LIV Golf Las Vegas preview: Field, odds, tee times, and predictions

After the LIV Golf League’s third season got underway last week at Mayakoba in Mexico, golf’s breakaway tour heads to the Las Vegas Country Club for the second of 12 ‘regular season’ tournaments.

Las Vegas seems the perfect locale for LIV Golf and its “golf, but louder” strapline and it’s likely no accident that this tournament coincides with Super Bowl LVIII, which is taking place on Sunday at the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, just a few miles from the golf course.

LIV bosses will be hoping to piggyback the Super Bowl to get increased exposure for a tour that now boasts many of the world’s best golfers but hasn’t necessarily captured the public’s attention and affection in the way they may have hoped.

“I think this is LIV Golf trying to create a spectacle for the United States to see,” says former US Open champion and LIV star Bryson DeChambeau. “We haven’t been highlighted enough here in the States. I can’t wait to see what the response is going to be like with the football fans and the Vegas fans alike. It is a perfect combination for a unique and upbeat environment. There are going to be a lot of fun moments out there, a rowdy crowd, and probably a lot of clip-able moments.”

In a golfing sense, LIV Golf Las Vegas will compete with the hugely popular Waste Management Phoenix Open in Arizona on the PGA Tour, plus the Qatar Masters on the DP World Tour.

Like all standard events in the LIV Golf schedule, LIV Las Vegas will be played over 54 holes across three days, with a shotgun start each day and no cut. For more information, check out our LIV Golf: Everything You Need to Know page.

The field will be made up of 54 players, which includes the 13 four-man teams or ‘franchises’, plus two wildcard players. Hudson Swafford has signed to take a wildcard spot for the entire 2024 season, while Laurie Canter was registered for last week’s LIV Golf Mayakoba and LIV Golf Las Vegas. We’re yet to discover who will take his spot at the next event, LIV Golf Jeddah, which takes place in Saudi Arabia from 1-3 March.

The team-assigned players compete in two competitions simultaneously – an individual event and a team event. Every stroke counts in the individual event, whereas in the team event, only the combined scores of the team’s top three players count for rounds 1 & 2, with all four scores counting in the final round of each event.

LIV Golf Vegas is taking place at the Las Vegas Country Club in the heart of Vegas and just seconds from the famous Las Vegas Strip. The course was established in 1967 with a layout designed by Edmund B. Ault, which was renovated by Ron Garl in 1981 and then modernized by Mark Rathert in 2009.

It’s a 7,203-yard tree-lined par 72 and previously hosted the PGA Tour’s Las Vegas Invitational.

Gene Sarazen described it as “one of the best courses I have seen in my lifetime,” which is high praise indeed.

Joaquin Niemann beat Sergio Garcia on the fourth play-off hole at last week’s opening event, having both finished the 54 holes at 12-under. Dean Burmester and Jon Rahm finished two shots back, the latter finishing bogey-bogey to miss out on what could have been a dream debut following his mega-money switch at the end of 2023.

Las Vegas Country Club features tree-lined fairways plus plenty of bunkers and water, meaning accuracy is key.

Beyond the obvious favorites like Rahm, Cam Smith, Brooks Koepka, and Dustin Johnson, I’d look at Louis Oosthuizen for something of an outside pick. The South African won back-to-back tournaments on the DP World Tour in December, taking the Alfred Dunhill Championship and AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open in the space of two weeks, and looked good en route to a 7-under par total in Mexico last week.

Like all regular season events, LIV Golf Las Vegas has a $25 million purse, with $20 million assigned for the individual competition and $5 million for the team competition.

The individual winner in Nevada is set to receive a $4 million share, ranging down to $50,000 for those finishing at the wrong end of the leaderboard.

Only the top three teams will receive prize money in each event. The winners will earn their team $3 million, with $1.5 million and $500k earned by the second and third-placed teams respectively.

UK viewers can watch the action for free on the LIV Golf YouTube channel.

US viewers can catch all the action on the CW App & LIV Golf+ App.

Rob has been a writer and editor for over 15 years, covering all manner of subjects for leading magazines and websites.

He has previously been Features Editor of Today’s Golfer magazine and Digital Editor of todays-golfer.com, and held roles at FHM, Men’s Running, Golf World, and MAN Magazine.

You can follow him on YouTube where – depending on what day of the week it is – he’ll either be trying his best to get his handicap down to scratch or shoving his clubs in a cupboard, never to be seen again.

Rob is a member at Royal North Devon, England’s oldest golf club, where he plays off a three-handicap.