Predictions before the first shots of major championships are little more than wild guesses, darts thrown at a field list or Lotto balls in a swirling tube of air. That’s what makes them fun. Almost no one outside her family or coach picked In Gee Chun the Tuesday before the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. And it’s easy to see it in hindsight, but who had Jennifer Kupcho as the winner of the last Chevron Championship to be contested in Rancho Mirage?

Golf is as unpredictable as the weather, in no small part because it’s a game of ever-changing feels. Just ask Cameron Smith, who couldn’t buy a putt at St Andrews last Saturday only to hole one testy 10-footer after another on Sunday to walk away as Champion Golfer of the Year. As Amy Olson told me on the range not long ago, “Feels are like catching a mouse in the beam of a flashlight. One minute you have him, and the next he’s gone.”

As the LPGA Tour enters its fourth major championship week of the season – the Amundi Evian Championship in the beautiful French hamlet of Evian-les-Bains - it’s worth noting two things that are in no way predictors, but that at least cut through the fog. One, golf is a game of streaks and you should always look at players who are on good runs. And two, the adage “horses for courses” didn’t become a cliché by accident. Some people play better in spots than others.

That second one is especially important this week. The Evian Resort Course is now the only major venue in the women’s game never to have moved. It’s always on the same hillside track between Lake Geneva and the towering snowcapped alps, a spot where you half expect the von Trapp family singers to show up on the first tee and yodel a tune or two. Several redesigns have brought the course up to major-championship standards, but it’s still on the side of a mountain. The sightline for your second shot on one of the par-5s is fully 70 yards right of the flagstick at times, and you can catch some lies that make you wish you’d packed repelling gear and crampons.

Some players love it. Others shake their heads. The former are the ones you have to watch this week.

Among those is your defending champion, U.S. Women’s Open champion and current leader in the Rolex Annika Major Award standings, Minjee Lee. Not only is Lee coming back to the scene of her first major title, but she’s entering it with some wonderful memories of how she got the job done. On a toasty Sunday last July, Lee came from seven shots back with one of the most extraordinary ball-striking performances of her career.

She loves Evian. It was her breakout spot, the plot of ground where her full potential was realized, where she catapulted from good player with a fine resume to great player on the path to superstardom.

It also helps that she’s still on a hot streak. In her last LPGA Tour appearance, Lee rallied on Sunday again to finish solo second and one shot back at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship at historic Congressional Country Club. That week Lee was asked if she believed she was the best player in the world, despite where the rankings put her. Without flinching she said, “I think I'm contending. I still want to be humble, stay humble, but I want to think that I'm hard to beat right now.”

That’s the kind of player you want to watch when the gates open.

There are plenty of other players who like Evian and are on a hot streak. Leona Maguire shot 61 last year in the final round, equaling the lowest major championship round in history, man or woman. She’s got a win this year and has been hitting it well all summer, surely making the Irishwoman a favorite.

Nelly Korda also shot 61 last Saturday at the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational. The former Rolex Rankings No.1 also has a chip on her shoulder after a health scare knocked her out of the early part of the year. She wants nothing more than to add to her lone major championship from a year ago when she won the KPMG. Korda hits the ball high and long and is disciplined enough to take the lines needed, even when it means playing away from the hole. That coupled with her smoldering competitiveness makes her dangerous in every major event she enters.

A sleeper to watch this week is LET star Linn Grant, another player who fits well in the Evian landscape while coming into the event on a hot streak. She has three wins this season, including a historic victory at the Scandinavian Mixed when she became the first woman to win a mixed-gender event, and has carded five other top-10s on the LET. Evian has a history of producing some unlikely champions and Grant, currently ranked 102nd in the world, would fit that bill.

Again, these are guesses, educated and informed ones but nothing you can bank on with any sense of certitude. But it’s golf, and it’s a major week. That’s why we watch. That’s why we love it.

Wild Guesses and Horses For Courses at Amundi Evian Championship

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