The first PGA Tour event of the season with a full field of competitors
begins this week in Hawaii at one of my favourite courses, Waialae Country
Club. Last week saw Jordan Speith kick off the New Year by winning the Hyundai
Tournament of Champions by a whopping eight strokes. He won’t be teeing up this
week, so we will have to look elsewhere for our fantasy points. But perhaps we
won’t have to look too far? Last year’s winner Jimmy Walker won this event by
nine and will be fancied to post another low scoring round. He won the year
before that too, but no-one has managed to win this tournament three years in a
row before. Could Walker be the first?
Before we take our usual look at the fancied golfers for
this event, let’s cover what fantasy games we will be participating in and how
the picks will be laid out. Selections will be divided into three groups
according to Yahoo Fantasy Golf; A, B, and C. PGA Fantasy has done away with
the simple ‘pick any four golfers’ game and is now solely represented by the
AVIS Fantasy Golf game, where you select four starting golfers who gain points
for you each round, and two golfers who you can sub in if need be before the
start of each days play. You may pick any golfer from the field for this game,
but you can only use a golfer three times during each segment of the AVIS game
(of which there are four, this one finishes at the end of January). To replace
the original PGA Fantasy, we will be now playing the Golf Channel’s Fantasy
Golf game. In this game you select four players, one from each group. These groups
are divided up by world ranking.
As I’ve said, selections will be shown according to Yahoo
groups, which picks for each section underlined. Picks for the Golf Channel
Fantasy game will have a (G1),2,3, or 4 after their name, corresponding to
which group they were selected from. AVIS PGA Fantasy picks will have an (AVIS)
or (AVISsub) after their name to indicate where they were picked in that game.
Phew! I hope that isn’t too complicated.
So on with the picks. Jimmy Walker will be one of the
favourites here having won the last two times he played here. It’s also his
birthday this week, if you believe in that kind of thing. Russell Henley and
Johnson Wagner won here the two years before Walker, and could well be in
contention again. The second most selected player in Yahoo and AVIS is Brandt
Snedeker. He finished last week in third and will be the highest placed
finisher from that tournament to play in the absence of Spieth and Reed.
Zach Johnson is the third most selected player in Yahoo,
probably because of his good record on Bermuda grass greens. But he has only
finished inside the top 10 here once (T8th) so I’ll be avoiding him I think.
Looking further down the list; Chris Kirk has had two top 5s here in recent
years. Charles Howell III has an excellent record here spanning back almost 15
years. Plus he has the longest run in Golf Channel Fantasy Group 3 without
missing the cut and is a strong selection there.
Here are this week’s picks. Good Luck Everyone.
Group A
Russell
Henley (AVIS)
Chris Kirk
(AVISsub)
Group B
Brandt
Snedeker (AVIS) (G2)
Jimmy Walker
(AVIS)
Charles
Howell III (G3)
Troy Merritt
Brendon Todd
Group C
Matt
Kuchar (AVIS) (G1)
Graeme
McDowell
Lucas Glover
(AVISsub) (G4)
Johnson Wagner
Peter
Malnati
Daniel
Berger
Will Wilcox
Marc Leishman
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