Betting on Golf can be extremely difficult if you don’t know what you are doing. Betting on golf can be extremely difficult even if you DO know what you are doing. Yet, here we are, reading and writing about how to become better at betting golf. This article is going to walk you through some basic concepts that apply to the weekly grind of betting golf, as well as a few more advanced tips and tricks that I find have worked well for me in the past.

Golf can be a very frustrating sport to bet on, and often I find myself tripping over rakes and hydraulic jacks as I nervously pace around my cluttered garage, which is the only place detached from the house that I can scream at my TV without my dogs and wife getting as frustrated with me as I am with Daniel Berger blowing a 5-shot Sunday lead at the Honda. However, having a process and a method to your madness allows you to “let go” of the moment and just watch the golf unfold, knowing you have researched and prepared adequately for your bets to make you money over the long run.

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The Golf Course

Course Length

The 18-hole battlefield on the PGA Tour changes from week to week, and with it so do golfers’ probabilities of success. A golf course can be a long 7,600-yard beast that rewards booming drives and accurate long irons, or it can be a tricky 7,100 yard coastal track that relies on wind and other weather elements to bolster its defenses against the tour’s best. Not all golfers are built the same, and certain aspects of their game match up better with specific courses depending on a multitude of variables, as is evidence by short-hitting Kevin Kisner and Webb Simpson at the RSM Classic.

Driving Distance vs Driving Accuracy

When it comes to driving the ball off the tee, some courses have thick rough that gobbles up stray drives, while others have alligators perusing the numerous water hazards and penalty areas that have seen the best golfers in the world having to hit their third shot from the tee box. Determining whether length or accuracy is more important is a week-to-week conundrum many golf bettors face.

Last season the tour averaged 300 yards off the tee and while hitting 60% of fairways. As you can see below, not many professionals are accurate and long. Below are the longest courses on tour and the respective driving statistics. Notice how courses of similar length can have remarkably disparaged accuracy averages. Knowing which courses reward distance over accuracy is probably the most important aspect of determining what kind of golf to bet on.

Approach Play and Proximity Buckets

If you are ever struggling to determine what weighting to apply to your model for a new venue or a course with limited history, approach play is king! Feel free to ramp up your model’s strokes gained on approach as much as you need to. Over a massive sample size, across all types of courses, strokes gained approach is THE most predictive metric in golf (excluding SG: Total). It typically sits between 30%-50% in my model settings each week.

Shorter courses may result in the majority of approach shots coming from 100-150 yards, while the aforementioned beasts could see a lot more approaches getting sizzled from 175-225 yards out. Golf is a weird game and there are distinct proximity ranges that tour pros excel from while simultaneously struggling to match the field from a range 50 yards further from the flag.

The tour hits 65% of greens in regulation while Scottie Scheffler lead it with 72.3% which equates to a total of five more birdie putts per tournament. Scheffler gained the seventh-most total strokes over the last six months, despite being the only golfer of the top 14 to lose strokes putting. He lost -0.31 strokes per round putting and still ranked seventh in the world in total strokes gained. The next worst putter of the 14 gained +0.12 on the greens. Incredible.

Around The Greens

Bunkers, rough, or sloped areas of short grass are the three types of bouncers that allow your golf ball onto the dance floor. Even the worlds very best get kicked out the club, leaving them in a sandy dilemma with the average pro saving his par only about 50% of the time, while the same challenge is 5% more successful from the rough (55%). Avoiding these two areas around the green goes a long way to dodging bogeys as the average scrambling percentage from the fringe (short grass) is 90%, which is almost two times more likely to yield a saved par.

Putting and Grass Types

Once on the green, the grass type plays a major role in the overall success players have with the putter, with nicknames like “Bermuda Burns” often frequenting the golf betting world when Sam Burns tees it up. The nuances of each respective grass type impact the confidence levels and putting stats of some guys more than others.

The best putters are usually successful on most surfaces while average putters may tend to prefer one surface over the other. Lucas Herbert lead the tour in putting over the last year, with Christiaan Bezuidenhout leading on Bentgrass, Martin Trainer ranking No. 1 on Bermuda, and Xander Schauffele putting best on Poa (min 10 rounds).

Our Research Station does a great job of showing which way a player’s putter is trending and how each respective time frame compares to his baseline on the grass type that will be putted on that week. These are general thoughts on the four main areas of golf. There are other nuances to handicapping the field but understanding how these play a role in your weekly preparation will go a long way to becoming a successful bettor.

