World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play Championship again to diverse international field

MARANA, Ariz. – The World Golf Championships were created in 1999 with the goal of bringing the world's best players together throughout the year and, with three weeks remaining before the field is finalized, the 2011 World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play Championship should continue that tradition. The top 64 in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) currently features 40 players born outside of the United States representing 14 different countries. One month from today many of these same players will gather for the opening-round matches of the Accenture Match Play Championship, February 21-27, at The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Dove Mountain.
International players currently occupy six of the top 10 positions in the OWGR, led by world No. 1 Lee Westwood (England) and No. 2 Martin Kaymer (Germany). Kaymer moved ahead of Tiger Woods (No. 3) by successfully defending his title at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship last week on the European Tour. The victory was his fourth worldwide in the last six months, highlighted by a playoff victory at the PGA Championship last August. Should either Westwood or Kaymer occupy the No. 1 position in the OWGR entering the Accenture Match Play Championship they would become the fifth different player in the 13-year history of the event to hold the No. 1 overall seed. Woods (1999-2000, 2002-2004, 2006-2009) has held the No. 1 overall seed nine times while Ernie Els (2001), Vijay Singh (2005) and Steve Stricker (2010) have each held the top spot on one occasion.
"Year in and year out the Accenture Match Play Championship proves to be one of golf's global summits, and 2011 looks to be no exception," said Accenture Match Play Championship Executive Director Wade Dunagan. "We've crowned an international champion at this event four of the last five years and with the current Official World Golf Ranking featuring so many players from outside of the
United States, there is a good chance that trend could continue in 2011."
Accenture Match Play Championship defending champion Ian Poulter is one of six Englishmen among the top 64 in the OWGR. England and Australia each have six players among the top 64 while South Africa has five, South Korea and Japan four, Italy and Sweden three and Spain and Northern Ireland two apiece. Argentina, Colombia, Germany, Ireland and Scotland all have one player currently among the top 64.
PGA TOUR rookie Jhonattan Vegas improved to No. 86 in the OWGR with his victory at the Bob Hope Classic on the PGA TOUR last week and has an outside chance of becoming the first Venezuelan to qualify for the Accenture Match Play Championship. Should he qualify he would become just the seventh player from South America to compete in the Accenture Match Play Championship, joining Angel Cabrera (Argentina), Jose Coceres (Argentina), Carlos Franco (Paraguay), Andres Romero (Argentina), Eduardo Romero (Argentina) and Camilo Villegas (Colombia).
Just three weeks remain for players to qualify for the Accenture Match Play Championship as the top 64 players in the OWGR as of Monday, February 14 will earn an invitation to The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Dove Mountain. Among the notable names currently on the outside looking in are nine-time PGA TOUR winner Stuart Appleby (No. 70), 2010 semifinalist Sergio Garcia (No. 80) and 2005
champion David Toms (No. 81).

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WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship

The WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship is one of the annual World Golf Championships. It is a knockout event and is staged in January or February each year. It is sponsored by Accenture, the world-largest consulting firm.
From its inauguration in 1999 through 2006 it was hosted every year by La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California, except in 2001, when it was hosted by the Metropolitan Golf Club in Victoria, Australia.
In 2007 the event moved to The Gallery Golf Club in Marana, Arizona, a suburb northwest of Tucson, for two years. All three of the individual World Golf Championships events will be played in the United States from 2007, which has attracted criticism from some golfers, including Tiger Woods and Ernie Els, and in the media outside the United States. PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem has responded by insisting that playing in the U.S. is best for golf as more money can be made there than elsewhere.^[1]
In 2009, the tournament moved to the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, a Jack Nicklaus-designed course at Dove Mountain in Marana.
The Championship is a single-elimination match play event. The field consists of the top 64 players available from the Official World Golf Rankings, seeded according to the rankings. The prize money for 2011 was $8.5 million, with the winner taking $1.4 million (both figures U.S. dollars) and the Walter Hagen Cup. Prize money is official on the PGA Tour, the European Tour and the Japan Golf Tour. All matches leading up to the final match are 18 holes, while the final match was played over 36 holes from 1999 to 2010 and over 18 holes since 2011. In addition, the losers of the semi-final matches play an 18-hole consolation match for third place. The five-day, six-match tournament begins on Wednesday, with a match per day through Friday. The quarterfinals and semifinals are played on Saturday; the finals and third-place match conclude the tournament on Sunday.
It is the successor event of the Andersen Consulting World Championship of Golf, a 32-man, unofficial money, match play event played from 1995 to 1998.

