Alfred Dunhill Championship 2009 preview, Australian PGA 2009 preview

Last week I appeared to break even, with a lot of ups and downs all cancelling each other out, so cumulative blog gain is still +£137. Looking forward to this Thursday:

Alfred Dunhill Championship 2009
Looking at the stats from the event in 2008, it was heavily dominated by the longest hitters in the tournament. Also, the 2006 tournament was won by the long hitting Alvaro Quiros. However the 2007 one was less dominated by long hitters, and GIR seemed more important. This leaves me wondering whether there was a change in set up last year (shorter rough?), which could be partly correlated with the fact that the winning score was much lower in 2008 than in 2007.
So should I be biased towards long hitters this year? No idea. The other areas I have been looking at are the successful Euro PGA tour qualifiers from the 2009 Challenge Tour and the Qualifying School. The best of these often do well in the events with weaker fields at the start of the year, such as this one (like Horsey, Willett and Cabrera-Bello last year).
Overall I will lean towards the long hitters but not exclusively so. Last, it does seem that certain players have more success in South Africa than others, and it is not surprising that African players themselves are the ones who seem to thrive. There are a core set of quality young African players at the moment and I will be including them in my tips.
I am going to split my choices into 3 groups based on big names, maybes, and outsiders:
Big Names - The South Africans Els, Oosthuizen, Aiken, and Schwartzel must all have good chances and fit my outlined profile. I won't include Sterne here due to his erratic recent form. Last person for this group is Eduardo Molinari who is playing very well. I am not going to back Els as his quoted finishing position of 15 looks too low given some inconsistency in his season.
Maybes
Cabrera-Bello, Drysdale, Maybin, A.Hansen, Otto. I think Otto could do well here - he won in Namibia a couple of weeks ago and came 29th at this venue last year.
Outsiders who could make Top 20 with luck
I will quickly list a few that I might back for Top 20 places - Van Zyl, Whiteford, Mclean, Fichardt, Dixon, Delamontagne, Davies, Colsaert, Cayeux, Boyd, Canizares, Andersson

UBS Hong Kong Open 2009 preview

As per the past few years, this year's tourney is at Hong Kong GC, Fanling. Its a short course at just 6,734 yards (Par 70). So its not surprising that the shorter hitters have had more success here than at some other tournaments. Looking at the statistics of the past few years, you should be looking especially at players who are putting and scrambling well, and good Greens in Regulation stats are useful too (although that would apply to any tournament really). Asian players have had a good deal of success here (WT Lin won last year, and KJ Choi and Jaidee were 2nd and 3rd the previous year) - maybe thats not surprising since there are lots of Asian players playing in an Asian tournament. Overall, a different type of player than the usual big-hitting US and European stars has a chance of success.

I'll give more detailed tips at the start of next week (mid afternoon GMT on monday 9th), but players I am currently favouring are (when I say "good scrambler" or "short hitter", I am basing this on Euro PGA statistics):

Dredge - good scrambler, short hitter, good form, 19th last year
Jimenez - good scrambler, won it in 2007
Mcdowell - good scrambler, decent form, 11 last year
Molinari and Schwartzel - both good scramblers and decent form
Ben Curtis - good short game
Dyson, Kjeldsen and Poulter - top quality players whose shorter length won't negatively affect them on this course
Asian and Australian players - I need to do more research on these still, but expect WT Lin and WC Liang to do well

Outsiders - Monty may be favoured by the short course and has shown glimpses of form recently, Karlsson may have had enough time to get his game in order after his recent eye troubles and is a good scrambler