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Find Me A 100 Winner - Steve Marino

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Form golfer looks a likely first-time winner some time soon...

Can Tiger Woods be beaten at Bay Hill this week? On recent form, no, but on the last four years' course form it's a certainty. This event used to be one of his bankers, winning four times consecutively from 2000, but strangely he's failed to finish higher than 20th since 2003. However invincible he looks at present, he will lose a tournament somewhere down the line and given those recent stats, there's probably more chance here than most venues.

And the one saving grace of Tiger dominating the market as he does is that it pushes all sorts of quality players up to huge three-figure prices. It was no mean feat trying to narrow my shortlist down to one this week, with Boo Weekley, Scott Verplank and Trevor Immelman all coming in for serious consideration. None of their prices though looked quite as mouthwatering as the [170.0] for Steve Marino.

Marino has looked one of the most plausible first-time winners on the Tour recently, making his last ten cuts and only twice finishing outside the top-30 in that spell. The 28 year-old has had two decent opportunities to win already this season, looking comfortable under the pressure of challenging on the final day. On both occasions, he's hit a solid final round without having quite enough to overhaul big deficits on KJ Choi at the Sony and Brian Gay three weeks ago in Mexico.

The evidence from recent seasons shows that greens in regulation is by far the most important statistic to follow at Bay Hill. Encouragingly, Marino finished 1st for this discipline when registering another respectable 14th place at last week's PODS Championship.