Tournament hosts

Winners

 

WGC Match Play has unique feeling

Padraig Harrington might feel a lot better about his chances in the Match Play Championship if he were still playing junior golf in Ireland.
He thinks he’d probably make more birdies, anyway.
“I used to love match play as a kid. It was my favorite,” Harrington said. “When I was an amateur, I was shooting scores I couldn’t shoot today. I was shooting well under par. Now, professional golf has taken that out of me. We play so much stroke play that you’re cautious. You don’t want to make mistakes. Professional golf knocks the edge off you.”
Harrington and 63 other players will be looking for that edge when the first World Golf Championship gets under way Wednesday in the high desert of Dove Mountain.
No other tournament on the PGA Tour schedule is like this one.
There is more drama, excitement and heartache found in the opening round than the final round because of simple match: There are 32 matches, meaning 32 players will be happy and 32 players not so much.
“It’s horrific, at least the first 10 minutes,” said Geoff Ogilvy when asked to describe how it feels to lose in any round. And this is a guy who has won the Accenture Match Play Championship twice and was a finalist another time.
“If the you finish top 10 in a tournament, you can find something good about it,” said Ogilvy, who plays Harrington in the opening round. “You can’t find anything good about losing at match play.”
Adding to the buzz going into the week is that for the first this year, all the best players in the world are at one tournament.
Lee Westwood, the No. 1 player in the world for the last four months, is the fifth player to be the top seed since this tournament began in 1999. The others were Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Steve Stricker.
Westwood opens against Henrik Stenson, who got into the 64-man field when Toru Taniguchi of Japan withdrew with a neck injury. It would be considered a tough draw, except that no opponent is a pushover. Westwood should know that by now, for the Englishman has never advanced beyond the second round.
Robert Karlsson, who would seem to be tough in match play, had never won a match until last year. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of effort. Three years ago he drew Paul Casey in the opening round and shot 65, only to lose. Casey shot 64,
So when he was asked if he looked forward to the week, Karlsson paused.
“Yes and no,” the Swede said with a smile. “It’s a bit funny. It’s good fun, and we don’t play it very often. I do enjoy the Ryder Cup match play a little more. This one here, the week can become so short. One year I was there for less than three hours.”
That was in 2007 when he played all of 11 holes before Stephen Ames beat him.
The matches are 18 holes of anything goes, and that now includes the championship match. Instead of a 36-hole final on Sunday, the format has been changed to 18-hole semifinals Sunday morning, immediately followed by an 18-hole final match.
PGA champion Martin Kaymer of Germany is the No. 2 seed and will play big-hitting Seung-yul Noh of South Korea. Woods, the No. 3 seed, faces longtime friend Thomas Bjorn, while fourth-seeded Phil Mickelson gets Brendan Jones.
So what’s the secret?
“I don’t think there are any secrets,” said Casey, twice a runner-up in this tournament, including last year to Ian Poulter. “It’s the guys making long putts. That’s really difficult to face. And that could be anybody.”
Stricker thinks the big hitters have an advantage on desert courses. He remembers facing Angel Cabrera on a different Dove Mountain course and watching him putt for eagle six times. “That’s hard to compete against it,” Stricker said.
There have been players who didn’t bring enough clothes for the week, not believing they would last as long as they did. And there have been players—a lot of them—going home with a suitcase full of clothes that haven’t been worn.
So what’s the best attitude to bring into such a fickle week?
“However I went in during 2006 and 2009,” Ogilvy said, referring to the two years he won. “It’s a weird tournament. In ’09, I played horrific the first three days—OK, horrific might be an exaggeration—but I didn’t play great. I went to 19 holes with (Kevin) Sutherland. Shingo (Katayama) let me off the hook at 18. And all of a sudden on the weekend, I found something.”
He said he played his best golf of the year in the final, even though he though he shouldn’t have advanced out of the first round.
Stewart Cink was the only American to reach the quarterfinals last year, and he was a finalist in 2008 when Woods won for the third time, a 6-and-5 victory that was the biggest margin for a championship match.
Cink loves the format, citing the “do-or-die” situations in brings.
“The finality of every shots brings out a new level of focus,” Cink said. “I’ve studied every possible direction you can study trying to figure out how to get that focus into my stroke-play game. But there’s something about match play. That’s why we see such a high level of golf at the Ryder Cup, the Presidents Cup and at Accenture. I just love the format.”
But he doesn’t like losing. No one does.
“When you lose,” Retief Goosen said with a grin, “you want to hit the other guy.”