The Weather

We have seen mother nature bless us with sunshine and calm breezes on any given Sunday, while runaway umbrellas in a rainstorm are also some conditions that can be expected on tour. It’s tough to play weatherman when handicapping golf, but having a decent understanding of what the conditions will be over the course of the event is an important variable to factor in. Wind usually has the biggest impact on golf scores, so finding golfers who can adapt to those conditions is essential.

Weather tends to have a sick sense of humor when it comes to golf betting, as there is roughly a 10-hour gap between the first shot of the day and the last. A lot can change in a few hours, never mind an entire day. If a golfer you bet on finds himself on the course on a windy Thursday afternoon only to be lambasted by the same winds on Friday morning, while the other half of the field lucked out with a calm Thursday morning / Friday afternoon. It happens more often than you think, and wave advantages can be one of the most frustrating variables to deal with in golf.

Here are a few websites that provide hourly wind speeds, directions, and gusts to help identify which parts of the day are projected to be the windiest:

WindFinder: Wind & weather forecast Fort Worth – Windfinder

Windy: Windy: Hog Bay Park, Somerset weather forecast

The Field

Who is playing and how many are playing? A typical “full field” consists of about 120 to 156 golfers. There are instances where the field is drastically trimmed down to 20 golfers, shrinking odds across the board. The Sentry Tournament of Champions will be the first event of the year and roughly 39 Hawaii-bound premier golfers will be teeing it up in a no cut event. Odds for a golfer to place inside the top 20 will be drastically shorter than the following week where 144 professionals will be looking to make the cut at the Sony Open.

The John Deere Classic made headlines for all the wrong reasons last season, rolling out a field half as competitive as the second-weakest event on last year’s schedule. The Players Championship had a field rating 16 times more competitive than the JDC. JT Poston won the JDC but if he played the same level of golf at The Players, it may not have been enough to win.

This does not mean that Poston was a bad bet at the JDC, as you can only play the cards you are dealt, and somebody has to win the event. The main takeaway here is that you need to adjust your expectations you have for the golfers you plan on betting, based on who is in the field and how big the field is. Hypothetically, a 20-1 Poston outright may be a great bet, depending on who else is in the field.

Our PGA Research Station does a fantastic job of breaking down each event’s field size and strength, which can help identify which events a player does best in.

Like what you read today? You can show your support for Byron by using the discount code MANIAC when purchasing a PGA Premium Pass. You get 10% off and full access to all of our Premium PGA articles, DFS tools, Ownership Projections and Lineup Optimizer! You also get access to weekly betting picks from Spencer Aguiar, one of the top betting minds in the industry. Spencer absolutely crushed 2022 and is now over 300 total units all time!

Recent Form vs Baseline

This is an aspect of player data that I have found to be extremely useful when betting placement bets (Top 20/40) and matchups (which will have its own section later). When it comes to DFS player pools and outright picks, an uptick in recent form has more weight in this decision-making process, compared to betting placements and matchups.

If the L10 rounds have been much better than his typical baseline, that is not enough time for me to be convinced to bet a Top 20 or matchup off of. In fact, if a book overreacts to this player’s last 10 rounds and makes them a favorite in a head-to-head, that is typically a matchup we like to pounce on if a few other metrics give us the green light to fade the player with a hot short-term versus a steady golfer with a superior baseline (L50+).

This is not the only way to make placement or matchup bets, but it is an approach that has worked for me over the last few years. My risk tolerance for short term improvement is much higher on the outright and DFS market, as often that is where the most value can be found in this kind of scenario (100-1 odds or sub $7K in DFS).

Preparation vs Odds Movement

This is a simple tip but if you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail. I am a relentless procrastinator … as I type this article minutes before cracking several cold ones on New Year’s Eve. However, if there is one part of my life that I do my best to stay on schedule with, it is knowing who I want to bet on before I go to bed on Sunday. If you know who you want to bet as the odds are released on Monday morning, the books often have a few rogue numbers that can be pounced on.

Almost every week, my personal betting card has 25% less investment on outrights than my Breaking $100 article, which includes the exact same picks, only a day later. If you are looking to be a profitable bettor, taking advantage of Monday morning misprices is an edge that requires 1% skill (spotting a misprice) and 99% preparation, which anybody is capable of.

If you get your outright bets in early on a Monday morning, a few times a year a tournament favorite will withdraw after the odds are released, inevitably shortening the odds of all the other golfers in the field, which we already have outrights on!!! It is one of the few instances where we have an absolute edge over the books.

