It is a star studded matchplay event with the 64 players made up from the top 69 in the World Golf rankings. It is matchplay, not strokeplay, meaning the golfers play h2h, mano a mano . The first phase of the tournament involves players being split into 16 groups of four players. Each group is decided by a round-robin format played over Wednesday to Friday, with the sixteen group winners advancing to the knockout phase. The group winner is decided by awarding one point for a win and half a point for a halved match. If two or more players are tied on points at the conclusion of the group phase, sudden death stroke play playoff is played between tied players.

• Round 1 – March 24
• Round 2 – March 25
• Round 3 – March 26

The group winners play the round of sixteen on Saturday morning, and the quarterfinals on Saturday afternoon. The semi finals are played on Sunday morning, and the final and third place playoff are played on Sunday afternoon. In total, the winner will play seven rounds of golf.

This will be the 5th year that the event has been played at the Austin Country Club (pictured) in Texas, the 2020 event was cancelled .

With no play last year and 22 debutants taking part this week, I feel we will be certain to see the usual number of shocks and star players eliminated early and over those four years played here in Austin, the make up of the quarter finals (32 players total) has been an awful lot like this ............

7 ranked 1-9

6 ranked 10-19

4 ranked 20-29

2 ranked 30-39

6 ranked 40-49

7 ranked 50-64

It is a very small sample size, but it is a format which lends itself to shocks and these are all players ranked inside the top 70 on the planet and over 18 holes, any of them can beat anyone else , at least on a going day.

As many ranked 40 + made the last eight as those ranked 1-19 and any value in the outright markets is probably amongst those at the wrong end of the rankings .

There are a few "names" amongst those and the ones who stand out in that regard as they have also done well in this event and in Austin are Jason Day who won here in 2016, Jordan Spieth (R16 in 2016), Matt Kuchar ( runner up 2019, R16 2018, R16 2016), Bubba Watson (winner 2018 , R16 in 2017) and Ian Poulter (QF 2018). Day (2014) and Poulter ( 2010) also won the WGC Matchplay at other courses, Spieth was born, raised and still lives in Dallas, about 300 km from Austin.

We will be going into the event in greater depth in the Wednesday subscriber newsletter.

Good luck !