Untouchables 🇺🇸
Rinse, rewind, repeatIt's a tale as old as time in 2026. Ben James finished runner-up to Jacob Bridgeman in Asheville as both men fired a smooth 61 on Sunday. What we believed to be a shoot-out, certainly was as Bridgeman's winning total was 26 under par. For RTL readers, James' second place was closely followed by JT Poston in a tie for fifth and Marco Penge closing out the top 10. Three outrights in contention and no win. The United States had two Presidents Cup team members competing. We know Bridgeman won, but Jackson Koivun finished fifth! Compare that to the five who played from the International Team: Corey Conners (T43), Nick Taylor (T57), and Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Nico Echavarria, and Ryo Hisatsune all missed the cut. Welcome to the Presidents Cup... Presidents Cup starts in...No. 3The last time we saw the No. 3 Course was the 2019 BMW Championship won by Justin Thomas at 25 under par. Medinah leadership met after the tournament and decided there needed to be a long-range plan. Hosting championship events is part of the club's DNA, and the modern game was passing them by. Forget what you saw at the BMW or the 2012 Ryder Cup. The golf course went through a massive overhaul. The final six holes were changed to better feature Lake Kadijah. The fairways were expanded by 40%, green surfaces were nearly doubled in size, tee boxes were added, and a number of trees were removed. The result is a par 70 scorecard for the match stretching 7,548 yards. That scorecard has been adjusted for the Presidents Cup. The matches will begin on hole 5. If a match makes it to the eighteenth hole, they will finish on hole 4. We have seen this strategy before at Liberty National (2017) and other match-play venues. We all want to see the players compete on the signature holes. With the routing change, those featured holes now fall on 11 through 15. The drivable par 4 sixteenth hole over the lake is now the twelfth hole in the Presidents Cup routing. I spoke with the Director of Golf, Casey Brozek, PGA last week for 20+ minutes on the phone. One theme that stood out is the turf conditions. Chicago has been wet. Over 3" have fallen in September, and the area is up +7.3" YTD. During the redesign, they did add 40 miles of drainage to the course and Sub-air systems to the green complexes, but that still hasn't kept a majority of the course from being soft. An inch of rain just fell on Saturday in Medinah. It has been dry since then, and outside of a slight chance of a shower during the matches, it should have time to dry out (some). As Brozek alluded to, the fairways are 40% wider and the course is playing on the soft side. Bombs away! Casey also spoke about angles. The old No. 3 was a tight driving course. It gave you little to think about off the tee. The redesigned version takes advantage of the wider landing areas creating different approach opportunities. Take the first hole for example this week. There is out of bounds down the left hand side of the entire hole. The more you take on the boundary fence, the better your approach angle is to the green. Players will be faced with decisions similar to that all round. For those who like to dive deeper into these matches, I offer a couple of other notes from my conversation with the Director of Golf and my research observations.