As we have already mentioned weather, tournaments like the Butterfield Bermuda Championship are played on an island that would blow away if it weren’t for the weight of the dead souls the wind and rain have taken from countless professional golfers who have played there. Take a peek at the five-day forecast on Monday morning to make sure you are not blindly betting an event that is going to be played in a wind tunnel. If it is expected to be windy, wait until tee times are released to determine if your targeted golfer is lucky enough to be in the wave with less wind.

ps: Spencer (@TeeOffSports) and I will be dropping our picks into the RotoBaller discord as we make them. Another reason to get involved with our premium subscription packages if you ever plan on tailing Breaking $100 which had a 17% ROI in the 2022 season. Spencer amassed +300 total units all time, a few weeks ago.

Line Shopping

The best way to take advantage of a Monday misprice, is to find the biggest misprice across all the books you have available in your state. This website is a favorite on my search engine ribbon: Golf Odds | Golf Betting | PGA Tour Odds (oddschecker.com) It allows you to select your state and then displays all the odds for each golfer across the books you have available.

I use this site for outrights, first round leader, and placement bets. It is a great way to streamline your Monday morning odds shopping spree and I highly encourage you to sign up with at least three books in your state, in order to get the best numbers on your golfers you want to bet on.

Budget

This is a rather boring topic to discuss, but in order to succeed as a golf bettor, you need to have discipline with your money and stick to a solid strategy. My personal outright strategy is to bet a total of 2 units in order to return 20 when hitting a winner. This affords me 10 events to hit a winner and so far, we have hit a winner at least once every 8 events. Again, this is not the only way to budget your bankroll for outrights.

There are successful bettors who have a 7-event window to break even, by investing more into their weekly picks, they inevitably have more dogs in the hunt, which should result in more winners. This is just a little too aggressive for my appetite, and although I have contemplated changing my approach to hit more winners to celebrate on twitter, the ultimate goal is to be profitable and so far my system has been working. You do you!

Another important part of budgeting is bank roll management and establishing an amount that you identify as a unit. My unit is an amount that I can afford to lose 99 straight bets, but still have enough to place that hundredth bet that can get us back on track. If you bet golf all year, there will be ups and downs, and if your unit size is too big to keep betting the same amount during a brief downturn, you may want to adjust your units.

Find Your Thing

We live in a marvelous world where we can bet on winners, first round leaders, placements, matchups (both pre-event and round-by-round) and a whole lot more. As of this moment, I only bet on winners, placements and pre-event matchups. First round leaders and round matchups are still areas of golf betting that I struggle to find success in.

The only FRL I hit last year was Cam Smith at the TOC in the very first round of the year. Nothing after that, a very frustrating period, so I hung up my gloves with a few months left in the year. Don’t be ashamed to put a specific bet on the shelf if you find you are not profitable pursuing them. Another alternative would be to decrease the number of units you risk on those bets, if you are still wanting some level of entertainment at the end of the day.

If you have read this section and don’t know what your thing is … keep reading.

Track Your Results

It is tough to “find your thing” if you don’t have objective evidence to determine what your thing is. Track your bets, whether it is on a notepad, Notes app, in excel, or a third-party app. After a few months of betting take a look at your different types of bets and see where you have had the most success and if any area needs to be revisited/shelved, or, on a more positive note, capitalized on. I recently went to betting 2 units on matchups, as that is my thing!

This app allows you to track your bets all in one place: Download Action Network: Sports Betting App | The Action Network

Matchups

My favorite golf bet! It is the only bet where the book has the smallest edge on a bettor. Betting a winner or placement bet can be sabotaged by withdrawals and disqualifications. Betting on a matchup has the same implications but for both players! Your player can WD, BUT, if the opponent in your matchup WDs, you win the bet! To me, this is the safest bet in golf.

I have placed 488 matchups and won 57% (10% ROI) of them using baseline metrics as the core for my decision making, as I want to identify consistent players who may be matched up against the guy in the L10 screenshot (Recent Form vs. Baseline), who has had a few outlier rounds that the books may have overreacted to. Slow and steady wins the race.

Good Luck

At the end of the day, we are ultimately doing this because we enjoy it. This article is not intended to discourage you from betting on golf if you are leaking an affordable amount of money to the golf betting system in pursuit of entertainment and the odd Sunday sweat. If you have made it this far into the article, then you are probably betting responsibly and can ignore my intended message: “bet amounts that you can afford to lose”!

I hoped you enjoyed this piece and hopefully it will make you a more successful bettor! Good luck this year and as always, may the odds be ever in your favor!

 

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