The Masters is the first “major” to be played each season, with the event being held every first full week of April. The tournament is an official stop on the PGA Tour, the PGA European Tour and the Japan Golf Tour, and players the world over strive mightily to receive an invite. Winners of the tournament receive a special exemption that allows them to not have to worry about an invite. This alone helps guarantee strong sales of Masters Tournament tickets.
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The Masters is, as said earlier, an invitation-only invite, with just who among golf’s best players receiving an invite up to the Augusta National Golf Club. The tournament is steeped in history and tradition at every step, and some of the greatest names in the game have graced the course with their presence, including the immortal Byron Nelson, the Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus and the incomparable Tiger Woods, who’s taken the green jacket on 4 occasions, the most recent being in 2005. The fans love his game, and flock to snap up Masters Tournament tickets anytime he tees it up.
The greatest number of wins, however, has not been recorded by Woods – though he certainly looks to be the golfer to eventually take that signal honor. Rather, Jack Nicklaus has come into the 18th hole and brought glory to tournament on 6 separate occasions, winning his final event in 1986, in the process becoming the oldest golfer to win it, at age 46. Sales of Masters Tournament tickets that year were phenomenal.
The playing format for the tournament is the most popular of the Tour’s various formats, being that it’s what’s known as “stroke play,” meaning that the player with the fewest number of total strokes for the whole tournament wins first place and that fabled green jacket, which is his for only that year, it having to be returned at the start of the following year’s event. This kind of tradition helps to sell a great many Masters Tournament tickets.
For 2010, the favorite again is the game’s current greatest player (and probably the greatest of all time), Tiger Woods, who looks poised to come off a restful off-season with a continually-tuned game. Last year’s champion, Argentina’s Angel Cabrera took the title after a 3-way playoff against American pros Chad Campbell and Kenny Perry. Carding a 12 under par, 276 (and a final round 71, under incredible pressure), the golfer from South America proved he belonged, adding the Masters to his 2007 U.S. Open win from 2007. A total purse of over 7.5 million dollars awaits those pros who receive an invite.