LIV Golf Adelaide preview: the biggest event of the LIV season with the showpiece ‘Watering Hole’

LIV Golf Adelaide features a showcase 'Watering Hole'

Get ready for the biggest event of the LIV Golf season, featuring the showpiece ‘Watering Hole’…

Australia has taken to LIV Golf more than any other country.

77,000 tickets were sold for last year’s inaugural LIV Golf Adelaide tournament, roughly double the estimated attendance of LIV’s second most popular event.

The reason is simple. Australia isn’t well-served by traditional tour golf, so LIV has provided the best chance for Aussie golf fans to watch some of the world’s best players in live action.

It probably helps that Brisbane-born Cameron Smith was one of LIV Golf’s biggest signings to date. The 30-year-old joined golf’s breakaway tour shortly after his 2022 Open Championship victory, which took him to second in the Official World Golf Rankings.

And it likely doesn’t hurt that LIV Golf CEO & Commissioner, Greg Norman, is Australia’s greatest-ever golfer and one of its most successful sportsmen.

There’s also the small fact that LIV Golf Adelaide features its own version of the famous 16th hole at the Waste Management Phoenix Open. The par-3 12th is surrounded by marquees and ‘sky boxes’, with players cheered for hitting the green, booed for missing it, and plastic beer cups raining down onto the tee regardless. It’s known as the ‘Watering Hole’ for a reason and was hugely popular in LIV Golf Adelaide’s first playing last year.

Fittingly, it was the site of LIV Golf’s first hole-in-one last year, with Chase Koepka becoming the first man to register a ‘one’ on a LIV card.

What is the format of LIV Golf Adelaide?

Like all standard events in the LIV Golf schedule, LIV Golf Adelaide 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 solo players in the form of Hudson Swafford and Anthony Kim.

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.

Where is LIV Golf Adelaide played?

LIV Golf Adelaide will be played at The Grange Golf Club. The Grange has two highly regarded courses – the West and the East, one of which was recently redesigned by Greg Norman – with LIV Golf Adelaide played across a combination of the two to make a 6,840-yard par 72.

How much does the LIV Golf Adelaide winner receive?

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

The individual winner in Adelaide 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.

Read our full guide to ‘How much every LIV player has been paid’.

Talor Gooch won LIV Golf Adelaide last year en route to topping the individual LIV Golf standings for 2023 and is hunting a first victory of this season.

How to watch LIV Golf Adelaide

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

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

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About the author

Rob McGarr – Contributing Editor

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 course, where he plays off a three-handicap.