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Winter golf is worth losing sleep over

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There's money to be made from golf in Asia, South Africa and Australasia but you'll have to miss some shut-eye to get it, says pro-punter Paul Krishnamurty

The night shift starts here. Following the final act of the 2007 Order of Merit in Spain on Sunday, it's now four long months until the next televised tournament in mainland Europe. Instead, throughout our winter the show rolls on to various different Tours across a variety of timezones.

Getting out of bed early to watch golf in the early hours of the morning can be a bit of chore sometimes, but rather than worry about such minor inconveniences I prefer to look upon the forthcoming months as a sequence of excellent gambling opportunities. Year in, year out, I've found the winter season by far the easiest time to back golf winners and the least likely to produce the kind of unfathomable outsiders that we see so often in the States.

From my experience, the market leaders seem to dominate when they step down a grade beneath the two main Tours. Last weekend's Singapore Open was a classic case in point. The market was headed by seven notably world-class players. All started the event trading at under 20, before duly going on to fill four of the first five places. Only one Asian Tour player finished within eight shots of winner Angel Cabrera.

There are several reasons for this trend. Firstly there's often very little strength in depth to fields on the Asian, Japanese, Australasian and South African tours. Particularly in Asia, there are a handful of decent players who've recently made their mark beyond their regular Asian Tour - Thongchai Jaidee, Jyoti Randhawa, Jeev Milkha-Singh for instance - but the rank and file rarely threaten. Including those three, Asian Tour players have won just seven of the last 25 co-sanctioned events and rarely prospered in fields that included the very best players.

Furthermore, the field is weakened by the fact that there are scores of middle to low ranking Europeans who might challenge occasionally in Europe, but are very rarely competitive outside their own continent. Some regularly struggle to acclimatise to the different weather conditions, and many never fully master the different greens or rough. Consequently, most of these winter events contain no more than a dozen obvious contenders.

Though they differ dramatically in strength, I expect the trend towards the favourites to continue in both of this week's Asian tournaments, the Taiheiyo Masters in Japan and the HSBC Champions Trophy in China. The Japanese event has a long history of being dominated by the handful of overseas stars that contest it every year. Eleven of the last 20 winners came from the top grade of the PGA and European Tours, with Westwood, Clarke, Olazabal, Ballesteros and Norman accounting for nine of them.

This year's line-up is headed by two foreign stars that represent a level of golf beyond the wildest dreams of any of their opposition, world No. 6 Adam Scott and former US Open champion Geoff Ogilvy. Both are fairly restrictive odds at 5.6 and 10 respectively, but anything approaching their best form would be unbeatable in this company.

By far the bigger event though is the Champions Trophy from Shanghai, which kickstarts the 2007/2008 European Tour season. There's plenty of strength in depth here, in fact its hard to see any of the other seven co-sanctioned Asian events hosting a stronger field. In both of the previous runnings of this event, the leaderboard has been packed with stars headed by Tiger Woods, only for David Howell and unbelievably last year Yong-Eun Yang to upset the runaway favourite. Yang's shock win rather blew my theory apart but I'm confident of revenge this year.

It's worth remembering that the next three places behind Yang were filled by Major winners, with only one other Asian Tour player in the top-17. Similar trends were evident in 2005, when Howell was an obvious winner and the entire top-seven all high-class overseas stars.

Once again, I expect the top dozen or so contenders to fill most of the places. Of the six previous Major winners on show, I reckon Ernie Els and Vijay Singh look the most likely to be in the thick of it come Sunday. 12.5 about each of these favourites looks very reasonable trading value.

What do you think? Has Paul called it right? Do the established stars lord it over the competition on the 'lesser' tours? Or has he underestimated the quality of player out there? Leave a comment below...