The first round of the USPGA Championship will be played out on Thursday as the entire field get to taste the Southern Hills Country Club course for the first time from a competitive viewpoint as the second major of the year gets underway.
The aim for everyone with a tee time on Thursday is exactly the same – to get off to a fast start and set themselves up for a tilt at one of the four biggest tournaments in the game. We are all set for a decent day of golf.
First Round Leader
As ever in an event of this magnitude the first market to look at is the one for the first round leader. Regular readers will know by now that you have to look at the format before you get stuck into this market and here we have two waves of tee times – a morning and an afternoon one. That is significant because the wind is expected to be a lot stronger in the afternoon than the morning so the early starters look to have a real advantage.
That means I’ll take a couple of players from the early starters and they are players who went well just last week in Jordan Spieth and Ryan Fox. Spieth should go really well here and while I think the pressure of completing the Grand Slam will eventually be too much it shouldn’t get to him in this first round. He has a perfect draw to do some damage. Fox arrives here with form figures of 1-15-9-8-2 on the DP World Tour and in those events his strokes gained on approach rankings have been 2-13-6-12-1. He is putting really well so if he can have his irons dialled in here he could shoot a low one to begin with.
Special Offer
Sign up for a Boylesports account to get up to £25 in free bets! Perfect offer for this tournament! Click the image below for this great offer! New accounts only. 18+ T&Cs apply. Gamble Aware.
Thursday 3 Balls
As ever in a major championship the field will go out in three balls on Thursday. In the USPGA Championship they go off the first and tenth tee in the morning and the afternoon. The headline groups in the morning wave are the ones which feature Jordan Spieth, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. They go out at 14.11 BST while Viktor Hovland, Will Zalatoris and Cameron Smith go out 11 minutes prior to that. The afternoon wave is headlined by the Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa and Scottie Scheffler group who go out at 19.36 BST. 22 minutes prior to that will be the three ball of the American trio of Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas and Patrick Cantlay. With the wind expected to get up in the afternoon I’m playing safe and taking a bet from a morning group.
Beau Hossler/Tom Hoge/Si Woo Kim
Match tees off at 14.39 BST
The group I like is one of the later ones off the first tee on Thursday morning local time when the American pair of Beau Hossler and Tom Hoge go out alongside the Korean star Si Woo Kim for their opening 18 holes.
Hossler is very much feast or famine at the minute but he has lost strokes on the field on approach to the green in seven of his last nine recorded events and while his short game and putting has been good the test is just too extreme if you’re missing greens here. Kim has a good all-round game but his form has been nothing to shout about recently and most of his best form comes on Pete Dye designs of which this isn’t one. Hoge had a good week at the Byron Nelson last week and he needed it because his form has tailed off since the Phoenix Open but it can’t go unnoticed that he won at Pebble Beach this season and on a track very similar here albeit a bit longer, Hoge should be at home. Whether that translates into anything come Sunday evening we will have to wait and see but it does mean he should have enough to take this three ball down.
Tips
Back J.Spieth First Round Leader (e/w) for a 1/10 stake at 31.00 with Sky Bet (1/5 1-7)
Back R.Fox First Round Leader (e/w) for a 0.5/10 stake at 176.00 with Sky Bet (1/5 1-7)
Back T.Hoge to beat B.Hossler & S.Woo Kim for a 3/10 stake at 2.63 with Coral
Back him here:
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2022