Match play

Match play is a scoring system for golf in which a player, or team, earns a point for each hole in which they have bested their opponents; this is as opposed to stroke play, in which the total number of strokes is counted over one or more rounds of 18 holes. In professional golf, a small number of notable match play tournaments use the match play scoring system.

Scoring system

Unlike stroke play, in which the unit of scoring is the total number of strokes taken over one or more rounds of golf, match play scoring consists of individual holes won, halved or lost. On each hole, the most that can be gained is one point. Golfers play as normal, counting the strokes taken on a given hole. The golfer with the lowest score on a given hole receives one point. If the golfers tie, then the hole is halved, e.g. in an 18 hole match, the first hole is a par-4 and player 'A' scores a 3 (birdie) and player 'B' score a 4 (par); player 'A' is now 1-up with 17 to play. In the same match on the second hole, a par-5, player 'A' takes 8 strokes and player 'B' takes 5 (par); player 'B' wins the hole and the match is now all square with 16 to play. On the third hole, a par-3, both players take 3 strokes and the match is 'all square' with 15 holes to play. Once a player is 'up' more holes than there are holes remaining to play the match is over. i.e., if after 12 holes player 'A' is 7-up with six left to play, player 'A' is said to have won the match '7 and 6'.
A team that is leading by 'x' holes with 'x' holes remaining is said to be "dormie-x", or simply "dormie", meaning that they need one more halved hole to win the match (or that the other team must win all the remaining holes in order to halve the match). For example, if player 'A' is 2-up with 2 to play, he is dormie; the worst outcome for player 'A' at that point is a tie, unless the format calls for extra holes to determine a winner.
In a tournament event where the score is all square after the last hole, usually 18 or 36, the players will play on until a player wins a hole (sudden death). In the Ryder Cup and other similar team events, the match is not finished this way, and the teams each receive a half point. In such events there are points accumulated over several days, playing different formats, and the total determines the winner.

Scoring using handicaps

Scoring match play using handicaps is not done exactly the same way it is done in a stroke play event. In 18-hole stroke play where player 'A' is a -10 handicap and player 'B' is a -19 handicap, player 'A' gets one stroke off his score on the ten hardest holes (by handicap rating on scorecard); player 'B' gets two strokes off his score on the hardest hole and one stroke off on the other 17.
In match play, player 'A' would play as 'scratch' (zero handicap) and player 'B' would get one stroke off his score on the nine hardest holes. In other words, the 10 handicap becomes zero and the 19 handicap becomes a 9.
In team match play competition, where team 'A' consists of player 'A1' (a -10 handicap), and player 'A2' (a -15 handicap); where team 'B' consists of player 'B1' (a -19 handicap) and player 'B2' (a -30 handicap). Player 'A1' plays as 'scratch'; 'A2' gets one stroke off his score on the five hardest holes; player 'B1' gets one stroke off his score on the nine hardest holes; 'B2' will take 2 strokes off the 2 hardest holes and 1 stroke of the other 16. Exception: the USGA does not restrict the handicap of the low partner but some local clubs and organized tournaments do. i.e., in team play, if no player can have a handicap more than 8 strokes higher than his partner, 'B2' would play as if his or her handicap were -27 (high partners handicap of 19 + 8 = 27).

