European Tour Fantasy Golf Predictions – Shot Clock Masters

2018 Shot Clock Masters Preview

You have to feel kind of bad for Francesco Molinari. After winning the BMW PGA Championship a couple of weeks ago, he headed home to his native Italy for last week’s Italian Open; an event he has won twice before and one that clearly means a lot to him.

How often can you card 66-66-66-65 on the European Tour and not get the victory? After draining some monster putts on Sunday, Molinari really must have thought he’d go back-to-back in front of his adoring countrymen and women.

But he hadn’t accounted for one of golf’s true mavericks, Thorbjorn Olesen.

Thorbjorn Olesen of Denmark celebrates wiuth his caddie Dominic Bott…

Thorbjorn Olesen of Denmark celebrates wiuth his caddie Dominic Bott on the 18th green after winning the Italian Open at Gardagolf Country Club on June 3, 2018 in Brescia, Italy. Get premium, high resolution news photos at Getty Images

If you look up the word mercurial in the dictionary, you might just find a picture of the Dane nestled in beside it. His formline heading into the Italian Open – and remember, this is a strong field for the Rolex Series events – read 60-MC-37-46-MC, but as so often happens with frustrating talents like Olesen, it can take the most unexpected of sparks to light the fuse.

Either way, Olesen is now a five-time European Tour winner and considerably richer than he was just a week ago.

From the sublime to the ridiculous now with this week’s Shot Clock Masters, a rebranding of the Lyoness Open. As the name suggests, a shot clock will monitor every single swing of the club, with the first player in the group having 50 seconds to play their shot and the rest just 40 seconds.

That gimmick, along with the event’s unfortunate scheduling a week ahead of the US Open, has led to one of the weakest fields in European Tour history assembling at the Diamond Club in Atzenbrugg, Austria.

The top four in the betting and the DFS salary list have a grand tally of three European Tour victories between them, and a big fat zero in the past year. The highest salary pick, Dean Burmester, qualified for the US Open at the sectional qualifying event and so he will be focused purely on that, the next best – Erik Van Rooyen – doesn’t have a European Tour top-ten to his name outside of Africa, Lee Slattery hasn’t won since 2015 and Matthias Schwab, the home hope, has just one European Tour top-five finish to his name.

Indeed, when you think that the most likely champion this week is a 54-year-old cigar-smoking Spaniard, you know that this is an event that is going to prove to be a nightmare for DFS gamers.

But where there is confusion there is opportunity, and it might just be the case that if you can get six players to the weekend in Austria you will stand a fantastic chance of cashing very nicely in your contests.

And besides, it’s not as if we don’t have any material to work with, as the Diamond Club has hosted the Lyoness Open since the 1990s. The most recent winners list – Dylan Frittelli, Ashun Wu, Chris Wood, Joost Luiten and Bernd Wiesberger – suggests we should be looking for classy ball-strikers who are long and straight off the tee and who are dialed in with their irons.

It’s just finding them in this field that’s the tricky part!

Accuracy is certainly the key at the Diamond club with small greens and water in-play on nine holes, with two of those featuring island greens. The rough is often quite penal here too, so keeping your ball in the short stuff is key.

As for the shot clock, will that have any bearing on things? Probably not, but it might be worth drafting light-hearted souls who aren’t going to get too angsty about being timed.

So, in this ultimate minefield of an event, who are we drafting to our roster?

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This Week’s Shot Clock Masters Fantasy Picks & Predictions

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This Week’s Shot Clock Masters Fantasy Picks

Miguel Angel Jimenez – $9,800 – It’s 2018, and yet we find ourselves drafting ‘the Mechanic’ in our squad….

Yep, we know how ridiculous that is on paper, but with doubts persisting about the top four – and a few others in the upper echelons of the salary cap – backing a proven performer who is in decent form makes sense; age is but a number, after all.

Jimenez won on the US Senior Tour the other week – that’s still a pretty decent standard of golf – and finished T5 in their PGA Championship.

