Last week, Harris English won at Kapalua at 33/1 odds.
I had English ranked 8th most likely to win, but only selected 6 picks due to a limited field (really, I did 🙂 )
Waialae CC is a private club on the Eastern shore of Honolulu. It was built in 1927 with Seth Raynor as the architect.
Despite my love for The Sony Open, it’s not a favorite of most Tour players. It’s an expensive trip over to Hawaii and the purse size of $6.6 million is in line with the Sanderson Farms Classic. The course design is not all that well liked either. Typically, Waialae gets a few votes for ‘worst course on Tour’ by Tour players.
Raynor’s designs usually feature a lot of lay-up tee shots and he has that at Waialae due to sharp turning doglegs.
A few years ago they widened the fairways a bit as Waialae would usually yield one of the lowest hit fairway percentages on Tour, usually less than 50%. However the field hit 65% of their fairways last year due to the widening of the fairways. This should likely help out the better drivers of the ball. Prior to the widening of the fairways, finding the fairway often boiled down to luck and the standard deviation in both driving distance and fairways hit was low. Now the deviation in hit fairways is slightly higher and that projects to help out the superior skilled drivers to a small degree.
The last Critical Hole on the course is the par-5 18th hole.
I suspect the target for most players on 18 will be on the right edge of the first left fairway bunker.
If the wind is in their face, they’ll need to move the target to the right of the first left fairway bunker.
What makes this an easy driving hole is that typically it’s playing with a tailwind off the shore from the east. The general shot dispersion for a Tour player has then hitting it further on misses to the left than to the right. So in this case shots that miss the target to the left play nicely into the dogleg and should carry the left fairway bunkers, easily.
PROJECTED WINNING SCORE: -18
3JACK’S FAVORITES
Webb Simpson +1,200
Collin Morikawa +1,400
Harris English +1,600
Joaquin Niemann +2,500
Ryan Palmer +3,300
Russell Henley +3,300
3JACK’S DARK HORSE PICKS
Emiliano Grillo +6,600
Scott Piercy +10,000
Henrik Norlander +15,000
Harry Higgs +22,500
3JACK