The Bullseye – Volvo China Open

For this week’s European Tour preview, we head to China for the Volvo China Open. The European Tour is getting back into full swing after a light schedule while its top players were playing WGCs and the Masters overseas. Last week, Alexander Levy won in spite of poor course history in Morocco, and comes back to Topwin Golf and Country Club as the defending champion. He’ll be the talk of the town this week.

The players make the long trip from Morocco to Topwin Golf and CC for this week’s Volvo China Open. Although this is a tournament full of history, the current venue was used for just the second time last season. Therefore, we only have two years of course history to draw upon, and very few accurate stats from those events. Topwin Golf and CC is a 7,261-yard par-72, and tends to produce very low scores. The past couple years, the winners have been -17 and -22, respectively.  The par-5s are long, but not too difficult to score on. The course features rolling hills and undulating greens, and has water hazards on nearly every hole. Looking back at last season’s leaderboard, there were only a couple bombers near the top. Most of the top-10 were more accurate players: Alexander Levy, Bernd Wiesberger, Chris Wood, Ross Fisher, and Y.E. Yang. I’m going to look at who played well last week in Morocco, and also players who have strong records on Chinese soil.

This is one of the first European Tour events where we’ve had reliable stats (albeit small sample sizes), so that adds another element to our edge. It’s pretty clear that bombers have an advantage here, but we’ve seen plenty of short hitters contend as well. Beyond weighing recent form heavily, I’ll look at strokes gained off-the-tee and strokes gained approach as my top metrics. Putting is usually a challenge, so let’s just focus on ball-striking.

• Strokes Gained Off-the-Tee
• Strokes Gained Approach
• Greens in Regulation
• Birdie Average

And now on to the picks!

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