THE ARGENTINE OPEN

The Argentine Open is polo’s championship of clubs, played every year since 1893 and at the Campo Argentino de Polo in Palermo, Buenos Aires, since 1928: ten teams rated between twenty-eight and forty goals, in two zones, play each other through the weekends of November, and the winners of the zones meet in a final in December for The Championship Cup. It is the last of the three opens of Argentina’s Triple Corona, after Hurlingham and Tortugas. In Buenos Aires it is the Abierto de Palermo, or simply El Abierto.

Only once has it been won by a team from outside Argentina: Meadow Brook, of the United States, in 1932, by eight goals to seven.

Palermo

The first was played in April 1893 in two halves, at the Hurlingham Club in Buenos Aires and at Cañada de Gómez in Santa Fe, so that the two centres of the game could share the cost of travelling; Hurlingham won. It was called the River Plate Polo Championship until 1923, when the River Plate Polo Association became the Asociación Argentina de Polo and the tournament took its present name. Handicaps came to Argentina in 1911, and ten goals is the highest.

The ground at Palermo opened on 27 October 1928, beside the Hipódromo Argentino on the Avenida del Libertador. It belongs to the Army and is let to the Association, and it is called the Cathedral of Polo.

Meadow Brook’s team in 1932 was Mike Phipps, Winston Guest, Elmer Boeseke Jr. and Billy Post, and it beat Santa Paula. Coronel Suárez won twenty-four times between 1934 and 1981, more than any other team, and in 1975 became the first to play at forty goals, four players of ten: Alberto Heguy, Juan Carlos Harriott Jr., Alfredo Harriott and Horacio Heguy. Juan Carlos Harriott won twenty titles himself, the record.

Adolfo Cambiaso has scored more goals in the Open than anyone, 1,083 in 128 matches, and his titles run from 1994 to 2025. In 2024, at forty-nine, he played his thirty-second, a record, and said “Estoy viejo”, I am old. With Pablo Mac Donough, Juan Martín Nero and David Stirling, at forty goals, La Dolfina won six in a row from 2015 to 2020.

The Abierto

The Campo has two grounds. Cancha 1, the main ground, measures 275 metres by 150; Cancha 2 lies behind its main stand.

Eight teams enter directly and two more come through a qualifying tournament. They are drawn into two zones and play each other once; the winner of each zone goes to the final. The first two days fall midweek and the rest at weekends, and from 2026 the early days are no longer free: “Es necesario ese ingreso económico”, the Association’s president said. The Triple Corona is shown on Disney+ in Latin America and on the Association’s own channel elsewhere.

A forty-goal team is not seen every year. In the finals of 2023 and 2024 La Natividad beat La Dolfina; in 2025, the 132nd, La Natividad La Dolfina beat Ellerstina Indios Chapaleufú by seventeen goals to thirteen.

The 133rd Open is to be played in 2026 at forty goals by the holders, La Natividad La Dolfina, with Camilo and Bartolomé Castagnola and two Adolfo Cambiasos, every one rated ten. They head the first zone and Ellerstina Indios Chapaleufú, led by Facundo Pieres, the second; La Irenita and La Zeta Kazak came through the qualifiers on 2 October. The schedule published in May ran from 10 November to a final on Saturday 12 December, but in September the Association said the start would be moved, because it coincides with the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Argentina; the new dates are still to be made official.

What to Know

It runs from November into December, about five weeks, with the final in December. The 2026 dates are being changed, and the 2027 dates have not been announced.

Tickets are sold through Ticketek, on general sale from 2 October 2026: the first two days from 5,650 pesos, the later days from 20,400.

A lounge suit. Nothing is published, and the Court dresses to the register of a final at Palermo.

The ground is on the Avenida del Libertador in Palermo, ten minutes from the centre of Buenos Aires. Stay in the city.

The mistake is to book on the schedule published in May. The start is being moved for the papal visit, and the final date should be confirmed before anything is committed.

The Court

The Argentine Open is not the Court’s own. Seats in the main stand for the final are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Buenos Aires, and the table afterward. The Court is at Aspen at the end of December for the polo on snow.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.