Ben Coley makes Mackenzie Hughes the best three-ball bet on day one of the PLAYERS Championship.
Recommended bets
2pts Hughes to beat Cabrera Bello and van Rooyen at 11/4
2pts Kang to beat Oosthuizen and Herman at 7/4
1pt Tringale to beat Glover and Brown at 17/10
1pt Laird to beat Stanley and Clark at 9/5
Louis Oosthuizen is one of the shortest-priced favourites on Thursday's three-ball coupon, but he looks worth opposing with the bang in-form SUNG KANG.
Oosthuizen's driver has been seriously poor across his last two starts, to the extent that he couldn't crack the top 50 in Mexico despite ranking second in putting, before going on to miss the cut in the Honda Classic.
Though he's been runner-up here before and is a major champion who could so easily have won the lot, right now he looks there to be taken on and this is the best way to do so.
Kang has two top-10 finishes in his last three starts, and a three-from-four record at Sawgrass is perfectly decent. Last year he carded a second-round 66 and half his rounds here have been par or better. Something similar may do here with Jim Herman easy enough to oppose as the other member of the group.
Around an hour before that group makes its way to the tee, CAMERON TRINGALE can show why he should be favourite to beat Lucas Glover and Scott Brown.
Tringale has been really solid for a long time now, making 12 of his last 13 cuts and regularly putting himself on the first page of the leaderboard early in the tournament.
In fact, from the start of the season he rattled off nine straight under-par openers and while things cooled for a while on the west coast, back in Florida he started with a round of 67 before finishing 27th in the Honda Classic.
His record here is good - he's made four cuts in six, and was 16th after an opening 65 on his penultimate visit - and he looks reliable when it comes to making a solid start.
Not so Glover, who is a better player at his peak but hasn't finished any higher than 49th this year. It's not as if he's simply putting badly, either, with just one respectable tee-to-green performance in six, and for now he's one to take on.
Scott Brown completes the group and is a handy player in the right circumstances. However, since finishing a surprise second at Riviera he's been poor and he's never threatened here.
Moving to the afternoon and MARTIN LAIRD is taken to beat Kyle Stanley and Wyndham Clark.
The latter is favourite, but he shot 80 here on his debut before being disqualified for signing for a 79, and last week shot 82-80 to fall to 68th in the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
It was tough at Bay Hill and should be easier here, but it will still take some turnaround from this talented youngster to return to the form he'd shown previously.
Laird, who was sixth in Puerto Rico when last seen having been bang in the mix throughout, looks a more reliable option than Stanley. Laird has twice gone close to winning this and although poor recently, his run of cuts made and solid rounds is encouraging.
Stanley also had a chance in Puerto Rico, but there's been very little to shout about otherwise and his long-game - which needs to be firing to make up for a troublesome putter - has gone missing.
Finally, I really like the look of MACKENZIE HUGHES in the final group out.
He's made the cut on both Sawgrass starts, including when leading after the first round on debut, and when we last saw him he played the best golf of anyone over the weekend of the Honda Classic.
That sets him up nicely for this, whereas Rafa Cabrera Bello and Erik van Rooyen have questions to answer.
Cabrera Bello shot 74-82 last week and 77-76 here a year ago, and while van Rooyen contended in Mexico, he's missed the cut the last three times there has been one including in his sole start since.
That performance in the WGC was excellent, but it had something freakish about it - not least the fact he suddenly became Luke Donald around the greens. A wider look at the state of his game suggests he's in line for a tough week and, at 11/4, Hughes is the day's standout bet.
Posted at 1640 GMT on 10/03/20
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