, 72 and 72 for 66th place in Memphis. He sits 13th in points, safe for East Lake, and the honest read is that he is being priced on his ceiling rather than on his August.
The multiple winners: Fitzpatrick, Gotterup, Young and Clark
Matt Fitzpatrick is second in FedExCup points with three titles in 2026: the Valspar Championship, the RBC Heritage where he beat Scheffler on the first playoff hole, and the Zurich Classic of New Orleans alongside his brother Alex, who is also in this field. Chris Gotterup matched him with three wins, taking the Sony Open, the WM Phoenix Open and the John Deere Classic, and sits seventh.
Cameron Young is third in points off two wins including the Players Championship, and Wyndham Clark is fifth after a wire-to-wire second U.S. Open title at Shinnecock Hills. Sam Burns, sixth in points, has been the nearly man of the majors: runner-up to Clark at the U.S. Open and third at Royal Birkdale, with his last actual win coming at the 2023 Match Play. Si Woo Kim is fourth with 11 top-10 finishes and no win, including a runner-up in Memphis. Aaron Rai is in the field as the reigning PGA Champion after his three-shot win at Aronimink.
The Bellerive experience nobody else has
Adam Scott is the only player in the field who has competed here in both the 2008 BMW Championship and the 2018 PGA Championship, where he finished third. Hideki Matsuyama and Patrick Cantlay both played the 2018 PGA. Cantlay is the two-time BMW champion in the field and has three FedExCup Playoffs wins overall, which is the sort of record that matters more in an event with no cut, where the survival instinct that saves a Friday is worth nothing.
The bubble is the real story
Here is the number that should shape how the week is watched. Rickie Fowler sits 30th, exactly on the East Lake cutline, two FedExCup points ahead of Gary Woodland at 31st. Kurt Kitayama is 28th and Bud Cauley 29th, separated by a single point. The first five names outside the top 30 are Woodland, J.T. Poston, Nicolai Hojgaard, Alex Noren and Jake Knapp.
Fifty players, no cut, and a top-30 cutline decided by two points. Roughly 20 men in this field are playing for a season rather than a trophy, and their incentives on Sunday are nothing like the leaders'.
That gap in motivation is the most underused piece of information on a playoff week. A player at 34th needs a top-15 and knows it, so he attacks pins on The Ridge that a leader plays to the fat of the green. That shows up in finishing-position markets and matchups far more reliably than it shows up in an outright.
BMW Championship 2026 odds: the community board
Here is a snapshot of BettorEdge community odds on the outright winner market for the 2026 BMW Championship, pulled on Tuesday, August 18. Outright prices move constantly once tee times start, so treat these as a starting point and check the live board before backing anything.
| Player | Community odds (to win) | Implied win chance |
|---|---|---|
| Scottie Scheffler | +250 | 28.6% |
| Rory McIlroy | +1375 | 6.8% |
| Xander Schauffele | +1500 | 6.3% |
| Ludvig Aberg | +1500 | 6.3% |
| Sam Burns | +1600 | 5.9% |
| Tommy Fleetwood | +1600 | 5.9% |
| Cameron Young | +1800 | 5.3% |
| Matt Fitzpatrick | +2000 | 4.8% |
| Si Woo Kim | +2200 | 4.3% |
| Hideki Matsuyama | +2200 | 4.3% |
| Viktor Hovland | +2500 | 3.8% |
| Chris Gotterup | +2500 | 3.8% |
| Patrick Cantlay | +2600 | 3.7% |
| Wyndham Clark | +2600 | 3.7% |
| Collin Morikawa | +2700 | 3.6% |
| Justin Thomas | +3200 | 3.0% |
| Jake Knapp | +3400 | 2.9% |
| Russell Henley | +3500 | 2.8% |
| Tom Kim | +3500 | 2.8% |
| Rickie Fowler | +5000 | 2.0% |
Start with the shape of the board rather than any single name. Scheffler at +250 implies about a 28.6 percent chance to win. In a 50-man field with no cut, that is not the absurdity it would be in a 144-player event, because the denominator is a third the size and the man just won by eight. It is still a very short price on a golf tournament, and it is worth saying plainly: 28.6 percent means he loses this week roughly seven times in ten.
Below him the board is flat and wide. McIlroy at +1375 is 6.8 percent, and everything from Schauffele down to Morikawa clusters between 3.6 and 6.3 percent. Fourteen players are priced inside a five-point probability band. That is the market saying it has almost no conviction about who the second-best bet is, which is exactly the terrain where reading course fit against price is worth something.
Where the price and the profile come apart
The case for the top of the board: Bellerive at 7,448 yards with four-inch rough and only two par 5s is a ball-striker's setup, and the ball-strikers are all priced at the top. Scheffler has been the best iron player alive for three seasons. Fleetwood and Morikawa live on approach play. Aberg is the purest long-iron player in the field on a course with a 237-yard par 3 in the closing stretch.
The case against it: no cut means there is no attrition to thin the herd. Every one of the 50 gets four rounds, so the winner has to beat a full field of elite players who cannot go home on Friday, and the usual favorite advantage of surviving a bad Thursday is gone. Short prices in no-cut events ask you to pay for consistency in a format that rewards a hot 36 hours from anybody.
The case for McIlroy at +1375: he is the second-best player in the field on talent, he owns the Masters, and Bellerive's length suits a driver that still ranks with anyone's.
The case against McIlroy: 74-70-72-72 last week and a major season of T7, T32 and T40. A 6.8 percent price is roughly one in fifteen, and nothing about his August argues he is the fifteenth-most-likely man here rather than the second.