But most eye-catching has been his form in European Tour events: the old dog can still mx it with the young pups! T14 in the high quality Italian Open last week, that follows T7, T10 and T19 finishes on the Tour in his prior three starts.

Conclusion: the Spaniard is the most likely winner this week, especially with course form that reads MC-5-19-14-15. Expect him to be low owned too, because who is drafting a 54-year-old, cigar-smoking good-time guy in this day and age….

Lorenzo Gagli – $9,100 – If we rewind a little to the end of March, we note that Lorenzo Gagli has won and finished second on the Challenge Tour, and recorded three consecutive top-20s on the European Tour.

In this field, that kind of form is goldust, and notable in his T14 return in his home Italian Open last week was that he ranked fourth for Greens in Regulation.

Other stats which suggest Gagli can go very close this week are his driving numbers: 69.64% of fairways found from an average distance of 294 yards is handy stuff indeed.

It is perhaps best to keep things simple this week, and so we’re drafting the Italian based on the premise that he is one of the best ball-strikers in the field.

Wade Ormsby – $8,100 – When you cycle through the $8000-8999 price point on DraftKings, there are a few tempters but nothing more.

There’s the perennially underachieving Nicolas Colsaerts, the exciting Challenge Tour prospect Oscar Lengden, the multiple-time Tour winner but out-of-form Soren Kjeldsen and the sublime iron game of Andrea Pavan.

Instead, we’re going to take a chance on a player who has won on the European Tour this season and who has banked five top-10s since the start of 2017.

It would be fair to describe Wade Ormsby as ‘out of form’, given that he has one top-30 finish to his name in six starts, but you wonder how far his game is away from the level that saw him triumph at the Hong Kong Open earlier this season.

There were rounds of 66 and 67 at the Italian Open in among two rather dire efforts, and just yesterday he finished one shot away from qualifying for the US Open at the Walton Heath sectional qualifier.

Are these green shoots of recovery or dawns of false hope? We will find out in the next couple of days….

Jeff Winther – $7,500 – Could this be the week when a talented but underachieving type of player breaks through?

Here are some fun stats about Jeff Winther: he ranks 28th on the European Tour for Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, which compares rather well to other stars who have played a similar number of rounds; Alex Levy (34th), Andy Sullivan (44th), Rafa Cabrera-Bello (46th) and George Coetzee (47th).

That classy ball striking has led to a birdie average per round of 4.42; again, comfortably among the best on Tour.

So there is something evidently wrong with his game, and it appears to be a complete inability to string four good rounds together. He missed the cut at the Italian Open last week despite opening with a 69, and at the Rocco Forte Open he closed 65-66 to land a share of T14 – how much better could that have been with a good start?

But let’s give him another chance this week; given his birdie tally, he at least gives gamers a good run for their money.

Ryan Evans – $7,200 – Within his last 12 rounds, Evans has posted 69 or better in six of those, including an opening 65 in the Rocco Forte Open and an excellent opening 67 at the Italian Open.

What he now needs to do is connect a decent weekend to his starts, but we’re willing to give the Englishman a try seeing as though he is more than capable of doing so.

The good vibes continued at the Walton Heath US Open qualifier, where he agonizingly missed out on a major appearance after losing in a play-off to Paul Waring.

Rather than dwell on what might have been, Evans may actually have walked away from that with added confidence – that could be a recipe for success this week.

Kim Koivu – $7,200 – There is a sense of ‘opportunity knocks’ about this Shot Clock Masters, with the potential for a young star to announce themselves to a wider audience.

Of all the players on the Challenge Tour, Kim Koivu is one that many are talking about. The Finn won for the first time in April, and has since followed up with a trio of top-20 finishes.

A prolific birdie-maker, if Koivu can get off to a good start in Austria and settle the nerves on a rare European Tour start, he is more than capable of shooting some good numbers.

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