With cards and Play-Off spots on the line, it’s crunch-time on the DP World Tour as the Race to Dubai reaches the end of the regular season at the Genesis Championship in South Korea.
As well as the contest to finish among the top 115 on the Race to Dubai Rankings and secure category 10 for 2026 and gain entry into almost all DP World Tour events, there is also the battle to be among the top 70 at the end of this week, with those players advancing to the DP World Tour Play-Offs. The first event of the Play-Offs is the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship and the top 50 on the Race to Dubai Rankings after that will make it to the season finale at the DP World Tour Championship.
Wenyi Ding is the man closest to the cut-off line that won't feature in the field at Woo Jeong Hills this week. The Chinese player earned his card for the 2025 season by topping the inaugural Global Amateur Pathway Ranking, and he has had a strong rookie season, highlighted by top tens at the ISPS HANDA Australian Open and then the Volvo China Open in front of home fans. Currently 68th in the Ranking, his fate in the Play-Offs will be decided by others as he sits out for a second consecutive week. Ludvig Åberg, who currently sits in 75th position, has also opted to skip this week, but will qualify for the Play-Offs through an exemption for Team Europe's Ryder Cup players.
With just four rounds left to earn enough points to head to the Middle East, we take a closer look at the men either side of the top 70 mark that are in the field in South Korea and how they've fared so far this season. From Rafa Cabrera Bello and Richard Sterne to Joe Dean and Ashun Wu, there are a lot of familiar faces in the battle for a spot at the DP World Tour Play-Offs.
Inside the top 70
65th - Ben Schmidt
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: N/A
Schmidt, a successful amateur golfer from England who plied his trade on the Hotel Planner Tour over the past couple of years, earned his DP World Tour card for this season through the DP World Tour Qualifying School last year.
A tie for fifth at the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters signalled his ability to compete at the top end of a leaderboard on the DP World Tour early in the season, but the 23-year-old has had to be patient during a year where he has had two top tens from 25 events. His second top five of the year came with a third-place finish at the Danish Golf Championship, which propelled him from 94th to 61st in the Rankings.
Currently 65th and already safe in the knowledge that another season awaits, Schmidt will look to build on strong results in back-to-back events to keep that placing, with a tie for 23rd at the Open de Espana coming ahead of a tie for 11th at last week’s inaugural DP World Tour India Championship.
66th - Ryggs Johnston
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: N/A
After earning his card through the 2024 DP World Tour Qualifying School, Johnston made one of the most memorable starts to a DP World Tour career in recent memory with victory on just his second appearance at the ISPS HANDA Australian Open. At the time, he was ranked 954th in the world, and went on to win by three strokes over home favourite Curtis Luck after a four-under-par final round of 68.
While he made his next two cuts, Johnston has struggled to find his feet in 2025. In 26 starts, he has made just ten cuts, the best of which was a tie for 26th at the BMW International Open. While he finished tied 55th in Spain, Johnston missed the cut last week in India and will be trying to kick-start momentum to stay inside the top 70 and book his place in the Play-Offs in his rookie season on the DP World Tour.
67th - Jeong Weon Ko
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: T54 (2024), T10 (2023)
With a chance to make the Play-Offs for the first time, Frenchman Jeong Weon Ko made that reality a real possibility with a runner-up finish on home soil at the FedEx Open de France last month. Ko went into the week with work to do to secure his playing rights at 133rd but that first top ten of the season was enough to jump him up to 60th on the Race to Dubai Rankings.
Having graduated from the HotelPlanner Tour at the end of 2022, Ko finished 115th on the Race to Dubai Rankings in 2023 and 78th in 2024, missing out on qualifying for the DP World Tour Play-Offs by just eight spots. It hasn’t been the most straightforward of seasons for the 27-year-old, who has played in a staggering 31 events this season – second only behind Jordan Gumberg (33 events). Of those, 14 made cuts (with his tie for second the best outside of a top 16), and 18 missed cuts make up his campaign, which include three missed-cuts in his three most recent events. Still, currently the right side of the line and with a record in this tournament that includes a tie for 10th in 2023, he has a chance to cap off his year with a place in the first event in the Middle East.
