Singapore Classic 2023

DP World Tour is being true to it's name this week when it's moving from Middle East to Asia for a three week sprint of Asian events. The field has changed quite a bit from last few weeks and this inaugural event features a interesting field of young talent and more established players.

The course piqued my interest this week. It's nickname is "The Beast" and it's said to be the most difficult course in Asia. Designed by Pete Dye's nephew Andy Dye, the course has similarities with world famous courses such as Oakmont, Troon, Shinnecock and Sawgrass. Known for it's really undulating and large greens and 146 bunkers.

Because no one has played this course before in competitive environment we might want to look at the similarities and then you'll find difficult courses lined up. The Green Eagle pops up and you'll find many well finished players from there playing this week. Depending on current form and model's findings players we might want to boost up are Marcus Armitage, Jordan Smith and Kalle Samooja for example.

There's a great risks of thunderstorms in the area during "winter months" in Singapore and this time the Thursday morning wave seems to be in a risk of having delays in their second round of play. This will affect our main strategy this week so we're waiting for latest possible time before putting our bets in. See forecast below:

The betting card & reasoning

Last week was really good in top20 market and cashing out Bjork was profitable move after all. The full card yielded 35,96% and I was pleasantly surprised of this performance since it was the first week I used the average ranking when deciding on top20 bets.

This week we're putting a lot of emphasis of ball striking and putting in addition to current form. In addition we tend to trust more experienced analysts in the weeks that are not available data wise. We highly recommend excellent preview (as always) from Ben Coley at Sporting Life here. His picks move the market and were on point this week. Some of those players were locked with the first look of data.

This table summarizes the field and setup pretty well. Based on Datagolf's excellent Trend Index there's not that many hot players in the field. Baseline tells how much better player is playing compared to his 12 month TSG statistics. You could say that Bjork, Hoshino and few others are performing well compared to their level.

The course seems pretty absurd (see Vincerix preview for some mesmerizing photos of the course) and difficult. The betting card was locked at the last possible time so that the weather forecast is as good as possible. Since it's a new difficult course and there's a lot of randomness involved, the main bet was "To miss cut" bets, that were all high valued based on our analysis. Below you can see this weeks selections and these are easier accessible through this link.

Good luck! This week will be exciting to watch and there will be proper CUT sweat this time. More about this strategy later on.