🥇 The Podium Awaits

📢 Fore, Please:

• This Week’s Live Chat — will be Wednesday at 12:30PM ET. You can head over to the room and drop your questions now!

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Jhonny Vegas: $7,500 | 136.5 PTS
Max Greyserman: $7,400 | 120.5 PTS
Taylor Pendrith: $8,700 | 110.0 PTS
Matt Kuchar: $6,500 | 109.5 PTS
Maverick McNealy: $8,300 | 106.5 PTS
Sam Burns: $10,000 | 101.5 PTS
TOTAL: $48,400 | 684.5 PTS

🎰 Making The Most Of It

Since the start of 2019, Jhonny Vegas has gained 0.93 strokes ball-striking per round, over 367 rounds. There are only nine golfers in the world who have returned a better rate than Vegas over the same, or more rounds. The list is Flushers Only:

Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay, Viktor Hovland, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Corey Conners.

Those have been some of the best golfers in the world during that six year stretch who account for 72 wins while Vegas, until last week, had zero trophies.

So what changed? Well, the putter. Vegas has only gained strokes putting three times this year but I’m going to exclude The American Express because that was technically just one measured round.

In his other two positive putting weeks, Vegas finished T27 at the Canadian Open and won the 3M Open. There are few golfers with the upside that Vegas had when he simply gains a few strokes on the putting surface.

👍 Rahm Hoists A Trophy

Jon Rahm finally broke through and won his first LIV golf event last week in the United Kingdom. He leads the circuit in SG/round this year with +2.16 and his win means that every golfer who is averaging at least +2.0 strokes per round has won on LIV.

The “big three” — Rahm, Niemann and Hatton — are creating a huge gap between themselves and the rest of the tour. Hatton is +0.45/rd better than Louis Oosthuizen who is the fourth best LIV golfer this season.

🏰 Le Golf National

Le Golf National has hosted the 2018 Ryder Cup but it’s a staple on the DP World Tour schedule, annually hosting the French Open. There are some players in the field this week with a decent run of history at Le Golf National.

You’d think that the Frenchmen would lead the way but it’s Paraguayan Fabrizio Zanotti who has the most rounds (30) played here. He’s gaining about a stroke per round during that period. Swede, Alex Noren, is next with a stunning +2.21/round over 23 rounds. He won the French Open in 2018 and was a member of the 2018 winning European Ryder Cup team.

Above are the results from Le Golf National sorted by most rounds played. There are (12) golfers in this field who have played at least a dozen rounds.

🎪 Hidden Gems

Because of the qualification process for The Olympics, the field gets very deep, very quickly. There are a lot of names that you may not be familiar with so this section is to give you a crash course into a few notables.

Kris Ventura (Norway) — It should be a comfortable week for the Norwegian who is alongside his friend and college teammate in Viktor Hovland. Ventura is currently playing on the Korn Ferry Tour and playing well. He has three straight Top 25 finishes and seven Top 25s in his last ten events.

Tapio Pulkkanen (Finland) — He currently plays the majority of his golf on the Challenge Tour. He has (3) Top 6 finishes in his last seven starts. He’s played one DP World Tour event this year, the Magical Kenya Open, and finished T19.

Shubhankar Sharma (India) — Fresh off a T19 at The Open Championship, Sharma has been on an excellent run of golf. Leading into The Open, he finished T39 at the Scottish Open and T5 at the Italian Open. He’s been an approach/putting specialist this year which can be a very high risk/high reward skill-set.

💦 Water Everywhere

Le Golf National will feature water on 10 different holes which will demand precision on both tee shots and second-shots. That amount of trouble certainly skews towards the high end of courses. There are about 20 courses in the last two years with at least 10 “water-in-play holes”.

Above are the best players in this field on courses with at least 10+ water holes. About half of these courses are in Florida, as you can imagine.

📺 All Thing Rings

My weekly tournament preview uses data to cover the course, field and so much more. It can be found on my YouTube page and the direct link is below:.

⭐ Before You Go …

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