69th - Richard Sterne
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: N/A
Sterne is a six-time winner on the DP World Tour, his most recent title coming in 2013, but battles with injuries have often limited his playing opportunities and appearances. Despite that, he finds himself currently in position to make it to the Play-Offs, having made a significant jump from battling for his card to challenging for a spot in Abu Dhabi over the last few weeks.
The South African made just four cuts in his first 16 events of the season, albeit one of those was a top five at the start of the season in Mauritius, and from March onwards found himself outside of the provisional cut-off line to secure DP World Tour Category 10 for 2026. Things began to turn for the better with a second top ten of the year at the Nexo Championship in September, where he set the course record (67) at Trump International Golf Links on day one in Aberdeen. With a tie for 29th the following week, he entered the Back 9 in 131st place on the Rankings, before making the weekend in Switzerland and following up with top 20s in Ireland and France to get back to 115th.
Still battling for a card, Sterne produced the biggest result of his season with a third-place finish at Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in early October, his best result on the DP World Tour since a runner-up finish in Abu Dhabi in 2019. As a result, he jumped to 66th on the Rankings, and since followed up with a missed cut in Spain and a tie for 29th in India to currently sit in 69th place.
70th - Rafa Cabrera Bello
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: T89 (2024), T112 (2023)
The man on the line currently, the Spaniard has a big week ahead at the Genesis Championship. The four-time DP World Tour winner and 2016 Ryder Cupper spent the majority of the early season battling for status. A tie for 24th in Bahrain bumped him to 115th for a short time, but it was only 11 events later that he would better that position to 113th thanks to a tie for 13th at the Danish Golf Championship. The up and down nature continued despite a steady run of results until a tie for third at the Amgen Irish Open moved him from 108th to 63rd, and since then he has spent the last three events sitting around the DP World Tour Play-Offs cut-off line.
Until 2024, Cabrera Bello had spent 15 consecutive seasons inside the top 100 on the Race to Dubai Rankings. Last year he finished 127th but retained Category 11 playing privileges through the career money list. And while he doesn’t have a great history in this championship, a place he does have an incredible history at is the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship - should he get there. The runner-up when the championship first moved to Yas Links in 2022, Cabrera Bello also finished tied 10th in his most recent appearance the following year. In previous years, albeit at a different course, he had four other top 10s, five further top 20s, and he has missed one cut in 15 appearances, which came ten years ago in 2015.
Outside the top 70
71st - Joe Dean
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: N/A
One of the stand-out acts of the 2024 DP World Tour season, Dean went from playing one-day events to reaching the DP World Tour Championship in a little over 12 months last year, with a play-off loss at the KLM Open and a tie for 25th in The Open at Royal Troon helping to finish 37th on the 2024 Race to Dubai Rankings.
This year has been a little less linear in terms of progression. With a tie for fifth in Ras Al Khaimah jumping him up to 40th and a tie for 13th the following week improving that to 32nd, it looked like Dean’s upward trajectory was cemented for another year. But a difficult run mid-season saw him sandwich a tie for 22nd in Austria in the middle of eight missed cuts, dropping him down to 115th by the Barracuda Championship in July.
His game made a shining return with a runner-up at the NEXO Championship in Scotland at the start of August, making a huge leap up to 44th on the Race to Dubai. Since then he’s managed a best of a tie for 64th from eight events, but Dean will be hoping he can edge his way back to the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship on his debut in Korea.
72nd - Ivan Cantero
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: T6 (2024)
At his highest point he was 12th on the 2025 Race to Dubai earlier in the campaign, but after opting to miss India last week he has slipped outside of the top 70 for the first time all season and finds himself in need of a good finish to make the Play-Offs for the first time.
