Her golf is built on premier control; few strike the ball as consistently and make the game appear as effortless.

When the AIG Women's Open rolls around, the conversation changes slightly. For all Korda's success, this event remains a championship she hasn't quite mastered.

Across nine appearances, she has recorded only two top-10 finishes. By the standards of almost every other player in the world, that is an excellent record. By Korda's standards, it is an outlier.

Open Championships ask questions that don't appear anywhere else in the game; Royal Lytham & St Annes will ask plenty of them again this week.

Committing to the perfect shot doesn't always produce the perfect result.

A drive that lands exactly where it should can find its way into a pot bunker, as we saw Ryan Fox do with his tee shot on the 17th at Royal Birkdale on his way to the Claret Jug two weeks ago. Players can spend four days hitting great golf shots, and the golf course has the final say.

There is a level of unpredictability that has to be combatted by acceptance, because it goes both ways.

Elite golfers operate with extraordinary precision. The world's best separate themselves by mastering the art of repetition. They can rinse and repeat the same motion, trajectory, tempo and routine time after time.

Links golf doesn't reward repetition quite as generously; it rewards adaptability.

"The best players are usually remembered for the championships they won. Occasionally, they're remembered for the one that took the longest to conquer, as per Rory McIlroy at the Masters."

Players spend as much time reacting as they do executing. One shot, the wind whistles off the Irish Sea; the next, it swings completely around. Changing trajectory becomes a player's best tool, and creativity and patience become so valuable.

Perhaps that's why the Women's Open often produces champions who look entirely comfortable accepting the uncomfortable. All the great Links players possess the ability to play the shots they see and move on quickly, without mentioning the ever-changing conditions Mother Nature makes players contend with as well.

The former has never been a weakness in Korda's game, but it remains the one environment where her greatest strength, complete control, is hardest to maintain.

Ironically, that's also why she arrives at Royal Lytham as the player to beat.

Being the favourite isn't about previous results at one championship. It's about the complete body of work. Korda has already reminded the golfing world this season why she remains the benchmark, adding more victories and another two major championships to her pending Hall of Fame career. Even when she isn't at her absolute best, she still finds herself near the pointy end of leaderboards with remarkable regularity.

Players won't solve the art of links golf overnight. It often takes repeated visits to understand which shots to hit, get used to the turf interaction, when to stay patient, and, perhaps most importantly, when to accept that a little bad luck is simply part of the examination.

Royal Lytham offers another opportunity. It's demanding bunkering and relentless requirement to position the golf ball correctly make it one of the purest tests on The Open rota.

For Korda, that's less a weakness than an unfinished chapter. The best players are usually remembered for the championships they won. Occasionally, they're remembered for the one that took the longest to conquer, as per Rory McIlroy at the Masters.

The Women's Open has become that championship for Nelly Korda. She doesn't need to prove she's the world's best golfer; she's already made that abundantly obvious.

What remains is proving she can solve the one puzzle that has continued to resist her. If she does, it might be the most satisfying victory of them all.