Read The Line media ⤵️How to win?The United States will win the Presidents Cup. The team is 13-1-1 in 15 editions. It would be a fool's errand to write a narrative that would try to convince anyone otherwise. If for some insane reason the International Team did win, then I would shake the hand of any pundit who actually believed it would happen for legitimate reasons; of which there are none. But how can the Black and Gold keep it close? The International Team is statistically more accurate off the tee. Four-inch northern rough is a challenge. Over the course of 30 matches, it could make a slight difference. Second, the INTs have a comparable mid-iron game. The approaches between 175-200 yards are important on the par 3s and a few of the long par 4s. Score when you have a six or seven iron in hand, and you may be able to win a match or two. The last area to consider is scrambling. Holes 3, 4, and 6 are three great scoring opportunities from close range. Grab an early lead in a few of these matches, and who knows how they will turn out. All of the Internationals are great players. They can beat the Americans on a given day, just not four straight days. Winning the match still comes down to scoring points; a race to 15.5. If the Internationals are to keep it close and give themselves a chance to win, their second tier of players behind Si Woo Kim, Hideki Matsuyama, and Adam Scott need to earn points. Ryan Fox (Open Champion), Min Woo Lee (ranked 30th OWGR), Tom Kim (Scottish Open winner), and Sungjae Im (6-7-2 in three previous matches) need to walk away with winning records this week. In the end, it is just simple math. The problem is, I don't see how that happens. The Presidents Cup requires more of the team to play than the Ryder Cup. The twelfth man on the US roster just won on Sunday. Our second tier holds a US Open Champion, three-time PGA Tour winner, and a player who was 20 under par in the majors. For the fans, I hope it remains close, but I fear it will not. As always on the international matches, I will limit my exposure until after the pairings are announced. Similar to the Solheim Cup, RTL will post our live action online. I'll be in the Windy City all week taking it in and monitoring the matches from inside the ropes. If you are on property, send me a DM and maybe we can meet up! Placements, Props, and H2H's... - Presidents Cup* - Odds can change from site to site. Make sure you shop around before making each bet. Even though a bet is listed, it may have changed since the newsletter was published. FanDuel (FD), Caesars (CS), DraftKings (DK), BetMGM (BM), bet365 (B3), Bet Rivers (BR), ESPNBet (EB), Fanatics (FA) LPGAFall runSeven tournaments remain on the 2026 LPGA schedule before the CME Group Tour Championship. Of those events, only one is a true full-field event. The top 60 on the CME Points list earn a spot in the $4 million final event. On paper, the calendar leads one to believe she has time. When you consider four events are played with a limited field in Asia, two more (Hawaii and Florida) host limited fields in the United States, the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship presented by P&G takes on another level of pressure. To compound the claustrophobia, this week’s event is one of two 54-hole events played on the LPGA. A three-day shootout with 144 players cutting down to the top 65 and ties after Saturday. Looking to throw a little more angst into the equation? The average winning score over the last decade is 17.8 under par! I love the three-day supermarket shootouts on the tour schedule. The second 54-hole event is the ShopRite Classic. Seventeen or 18 under par for three rounds is exciting. With CME points and $3 million in the purse, the women have plenty to play for. RTL has won this event (Haeran Ryu, 2023) and lost in a playoff (Danielle Kang, 2022). We had the Round 1 leader last year, and the event was cancelled after 18 holes due to heavy rain (3.25”!). RTL has also won the ShopRite three times with three different players. Celine Boutier cashed for us back in May. Why all the success in these super shoot-outs? Read The line to find out… Three times a ladyPinnacle Country Club has been the host of this event since its inception in 2007. Based upon the average winning score, not much is intimidating about a par 71 scorecard that stretches 6,438 yards for a field of the world’s best female players. Dig a little deeper, and you find the course is actually even shorter than you think. Pinnacle CC has five par 3s. Most times when we see a par 71 course, the architect removes a par 5. Scoring is ridiculous in Rogers because we still get four par 5s and the average par 4 is a mere 385 yards. That’s well beneath the LPGA average. Much like Seaview; the host venue for the ShopRite, Pinnacle’s scorecard is unique and that leads to a very specific skill set for success. The creeping Bentgrass across the 6,000 sq/ft greens (average size) and Zoysia fairways will be firm and fast. Players will receive plenty of roll out, which sounds like the course will play even shorter, but be careful. If you don’t control the roll, 16 holes have water in play, and the course exhibits 62 bunkers. That being said, the winner