He and playing partner Lexi Thompson shot a 10-under-par score in the scramble format to sit eighth on the 12-team leaderboard.
Broken down, DeChambeau's new technique involves standing facing his target, with his ball slightly outside his right foot, and gripping the club in an unorthodox fashion, with his right hand extended halfway down the shaft and pointing downwards, while his left hand grips both the club and all of his left wrist.
He then swings the putter in a similar way how to a croquet player might use his mallet, swinging straight back and then through the line of the putt.
The method appears odd and challenges putting convention but it breaks no laws of the game. Sam Snead, who won seven majors in the 1940s and 50s, was known to putt side-saddle.
'I think it's an easier way to putt and could be another game-changer like the one-length [irons],' he told Golf Digest in October.
DeChambeau made a name for himself last year when he became only the fifth player ever to win both of America's most prestigious amateur tournaments - the US Amateur and the NCAA Division 1 Championship - in the same year.
He professed an ambition to win the Masters as an amateur, and then briefly contended at Augusta but faded away to finish 21st. The Californian turned pro straight afterwards but did not manage another top-10 all year. He earned his PGA Tour card for 2016-17 by winning on the second-tier Web.com Tour, but has had two missed cuts at the start of the wraparound season.
DeChambeau's other quirks include using clubs with exactly the same length shaft - 37.5in. A conventional set of irons has shafts which decrease in length as the lofts on the club-face increase (so a 3-iron's shaft length is longer than a 4-iron, for example, and so on.) Unlike most players he keeps the club on the same 'plane' during the swing, and does not activate his wrists, as most do for power.
