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Jeju, South Korea
Justin Thomas battled to a two-under par 70 in brutal winds at the CJ Cup on Saturday and thought he played better than when shooting 63 two days earlier.
It took Thomas into a share of the lead with fellow American Scott Brown on nine-under 207, two strokes clear of India's Anirban Lahiri and Australia's Marc Leishman.
"I know for a fact that I played better today than I did on Thursday when I shot nine-under," said the world number four after only 10 players in the elite 78-man field broke par.
"It is so hard out here, I've never played a place where the wind swirls as much as it does here. It was insane."
The US PGA Tour's first event in South Korea has taken the players to the slopes of the 1,950-metre (6,400-foot) Halla Mountain, an extinct volcano on Jeju that is South Korea's highest peak.
The spectacular Nine Bridges club has a reputation as a windy venue, but Thursday's flat calm saw a flurry of low scores headed by Thomas's 63.
On Friday and Saturday the course bit back with a vengeance and Thomas remains on the same nine-under mark relative to par.
"The hardest thing is the putting," Thomas said."We'll hit some putts that look pretty stupid out there and the viewers at home don't understand. You have to be out here and close to know why that's happening."
Brown shot a one-under par 71 that felt much lower, he said.
"When it's like this, I mean hitting a sand wedge into a green is hard," said Brown, who had his best season on the PGA Tour last year when he finished 55th in the FedEx Cup.
Lahiri is back on familiar turf having played seven years in the Asian Tour and used his experience to card one of the rounds of the day, a three-under 69 that catapulted him from 15th to joint third.
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22/10/2017
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