Cantero got off to a steady start with seven made cuts in a row which included back-to-back top five finishes in Ras Al Khaimah and Bahrain to get to 12th on the Rankings early in 2025. His best results since have been a tie for 14th the following week at the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters and a tie for 17th at the BMW International Open in July. He dipped to 55th after a missed cut at The Belfry, with his most recent finish a tie for 55th in Spain which kept him at 67th before he dropped out of the top 70 last week.
The Spaniard, who earned his card for the 2024 season through the HotelPlanner Tour, finished 99th on the Race to Dubai last year in part thanks to his third top ten of the year at the Genesis Championship. While it was not good enough to help him make the Play-Offs, it may give him an extra edge of confidence heading into this week: He moved up three places on the Race to Dubai last year in this event, which would be enough to secure his place in the Abu Dhabi field.
73rd - Jason Scrivener
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: T14 (2024)
Another player to have only just dropped out of the Play-Off spots in the last week, Scrivener’s tie for 63rd in India dropped him from 70th to 73rd and he now has it all to do to ensure he makes it to Abu Dhabi (where he finished tied seventh in 2023).
The Australian, whose best finish of 21st on the season-long Race to Dubai Rankings came in 2021, has been a steady presence on the DP World Tour since 2015, only once needing to return to the Qualifying School in that time. Still searching for his maiden victory, Scrivener has spent the entirety of 2025 in a good position.
Having begun the year with a tie for 21st in the first Rolex Series event of the year in Dubai to move up to 54th, Scrivener then finished in a tie for 8th in Ras Al Khaimah to shoot up to 21st. Like many others on this list, his drop to just outside of the Play-Off bubble since then has been a slow one, registering two top tens and ten missed cuts from 25 events. He moved back up to 59th from 72nd with a top ten at the Barracuda Championship and up one more with a tie for 12th at the Danish Golf Challenge, but he hasn’t been able to improve on that since. He will enter this week with good memories though, finishing his season with a five under par 67 on Sunday in South Korea last year to move up 17 places on the Rankings.
74th - Ashun Wu
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: T59 (2023), 68th (2024)
Just months after losing his full playing privileges on Golf’s Global Tour by just one spot, the Chinese trailblazer produced a stunning Sunday comeback to win the Volvo China Open for a second time to ensure he is exempt through to the end of the 2026 season. His win put him up to 22nd on the Race to Dubai Rankings, but battles with a tennis elbow injury at the end of last year into this year means playing opportunities for the five-time DP World Tour winner have been scarce. His win in essence carrying his position as it is, despite teeing up in just nine events throughout the entirety of this season.
Having not played in the previous five events leading up to his victory, Wu then took a second extended break from the Genesis Scottish Open until the Open de España presented by Madrid two weeks ago, where he finished 81st to drop to 68th on the Rankings. He didn’t play last week either, which dropped him a further six places to 74th, but he will make an appearance in South Korea for a third time to try to make the Play-Offs, having finished in a tie for 59th in 2024 and 68th in 2024.
76th - Julien Guerrier
Previous Genesis Championship Appearances: T52 (2023)
It was just last year that Guerrier was 72nd on the Race to Dubai Rankings heading into the penultimate event of the Back 9 when he dramatically came out on top of a nine-hole play-off against Jorge Campillo to win his maiden DP World Tour title at the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucía Masters. With his win he moved up 63 places to 18th, eventually ending the season at a career-best 23rd on the Race to Dubai. Now finding himself with a little more to do to guarantee he’ll have a second consecutive year in the DP World Tour Play-Offs, the Frenchman will play in his seventh event in a row at the Genesis Championship.
While he began this season strongly with a sixth place finish at the Nedbank Golf Challenge and made his first seven cuts in a row, his ranking has steadily dropped through the season, falling out of the top 70 for the first time after a missed cut at the Genesis Scottish Open. He briefly earned his way back into the top 65 with a top ten at the Betfred British Masters hosted by Sir Nick Faldo, but he has missed his next two cuts in a row and will now hope to draw on last year’s performance near the Play-Offs after following up a tie for 16th in Spain with a tie for 55th to move up one place to 76th.