If you want the framework for pricing a field event rather than guessing at it, the golf outright betting guide walks through why a 3 percent win chance and a 3 percent price are two very different things.
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Beyond the outright: matchup and finishing-position angles
There is no make-the-cut market this week, because there is no cut. That pushes the sharper money into two places. The first is finishing position. A 3 percent win chance is a coin toss dressed up as a bet, while a top-10 or top-20 on the same player asks a question that course fit and current form can actually answer. On a long par 70 with heavy rough, the profile that travels is approach play and long-iron control rather than driving distance. The top 5 and top 10 finish guide covers how those prices are built and how dead-heat rules settle them.
The second is head-to-head matchups, and a no-cut event is the cleanest week of the year for them. Both players are guaranteed 72 holes, so a matchup never dies on a Friday afternoon and you are pricing two full tournaments against each other rather than one player's survival. Pair that with the bubble dynamic and you get genuinely mispriced spots: a man at 34th in points who has to make something happen against a man at 12th who does not. The golf matchup betting guide lays out how those are structured.
You can follow the week's prices and the rest of the schedule on the BettorEdge golf hub, and the event-specific page lives at the BMW Championship betting guide. Next week's finale has its own page at the Tour Championship guide.
Open the live BMW Championship board
Prices move fast on a playoff event once Thursday tee times start. See the live BettorEdge board and take the number you actually want instead of the one you are handed.
Tools to check before you back a pick
Know the math before you lock anything in. Turn any outright price into a true win probability with the implied probability calculator, strip the built-in margin out of a board with the no-vig calculator, and size your payout with the betting calculator. Player pages for Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy carry their season context.
BMW Championship 2026 FAQ
When is the 2026 BMW Championship and how can I watch it?
The 2026 BMW Championship runs Thursday, August 20 through Sunday, August 23 at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, with coverage on ESPN, Golf Channel and CBS. Thursday and Friday are ESPN from 10 a.m. to noon ET and Golf Channel from 3 to 7 p.m. ET. Saturday is Golf Channel 1 to 3 p.m. ET then CBS 3 to 6 p.m. ET, and Sunday is Golf Channel noon to 2 p.m. ET then CBS 2 to 6 p.m. ET. PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ streams 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET on the weekdays and 9:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET on the weekend.
Is there a cut at the BMW Championship?
No, the BMW Championship has no 36-hole cut, so all 50 players in the field play four rounds. The field is already reduced from the 70 who played the FedEx St. Jude Championship, and the elimination happens in the standings instead: only the top 30 in FedExCup points after Sunday advance to the Tour Championship.
Who is the defending BMW Championship champion?
Scottie Scheffler is the defending champion, having won last year's BMW Championship at Caves Valley Golf Club by two shots. Robert MacIntyre held a four-shot lead and could not close it out. No player has won this event in back-to-back years since Patrick Cantlay did it in 2021 and 2022.
Who is the favorite to win the 2026 BMW Championship?
Scottie Scheffler is the clear favorite at +250 in BettorEdge community odds, which implies about a 28.6 percent chance to win. Rory McIlroy is next at +1375, followed by Xander Schauffele and Ludvig Aberg at +1500 and Sam Burns and Tommy Fleetwood at +1600.
What is the purse for the 2026 BMW Championship?
The purse is $20 million, with $3.6 million and 750 FedExCup points going to the winner. The $100 million FedExCup bonus pool is also distributed after this event concludes.
What kind of golf course is Bellerive Country Club?
Bellerive is a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design in St. Louis, renovated by Rees Jones in 2006, playing as a par 70 at 7,448 yards with only two par 5s. It has zoysia fairways, rebuilt T-1 bentgrass greens expected to run around 12.5 on the stimpmeter, and a fescue and bluegrass primary rough grown to roughly four inches, so it rewards accurate long-iron play far more than raw distance.
Who is on the top-30 bubble at the 2026 BMW Championship?
Rickie Fowler sits 30th, exactly on the Tour Championship cutline, two FedExCup points ahead of Gary Woodland at 31st. Kurt Kitayama is 28th and Bud Cauley 29th, separated by a single point, and the first five names outside the top 30 are Woodland, J.T. Poston, Nicolai Hojgaard, Alex Noren and Jake Knapp.
Which notable players missed the 2026 BMW Championship?
Keith Mitchell at 51st, Jordan Spieth at 52nd, Max Homa at 53rd, Harris English at 54th and Corey Conners at 59th all failed to reach the top 50 in FedExCup points. Sungjae Im was the only player to play his way into the field, moving from 53rd to 40th with a T5 in Memphis, and Matt McCarty held the 50th and final spot.
How do I bet on the BMW Championship?
Pick your outright, finishing-position or matchup bet and place it on BettorEdge against another real bettor at a community price. New users can get up to $100 after verifying their ID, with no deposit needed.
Is betting on BettorEdge legal?
Yes. BettorEdge is a peer-to-peer betting marketplace, legal across 45+ states, with identity verification built in. You are matched against other people, not a house that profits when you lose.
The bottom line
The BMW Championship is the week the season stops being about trophies and starts being about arithmetic. Bellerive gives the field a proper test for the first time since 2018, a long par 70 with two par 5s, four inches of rough and greens rolling at 12.5, and the forecast offers no wind to complicate it. Scheffler is the correct favorite and the board says so at +250, but a no-cut event hands 49 other elite players four guaranteed rounds and removes the attrition that usually protects a short price. The genuinely interesting money is a few rows down and a few markets over, where a two-point cutline is quietly reshaping how 20 men in this field will play their Sunday.
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