World number one Jeeno Thitikul set a 54-hole tournament record at the CME Group Tour Championship as she extended her lead to six shots.<\/p>\n
Thailand’s Thitikul fired an eight-under-par 64 in her third round to move 22 under overall.<\/p>\n
“It has been pretty good,” said 22-year-old Thitikul, who won this title last year at 22 under.<\/p>\n
“I was just trying to focus on myself and trying to make birdies and birdies and birdies because I know there’s a bunch of players who will be able to make some more birdies.”<\/p>\n
Thitikul’s compatriot Pajaree Anannarukarn and world number two Nelly Korda both shot 65 on Saturday and are joint second.<\/p>\n
Thitikul, who led by three stokes at the halfway stage, bogeyed her first hole on Saturday.<\/p>\n
But she then birdied the second, fourth, fifth and sixth holes, following up on the back nine with four birdies in a row from the 11th to the 15th – and another on the 17th.<\/p>\n
Victory would make Thitikul the second woman – after South Korea’s Ko Jin-young in 2020 and 2021 – to win the tournament in successive years. <\/p>\n
She would also receive $4m (\u00a33.1m) in prize money from a total pot of $11m (\u00a38.4m).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number one Jeeno Thitikul set a 54-hole tournament record at the CME Group Tour Championship as she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-278402","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}