will average three days in the mid-60s, and two women have reached a 20 under par winning total in the last 10 years! Another interesting twist is the leaderboards. Once a player figures Pinnacle CC out, she tends to contend again. There have been three two-time winners of this event and plenty who have come close and continue to climb the leaderboard. I know the Presidents Cup is taking place along with the Walmart. I don’t make the schedule, but if you’re addicted to watching golf like me, you will love this event. There have been two playoffs in the last three completed tournaments, and the scoring is sensational. How to win?Looking for outrights…? The last three top 10s have averaged 16.7 sub-par scores across 54 holes. In plain English, if you plan to finish inside the top 10, you'll need 17 birdies (or better). Who can average nearly six sub-par scores per round? We can start by measuring the best birdie percentage players, but I want to take it one step further. Plenty of professional players rack up sub-par scores on Sundays when they are out of contention. We don't have four rounds in Arkansas. I took a deep dive into early round scoring and found the fastest starters on tour. Who tends to grab the lead (or get close) after three rounds? In doing so, I found a few women who love to score before the final round. We aren't putting all of our eggs in one basket, but it is an interesting spin on traditional scoring research. My PGA brain always looks for "playability" edges that help players separate. Go low early on tour, and you have my attention in Arkansas. Pinnacle Country Club requires a ton of precision. Sixteen holes with water, 62 bunkers, etc., all force the field to stay focused. The contenders at the Walmart hit 81% of their fairways and 84% of their greens on average. That's 45 of 54 GIRs! At the risk of being redundant, players birdie about every third hole in route to winning. Just because PCC promotes low scoring, it does not mean everyone has the same chance of going deep. Ball striking counts in a shootout. Probably even more so than in a more difficult tournament, where your short game can keep you close. The field needs to create 20+ scoring opportunities in three rounds. It starts by hitting the fairway. With dry weather, the fairways will play narrower, so keeping it in the short grass is a little more difficult. That being said, 81% is still a specific skill. Five par 3s give each player an extra perfect lie on approach off the tee. Nearly 30% of your holes favor the best approach/par 3 scorers. Who goes low on the short ones? Our outrights are all inside the top fifth in this field for par 3 scoring. We have leaned into this strategy every year at the Walmart, and it has definitely worked. Match the skill set with the scorecard, and you will contend. As a secondary scoring skill, I also like par 5 scorers at PCC. The late par 5s are gettable and can cause some serious scoring volatility down the stretch. Remember when Haeran eagled the fourteenth hole on Sunday in 2023 and captured her first LPGA victory. We do with a +2500 win! Jasmine Suwannapura eagled 18 last year to jump into a playoff. She birdied 18 again in sudden death and won. Fifty percent of the approach shots fall in the 125–175-yard range. A mid-iron for most, we are taking solid approach players. Forget missing greens, you have to hit approaches inside 25' more than 50% of the time to create enough scoring opportunities. I have even looked through the rankings for players who hit a high percentage of GIRs from the rough. Think about that level of precision just for a minute. The path to winning requires 80% of your fairways, so you can hit 80% of your GIRs. Of those approaches, a little more than half must give you a legitimate scoring chance. Forget chipping this week, attack with your iron game and convert on the putting surfaces. Contenders (top 10s) gain an average of 3.3 strokes on the field with their flatstick. The women will make putts here, and with some light precipitation coming, whoever adjusts best to the changing green speeds over the three rounds will probably win. PCC is a little quirky, so I do like having course experience. I'm not just taking all former Walmart contenders, but it is not a bad starting point. Especially when it comes to changing conditions and the need for precise approach shots. After studying the recent scoring performances of the elite players at the FM, CPKC, and Portland, I did find some players peaking heading toward Pinnacle CC. After looking at pretty much every scoring analytic that applies in Arkansas; SG: scoring, rounds in the 60s, total birdies and more, I have a great outright card. You’ll be happy to know I’ve gone into the deep end on this one. Cannonball off the diving board for two reasons. First, we win 54-hole events, and two if you’re going to play a tournament against a limited Presidents Cup card, then we might as well take those Team USA winning tickets and put them toward another winner at the Walmart. Outright Winners - Walmart NW Arkansas ChampionshipRTL Weekly Editorials 📰Do you want to be a better bettor?Become a member of Read The Line today!
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