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The results of the four players will be added up in all rounds

In LIV Golf, this season every shot counts… also for teams

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Los Cleeks GC © LIV Golf
Los Cleeks GC © LIV Golf

Tomorrow, Thursday, a new season of LIV Golf kicks off in Riyadh. And it does so with some interesting novelties. The most striking of all affects its game format. For the first time since the Saudi tour began, each player’s result in each of the three rounds will count towards their team’s total score in the overall team standings of each regular event.

This new format will start to operate in the first tournament of the season, this very week, and as Bubba Watson, captain of the RangeGoats GC, says, it will make “the volatility bigger and crazier” and no one will be able to “hide”. Each player will have to be “committed on every hole, on every shot”. An important change that would have altered many of the standings in past years.

“It’s going to add a bit more pressure,” acknowledges Marc Leishman of the Ripper GC. In previous years, if a player had a bad day in the first two rounds, they could rely on their three teammates doing well so that their team wouldn’t be penalised in the standings. The worst of the four results was not taken into account. But now that will no longer be the case and all scores will be added up.

This modification will allow teams with a more ‘consistent’ block to benefit. In other words, the best ‘number 4’ of each team will be more valuable in general terms than even the ‘number 1’. The Crushers GC, for example, would have triumphed in 2024 if this rule had been applied. “If every result had counted, we would have had a lot of success. Or more success, rather,” believes Lahiri.

The new regulation will also mean extra pressure for the six new full-time players joining the tour, four of whom are under 25 years old. They will have to achieve good results immediately to prevent their teams from being penalised from the start.

The team competition has evolved since in London 2022, at the inaugural event of the tour, only the two best results of each team counted in the first two rounds and three in the third, up to the current change. Since the Bangkok event in 2022, the sixth event of the first season, the three best results of each team in each round started to be taken into account. And since the beginning of 2024, in the last round, all four team scores have counted.

Similarly, since all four results count in every round, LIV Golf has made adjustments to the substitution policy. If a player withdraws during a round, the team can select one of the reserves to play the rest of the round or tournament. If a player withdraws in the middle of two holes, the reserve will start on the next hole. And if someone withdraws while playing a hole, the ball will be replaced in the same spot as the original, and the reserve will complete the hole.

If a player starts a tournament but is forced to withdraw while on the course, they can return to compete for their team at the beginning of the remaining rounds. But they will only compete to contribute to the team’s score, not in the individual competition. If this new format had been implemented in the team competition last season, several final results would have been different, even affecting the winners.

The differences in the overall standings would have been minimal. But in six tournaments, the winners would have changed: Stinger would have won in Jeddah (instead of the Crushers), Stinger also in Adelaide (and would have avoided losing the playoff against Ripper), Cleeks and Smash would have tied in Houston (instead, Cleeks would win), Crushers would have won in Andalusia (avoiding losing the playoff against Fireballs), Ripper would have triumphed in the United Kingdom (instead of Legion XIII), Ripper would have done so in Greenbrier (instead of Smash) and Fireballs would have claimed the title in Chicago (not the Crushers).

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