Find Me A 100 Winner: Mark Brown

Find Me A 100 Winner / Paul Krishnamurty / 11 November 2008 / Leave a Comment

Horses for courses theory makes New Zealander Brown great value at [110.0].

As I've argued elsewhere, this is not the ideal time of the year to be looking for rank outsiders. In stark contrast to the recent spate of shocks on the PGA Tour, these co-sanctioned winter events tend to favour the market leaders.

Nevertheless, shocks do still occur from time to time, and in this second week of the Asian series there could be some value knocking about on players who rarely produce outside that continent, but can look top-class when in ideal surroundings. It seems that, perhaps because of the different climate and greens, there are several European players who never perform well outside their own continent, and several Asian Tour players that equally don't travel well.

My shortlist included Asian Tour regulars Jyoti Randhawa, Thaworn Wiratchant and Shiv Kapur, before I finally plumped for Mark Brown at [110.0].

Whether any of them wins this week or not, I expect to see all of these challenging regularly in the weeks ahead. Brown rates the best pick because he was quite outstanding in this period last season. In 12 starts in Asia from October 2007 to April 2008, Brown made eight top-10s and won two titles. He then proceeded to do nothing in Europe all summer, but when returning to Asia last month he returned to form with a couple more top-10s.

Brown also played well to finish eighth on this course last year. And with a strong emphasis expected this week on tee to green accuracy, it bodes well that he hit over 70% of greens in regulation last week in Shanghai.