The Punter / Steven Rawlings / 15 October 2008 / Leave a Comment

Steve will be Loving It if wild outsider Y E Yang wins Justin Timberlake's PGA Tour event.

It's the Portugal Masters on the European Tour this week and it's only the second staging of the event, so there's not an awful lot of form to go on. But looking at the stats from last year the key attributes required are the ability to drive the ball a country mile and to make plenty of putts.

It's blindingly obvious I know but the first player that springs to mind is Robert Karlsson.

The giant Swede was runner-up last year and if he can improve on that this week he'll be winning his third tour event on the spin, an achievement that few could begrudge as he really has been in fantastic form all year and I simply couldn't leave him out.

My only other pick is Alvaro Quiros, a player I backed last week. He matched winner Charl Schwartzel's score over the last three days and was bogey free for his last 56 holes. A first round that contained four bogeys and a double bogey made last week's task ultimately insurmountable but his fast-finishing fourth place shows he's in decent nick again after being dogged by injury.

He opened up with two rounds of 66 here last year before two rounds of 70 saw him drift back to finish 11th so he's shown a liking for the track.

Selections:

Robert Karlsson @ [10.0]
Alvaro Quiros @ [85.0]

The US Tour event this week is the Justin Timberlake Shriners Open, an old tournament with a new name. This Las Vegas event is now in its 26th year and has gone through a few changes. It used to be a five round pro-am using a couple of courses but has now evolved into a four round, single course event without the amateurs.

Over the years it's seen a couple of soon-to-be-famous first time winners, both Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk losing their tour cherries here. But a glance down the list of recent winners is not so much a who's who of golf more just a who?

Reading backwards the last six winners have been George McNeill, Troy Matteson, Wes Short, Andre Stoltz, Stuart Appleby and Phil Tataurangi. Of the six, only Appleby had won before or since his success here so caution is most definitely advised.

Towards the head of the market, I like both Stephen Ames and Ben Crane's chances, two players I backed in running last week. But they're just a bit too short and given the habit this event has for producing a highly unlikely winner I've decided to scrabble around in the hay for the proverbial needle.

Selections:

Ryan Moore @ [130.0]
Mark Hensby @ [170.0]
Tim Petrovic @ [180.0]
Parker McLachlin @ [200.0]
Martin Laird @ [220.0]
Brad Adamonis @ [340.0]
Y E Yang @ [500.0]

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