Disqualifications are common in the higher rungs of professional golf. The causes range from sloppy scorecard accounting to players unknowingly gaming with non-compliant equipment, but rarely are professionals shown the door for outright cheating.
That makes the case of 25-year-old Swiss professional Cedric Gugler so remarkable.
In June, Gugler, who plays on the HotelPlanner Tour — the feeder circuit for the DP World Tour — was DQ’ed after the first round of an event in the Czech Republic for “several times playing his ball from the wrong place on putting surfaces,” according to a statement from the European Tour Group this week.
At the time, the disqualification went off without much fanfare, presumably because the matter of the DQ was not made public. That changed Friday when the Tour announced that an independent disciplinary panel had met Nov. 3 to review Gugler’s actions and found that he had “conducted himself in a manner that fell below the standards of conduct and ethics expected of Tour members.”
The panel ruled that the way Gugler illegally marked his balls on the way to his opening 75 at the Raiffeisenbank Golf Challenge was a ‘reckless violation of the Rules of Golf’.
Gugler will pay a heavy price for his transgression. The panel has suspended him from the first ten HotelPlanner Tour events of the 2026 season, starting with the SDC Open in South Africa on January 29. Even more expensive will be the damage this ruling will do to Gugler’s reputation.
Gugler made 18 starts on the 2025 HotelPlanner Tour, finishing 166th in the tour’s season-long points race. Leading up to the Czech Republic event, he had missed seven cuts in ten starts and had taken in less than $4,000 in earnings.
Gugler has played sparingly on the DP World Tour, but he did finish fourth as a sponsor at the 2024 Omega European Masters in his home country, which he called “the highlight of my career.”
“I love playing in front of a big crowd on the big stage and it makes me stronger as a golfer,” Gugler said. “It was so special to play on the DP World Tour and that is where I feel I belong in the future. My goal is to get there as quickly as possible.”
Here is the full statement from the European Tour Group:
The European Tour Group announced today that Cedric Gugler has been sanctioned for violating the Code of Conduct during a tournament during the HotelPlanner Tour.
An independent disciplinary panel, which met on November 3, 2025, ruled that Gugler had behaved in a manner below the standards of conduct and ethical behavior expected of Tour members during the first round of the Raiffeisenbank Golf Challenge at the Kaskada Golf Resort in the Czech Republic on June 12, 2025.
He was disqualified from the tournament after hitting his ball from the wrong place on putting surfaces several times.
The independent disciplinary panel – made up of Philip Evans KC, sports administrator Ian Larsen and Legends Tour member Markus Brier – ruled that Gugler’s conduct was a serious breach of the Tour’s Code of Conduct due to a reckless breach of the Rules of Golf.
Due to the serious breach, he has been suspended from the first ten HotelPlanner Tour events of the season, starting on January 29, 2026, the day of the Tour’s first tournament of the 2026 season, the SDC Open in South Africa.
He may return after the first ten events have concluded, a date that will be determined once the 2026 HotelPlanner Tour schedule is finalized and announced.
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