Nine Bridges Key Fantasy Stats

The CJ Cup at Nine Bridges

October 17th – 20th, 2019

The Club at Nine Bridges

Jeju Island, Korea

Par: 72 / Yardage: 7,241

Purse: $9.75 million

with $1,755,000 to the winner

Defending Champion:
Brooks Koepka

by Sal Johnson

Founder, Chief Data Officer, GOLFstats

E-mail me at:
sal@golfstats.com

Last year was the second CJ Cup@Nine Bridges, and the first two have been a big success. The Club at Nine Bridges is one of those hidden gems that takes a significant effort to get to. It’s a 12 and a half hour, 5,700-mile journey from San Francisco and that’s just the first leg. After that, it’s an hour flight to another island and the town of Jeju which is 500 miles away and after that, it’s a 30-mile trek to Nine Bridges. For the average golfer, Nine Bridges is awesome and fearsome as it meanders at the foot of an extinct volcano. But for the best golfers in the world, it’s pretty tame. That showed as 60 of the 78 players were under par, as for the week the course played to a 70.95 average making it the 31st hardest course on the PGA Tour in 2019. Now in it’s first year it played to a 73.19 average making it the 4th hardest course on the PGA Tour in 2018. So you can see what happens when those players of the PGA Tour get to learn a golf course.

Based on the most vital stats from Nine Bridges from last year’s event and data from all the players in the field with PGA Tour stats from 2020 we have cobbled together some stats that will help you decide on who statistically to chose. Unfortunately with the event being played in Korea, we don’t have true Shotlink stats to work with, they don’t even measure driving distance, so we are stuck with the old-fashion stats of fairways and greens hit, scrambling, number of putts, birdies, and eagles made. Now the stats from the first two years show us very little, those in the top of the leaderboard didn’t hit it very straight and of the two winners, Justin Thomas in 2018 was T-44th and Brooks Koepka last year was T-23rd in Greens hit. But both of them were high in putts, Thomas took the least amount of putts with 115 and Koepka took 115 and was T-5th. Both dominated on the Par 5s, but it was interesting the importance of playing the par 4s well in 2019.
So in picking stats since we have had five events for 2020 on a good test of different types of courses, our number on stat is Strokes Gained Tee-to-Green. We pick this because the course caters to all types of drivers of the ball, yes winners Thomas and Koepka hit it long, but players like Cameron Smith finished 3rd in 2018 and Ryan Palmer and Rafael Cabrera-Bello were 3rd in 2019 and don’t hit it long. We do see the importance in Strokes Gained Putting, it’s an important element to putt well in putting both past winner Thomas and Koepka showed that. The same with Par Breakers, making lot’s of eagles and Birdies is important on this course. Last but not least, we were very surprised to see how well the top-four did in playing the par 4s last year. Koepka was 12 under, Gary Woodland was 9 under along with Ryan Palmer and Rafael Cabrera-Bello was 10 under.
Since the weather was pretty much the same between 2018 and ’19 it’s very strange to see the winner go from -9 to -21 and since only six players were 12 under and better we can only think that it was a flunk and that the winning score will be right around 14 under this year.

*Strokes Gained Tee-to-Green: Looks at the combination of length off the tee and accuracy, then getting the ball on the green so it determines who is best at all of these items.

*Strokes Gained Putting: The number of putts a player takes from a specific distance is measured against a statistical baseline to determine the player’s strokes gained or lost on a hole.

*Par Breakers: Players that make the most birdies and eagles averaged per rounds played

*Par 4 Scoring average: The find who plays the best on the par 4s.

56 of the 78 players from this year’s field with stats from 2020.

Click any column title in the table header to sort columns.