The World Golf Championships (WGC) are a group of annual professional golf tournaments created by the International Federation of PGA Tours as a means of gathering the best players in the world together more frequently than the pre-existing four major championships. All WGC tournaments are official money events on the PGA Tour and the European Tour, and officially sanctioned by the Asian Tour, Japan Golf Tour, Sunshine Tour, and PGA Tour of Australasia. The WGC tournaments offer comparable prize money to the major championships. In the pantheon of golf events, the WGCs rank below the major championships and above most other competitions, although The Players Championship, promoted by the PGA Tour as the "fifth major", may also claim such status. Despite the name, the World Golf Championships do not claim to crown a recognised 'world champion'. Events The WGC Championship, WGC Match Play and WGC Invitational events all began in 1999, although the WGC Invitational is the direct successor of the World Series of Golf, which began in 1976 and the WGC Match Play is a direct successor to the Andersen Consulting World Championship of Golf which began in 1995. The WGC Championship originally traveled to different venues around the world. After 2006 it found a home at Doral Resort in Florida superseding the Doral Open, a long-standing event on the PGA Tour. Between 2000 and 2006, the men's World Cup was accorded WGC status. The WGC Champions, first held in 2005, was awarded World Golf Championships status starting with the 2009 edition, becoming the fourth WGC tournament on the worldwide calendar. In April 2011, the Sunshine Tour announced that it would host a fifth WGC event. The event, to be known as the Tournament of Hope, was to be linked to awareness of poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa. In early 2012 it was announced that the tournament would be played in 2013; later in 2012 it was announced that the tournament would not be a WGC event, but ultimately the tournament never took place. The WGC concept was introduced to create a larger group of golf tournaments with a high global profile by bringing the leading golfers from different tours together on a more regular basis, rather than just for the major championships. At the time the publicity spoke of a "World Tour" which might develop on the basis of the World Championships and the majors. The "World Tour"