Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Zozo Championship

It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve gotten an article in on time, much to the chagrin of the hard-working ETR editors. I know I have to stop being a headache and get this thing going, especially with an EARLY lock this week, likely around 7:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday night. That’s right, we’re headed to Japan for the Zozo Championship, where we get one of the better fields we’re going to get all fall season. Before I move on to the Zozo, let me first give a shout-out to the many winners in Discord last week for the Shriners Children’s Open, including Discord automaton Grex123, who we hadn’t heard from in a while as he traveled the world on DK’s dime. There were some close breaks as well, as past Discord villain CommanderTrent held the top spot in the Sand Trap for a good amount of time over the weekend. Either way, we continue to crush it during the swing season and there are no signs of stopping now. Let’s review my week (not as good as the subs) before we get to the preview.

Shriners Children’s Open – Recap

As I said, it was not my best week at the Shriners, but honestly, I wasn’t too upset about the way I played. My flag plant, Doug Ghim, was eventually who did me in, as I had multiple top-500 lineups with him as the only piece missing in a 5/6. When you take a stand on your flag plant, that’s going to happen, and I am merely waiting for the time when the same situation works out in my favor with a slate-breaking performance from my flag plant (it’s happened before!). Here’s my screenshot of the week:

You’ll see a few nice lineups peeking their way through at the top there, but it was mostly unsuccessful for me. Here were my biggest stands:

• 60% Tom Kim (eventual winner); 30% Ghim, SH Kim, Hoge, and Laird (all missed the cut); 25% List, Riley, Wallace, and Cole
• Full fade on Ludvig Aberg, Ben Griffin, Nick Taylor

My big stands on mid-/low-priced golfers really messed me up this week. It’s a bummer that none of them even made the cut, which cratered my 6/6 rate and left me with only a couple of bullets at the top. I hope this week goes a little bit better! Let’s take a look at the Sand Trap winning lineup before we move to the Zozo.

• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of ~47%, which is incredibly low and something I didn’t really expect out of the week. I do generally harp on the variance of birdie fests in particular, which really evens out the playing field in terms of skill, but this was a really interesting winning lineup.
• It did NOT have the winner, Tom Kim. Instead, the lineup had Poston, Hadwin, and Cole, who finished third, second, and third respectively. It is very rare that we see a winning lineup not have the eventual winner in it and usually it’s because a lot of chalk finished at the top, but kudos to the winner for putting together a pretty sick contrarian team.

Zozo Championship – Preview

On to the Zozo, and the first thing I will say is make sure you are ready for a Wednesday, 6:45 p.m. ET lock this week. We are on Japanese time, so we get to have a fun sweat at night instead of waking up early every morning to see which one of our gutless golfers WD after lock. I’m even getting this article out on time so you all can read it before we get to lock. The other thing to know about the Zozo right off the bat is that it’s a smaller-field event, with only 78 golfers, making it a no-cut event. This is something that we should get used to for the 2024 season anyway, as we are going to get elevated events with similar amounts of players and the no-cut style. Typically, I don’t play these events much differently than the larger-field events with a cut, but do know that ownership will of course be more condensed given you have fewer players to choose from. There are also a few Asian Tour players in the field that you likely are not going to choose from populating the lower $6Ks, condensing the field even more. With all that said, I will continue to target the 60-80% cumulative ownership range, as ownership looks to be fairly spread out this week with no one taking on 30%+ ownership. That should allow me the leeway to keep my ownership lower by taking a couple of golfers in the 5-10% range with no worries.

Let’s talk about the history of the Zozo quickly before we get to the actual players. This tournament has actually not been going on too long, debuting in 2019 as the PGA Tour wanted to expand its reach to Japan and Asia in general knowing there is a large fanbase there. There’s a reason why Hideki Matsuyama is one of the most popular players in the world. The tournament has been played at the Narashino Country Club in Narashino for three of the four years it’s been run, with the only other time being played in the U.S. due to the pandemic. Here are the winners of those three years: