LIV Golf Andalucía:
LIV Golf travels to Europe for the first time in 2024 to play at Valderrama Golf Club in Spain.
Jon Rahm (+750) returns to his home country seeking his first win at historic Valderrama but is not the tournament favorite as reigning U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau (+650) has that role.
Rahm’s Legion XIII teammate Tyrrell Hatton (11-1) won the last LIV event in Nashville.
Joaquin Niemann (8-1) is the only two-time winner in the 2024 LIV season.
Spaniard Sergio Garcia (16-1) has three wins at Valderrama, having won the DP World Tour’s Andalucía Masters in 2011, 2017 and 2018. David Puig (50-1) and Eugenio Chacarra (130-1) are the other Spanish-born players in this week’s field.
Talor Gooch (18-1) won the first LIV event held at Valderrama last year by one stroke over DeChambeau and by three over Brooks Koepka (22-1).
Richard Bland (30-1) also returns to LIV this week after winning his second senior major of 2024 at the U.S. Senior Open.
The Field
Here is the 54-player field for LIV Andalucía with Draft Kings odds:
The Course
Real Club Valderrama, located in Sotogrande, Cádiz, Spain, is widely considered one of the world’s premier golf courses. It has hosted numerous signature events, including the 1997 Ryder Cup, the WGC-American Express Championship in 1999 and 2000 and the Volvo Masters and Andalucía Masters on the European and DP World Tours.
It will play as a par-71 of 7,010 yards this week.
Famed designer Robert Trent Jones originally designed this course in 1975 and renovated it in 1985.
The agronomy is Bermuda Tifway 419 on fairways and rough and Creeping Bentgrass on the small greens heavily protected by bunkers.
The fairways are also more narrow than normal. The rough is not all that challenging, but 2,000 cork trees will force players to chop out into the fairway if they have errant tee shots.
Here is this week’s official scorecard courtesy of the LIV Golf website:
LIV Valderrama Recent History
2023: Talor Gooch (-12/201); 18-1
Selections
Sergio Garcia, 16-1
Last week, Garcia failed by two strokes to qualify for next week’s British Open. A video circulated of him complaining to R&A officials about being put on the clock for slow play.
The best place for him to get over the disappointment is Valderrama, where he has won three times.
Patrick Reed, 22-1
Reed was in contention last week at the BMW International Open in Germany before a disappointing Sunday final round dropped him to T-13.
He finished T-5 at LIV Valderrama last year.
John Catlin, 55-1
Catlin won at Valderrama before having won the 2020 Andalucía Masters.
He is currently a “Reserve Player” on LIV and not under a full contract.
Last week, he finished runner-up on the Asian Tour’s International Series in Morocco, plus he has two Asian Tour victories this year and was T-7 three weeks ago at LIV Nashville.
Eugenio Chacarra, 130-1
Chacarra finished third last week in the Asian Tour’s International Series event in Morocco.
