LIV Golf is heading back to South Korea, but with a fresh address. The fifth-season tour rolls into Asiad Country Club in Busan from May 28-31, 2026, the first event of a new multi-year deal with the venue and a noticeable departure from the inaugural Korean stop at Jack Nicklaus Golf Club in 2024 and 2025. The defending individual champion, Bryson DeChambeau, arrives with his Crushers GC team carrying both individual and team title belts.
It is the eighth tournament of the LIV Golf 2026 season and the start of a five-event sprint toward the Michigan Team Championship. For a league still proving its competitive identity, Korea has quietly become one of the year’s most-watched stops thanks to crowd density, broadcast-friendly start times for North American viewers, and a roster that increasingly draws from the world top 50.
What Is Happening At Asiad Country Club
The competition format is the standard LIV three-round, no-cut shootout: 54 holes of stroke play across Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for the individual title, with the team competition running concurrently. Fifty-seven players will tee it up in 13 teams of four, alongside five individual wild cards. With no cut, every name in the field gets full television exposure across the weekend — one of LIV’s most-discussed competitive choices.
Asiad Country Club’s tournament course is a composite of the Pine and Valley nines, running roughly 7,300 yards at par 72. The venue was redesigned in 2019 under Rees Jones, the American architect best known in pro circles for his US Open course retrofits. The fairways at Asiad are tree-lined and winding, which puts a premium on precise tee shots in a field that has spent the season bombing drives at venues like LIV Adelaide and LIV Virginia.
The course has hosted the BMW Ladies Championship on the LPGA, and going back further, the 2002 Asian Games. It is one of the country’s higher-pedigree championship layouts and a clear signal that LIV is investing in venue prestige in Asia. The Saturday night concert, headlined by globally acclaimed South Korean DJ Peggy Gou, is included with general admission and gives the event the festival-tour energy LIV continues to lean into.
DeChambeau Defends, Crushers GC Defend
Last year at Jack Nicklaus Golf Club, DeChambeau put together one of his cleaner ball-striking weeks of the 2025 LIV season to win the individual title and lead Crushers GC to the team trophy. He arrives in Busan riding mixed form: a quietly impressive T2nd at the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink behind Aaron Rai, but a recent loss in the LIV Adelaide playoff to Anthony Kim that still stings on highlight reels.
The bigger story may be Kim. The former Ryder Cup star, whose return to high-level competitive golf has been one of the most-watched comeback arcs in recent memory, is now firmly back as a contender after his Adelaide win. Watching Kim and DeChambeau on a tighter, more shot-shaped course like Asiad’s Pine/Valley composite will be one of the weekend’s headline matchups, especially if both find themselves on the leaderboard heading into Saturday’s final round.
Legion XIII captain Jon Rahm rounds out the trio at the top of LIV’s individual race and is widely expected to feature near the top of the leaderboard at Asiad. Rahm’s iron play is suited to a tree-lined, position-first course, and he has been steadily climbing the season standings since a slower start.
The All-Korean Lineup Worth Watching
For Korean fans, the marquee storyline is closer to home. Korean Golf Club brings an all-Korean lineup led by captain Byeong Hun An, alongside Minkyu Kim, Younghan Song, and Danny Lee. An has been arguably Korean Golf Club’s most consistent performer in 2026 and looks the most likely to put together a low number on home soil, particularly if Asiad’s slightly tighter corridors reward his trademark fairway-finding off the tee.
Danny Lee remains the wild card. The 2015 Greenbrier Classic winner has shown flashes of his old form in LIV’s no-cut format, and a home crowd often does extraordinary things for a player’s putting confidence. Younghan Song’s heavy-cut iron shape may be the most course-appropriate ball flight on the team for Asiad’s winding holes.
Why It Matters For The Season
LIV Korea sits in a load-bearing place on the 2026 schedule. It opens an Asian-focused stretch that includes events in heavyweight golf markets, and the points up for grabs will shape the individual season-long race and team standings going into the Michigan finale. A win in Busan can vault a player from the chasing pack to genuine contender for the year-end title.
It also continues the ongoing rebalancing between LIV and the established tours. After the 2026 PGA Championship saw LIV golfers finish strongly (Aaron Rai’s English-first major win at Aronimink was bookended by Rahm’s T2 and Cameron Smith’s T7), the league’s appetite for prestige weeks and prestige venues has visibly grown. Asiad fits that bigger picture.
What This Means For You
If you watch LIV mostly for the team format, Korea is one of the more entertaining team stops because the field is dense at the top and the home crowd loyalty around Korean Golf Club shifts the energy in a way the broadcast tends to catch well. If you watch for individual storylines, the DeChambeau-Kim subplot, Rahm’s quiet ascent, and the upcoming US Open implications for any LIV player who needs world ranking momentum all converge here.
For the practical-minded golfer, this is also a good week to watch how the world’s best handle a course that doesn’t reward simply launching the longest drive. Asiad’s tree-lined corridors will force the field into smarter shot shapes. If you’re working on shot shaping yourself, post-round highlights will be unusually instructive — pay attention to how the leaders work fades and draws into pins on the dogleg holes, where pure distance off the tee buys very little.
Key Takeaways
- LIV Golf Korea 2026 runs May 28-31 at Asiad Country Club in Busan, the start of a new multi-year venue deal.
- Bryson DeChambeau defends the individual title and Crushers GC defend the team title.
- Anthony Kim, fresh off his LIV Adelaide playoff win over DeChambeau, is the headline subplot.
- Korean Golf Club brings an all-Korean lineup led by Byeong Hun An, with strong home-crowd backing.
- The 7,300-yard, Rees Jones-redesigned course rewards precision over raw distance.
- Peggy Gou headlines the Saturday night concert — LIV continues to pair golf with festival-tour energy.