Tournaments featuring match play

Currently, there are few professional tournaments that use match play. They include the biennial Ryder Cup played by two teams, one representing the USA and the other representing Europe; the biennial Presidents Cup for teams representing the USA and International (non-European) players; the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship; and the older Volvo World Match Play Championship, an invitational event which is now part of the European Tour. Formerly, the PGA Championship, one of the majors, used match play, but it changed to a stroke play event in 1958.
Women's professional golf had no event directly comparable to the Accenture Championship until the HSBC Women's World Match Play Championship was introduced in 2005. After it was canceled in 2007, the LPGA was without a match play event until the Sybase Match Play Championship was started in 2010. Women's golf also has the biennial Solheim Cup staged between two teams, one including USA-born players and one including players born in Europe. From 2005 to 2008, women's golf held the Lexus Cup, an event pitting an International Team against an Asian Team. The U.S. Amateur Championships for both men and women are conducted with two rounds of stroke play to cut the field to 64, and then proceed to a single-elimination match play tournament. All elimination matches are 18 holes except for the final, which is 36 holes.

Strategy

Golfers can employ a slightly different strategy during a match play event, since the scoring is different. The situation in the match and the outcome of each shot already played on a hole will both be taken into account. On the whole match play encourages more aggressive play, especially at the professional level, where a par is not usually good enough to win a hole. Since a very poor result for a hole is no worse than a slightly-below-average result when playing against an opponent with an average score, it often makes sense to accept the higher risk connected with aggressive tactics. However, in some circumstances players will be especially cautious in match play. For instance, a player may choose to play more conservatively if the opponent has hit a poor tee shot or is otherwise under pressure to compensate a poor start on a particular hole, reasoning that there is a good chance to win the hole with an average result.

Alternative forms of match play

There is a format of match play called "Irish match play" in which 3 or 4 individuals may compete against each other. A points system is assigned where as an outright win on a hole for a single player constitutes 2 points, a half of the hole for 2 or more players is equal to a single point. This format allows golfers to enjoy the format of hole-by-hole match play in groups larger than 2 people.

HSBC Women's World Match Play Championship

The HSBC Women's World Match Play Championship was an LPGA Tour golf tournament that was played from 2005 through 2007. It was first played from June 30 to July 3, 2005 at Hamilton Farm Golf Club in Gladstone, New Jersey. In 2007 the event moved to the Wykagyl Country Club in New Rochelle, New York.
In 2008, HSBC discontinued the event and began sponsoring a new event in Singapore: the HSBC Women's Champions, a stroke play event.
The title sponsor, HSBC, is a large banking group based in London, England.

Selection process

In 2007 the 64 woman field was selected as follows:

1. The top-30 players on Rolex Rankings List through the U.S. Women's Open (July 2, 2007) who commit to play in the event. (Numbers 31 and higher on the Rolex Ranking List were not eligible even if one of the top 30 do not commit).
2. The top-30 players on the Official Money List through the U.S. Women's Open (July 2, 2007), who commit to play in the event.
3. Two sponsor exemptions.
4. Only the number-one ranked player on the Ladies European Tour Order of Merit through the U.S. Women's Open (July 2, 2007), who commits to play in the event.
5. The defending champion, if not otherwise qualified.
6. Any spots remaining after the above criteria has been applied will be taken from the Official Money List through U.S. Women's Open (July 2, 2007), who commit to play in the event, to complete the field.

The closest equivalent event in men's professional golf is the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, which is also a 64-player 18-hole match play event. HSBC also sponsors the HSBC World Match Play Championship on the PGA Tour, a longer established sixteen player thirty-six hole event tournament played in the United Kingdom.

The tournament was last played from July 19 through July 22, 2007.

Winners