Barracuda Championship: Top 10 power rankings for Reno

The Barracuda Championship power rankings will put some fresh faces on your radar this week.

The Barracuda Championship is going to give you some fresh faces. Harrington, Tringale, and Stallings, for example.

If you’ve grown bored of the WGC-Bridgestone at Firestone Country Club held in Akron, Ohio, for the 15th year in a row, this week’s field at the Barracuda Championship provides some variety.

Since 2012, the Barracuda, formerly known as the Reno-Tahoe Open, has been the PGA TOUR’s lone modified Stableford event. Perched 5,500 feet above sea level, the field is incentivized to “go high” as points are awarded (or taken away) depending on each hole’s result.

The scoring lays out as such: -3 points for a double bogey or worse, -1 for a bogey, 0 for a par, +2 for a birdie, +5 for an eagle and +8 for an albatross.

Basically, the premise is to reward great shots and great holes, while not eliminating a player from the tournament for a bad hole.

This is not the U.S. Open; grinding out pars here won’t do you too much good.

Greg Chalmers’ winning tally in 2016 was 43 points, right in the 42-49 range that’s won this event in the modified Stableford era. Chalmers’ score would have been around 15-under-par at Montreux Golf and Country Club, where the tournament’s been held since 1999.

While a tournament like this can favor the bold, an element of strategy is needed, too. Perhaps that’s why veterans like Chalmers, J.J. Henry (2012, 2015), Geoff Ogilvy (2014) and Gary Woodland (2013) have won in this format.

Montreux plays at 7,400 yards on the scorecard but is minimized due to the elevation aiding players’ distance.

It’s anyone’s ball game here in the TOUR’s second stop in Nevada of the season. Let’s see who will light up the scoreboard in a different way this week: