The PLAYERS Championship

[Bamford]

We visit the Pete Dye designed Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass for The Players Championship. The PGA Tour's biggest tournament of the year, The Players victor earns some huge rewards. The winner receives a five-year exemption on the PGA Tour, a three-year invitation to the Masters, U.S. Open, The Open Championship and the PGA Championship. If European or American, they will also pretty much guarantee selection in their respective Ryder Cup teams. With such huge rewards on the table, you would expect the tournament champions list to be dominated by the very biggest names in the game and you would be partly correct. World Number 1s Tiger Woods and Jason Day have both one this in-recent times, but the likes of Si Woo Kim, Rickie Fowler, Martin Kaymer, Matt Kuchar and K.J. Choi, all came into the tournament at some serious odds. Top players, who needed to win a big tournament at the time they did. With DJ, Thomas, Spieth, Rahm and Rose all having cracks at leaving Ponte Vedra Beach with the World Number 1 mantle, it's almost as if we need to look deeper in this stacked field for the winner. 

So I'm looking for strategists this week, who have shown enough underlying form in the last 4/5 weeks  to give this a real crack, The course will play firm and fast and the 2017-new greens are likely to be as non-compliant this time around in terms of accepting approach shots. Wind though, which pretty-much is always a feature of The Players won't be in 2018. Solid (not spectacular) tee-to-green is needed this week, as is the ability to actually play for the middle of greens on a number of key holes. Scrambling (or strokes gained around the green) is the critical stat this week, over and above everything including putting. 

So I'm going for Henrik Stenson 33/1, Bryson DeChambeau 55/1, Kevin Kisner 66/1, Zach Johnson 80/1 and Adam Hadwin 100/1