The AT&T Byron Nelson – PGA Golf Sports Betting Card

The AT&T Byron Nelson Card Summary:

• This week the field of golfers is less elite compared to what we saw last week in the Wells Fargo tournament.
  • The Top 50 players this week average a rank of 45.3 on the model compared to last week’s Top 50 of 25.1
• This week’s card for the Wells Fargo Championship will focus on Top 5 placements due to the lower competition of the field.
• The card features 11 player picks to finish in the Top 5 for a total of 12.5 Units wagered.
  • The goal this week is to get at least 2 hits for about 40% ROI at a minimum

Round 4 Final update:

• Si Woo Kim ended up cashing, in a two way tie for 2nd. Good enough for a complete Top 5 cash.
• Adam Scott flirted with a Top 5 during the day on Sunday, but the odds against were too great as he had a great Sunday with too many players above him heading out of Saturday.
• It was a tough field this week as even the presumed favortie Scottie Scheffler ended up in a 3 way tie for 5th with 2nd fave Tyrell Hatton and Zecheng Dou (a player I had modeled as 125th heading into the event, +6000 for Top 5).
• Going forward I’d probably look to cut overall field selection for Top 5 only picks as I had used a wide net of 11 players this week which was similar to the Top 10 net size the previous week. Due to half the places paying I should’ve cut the net in half to compensate. The higher the risk in failing to win the lower amount of money should be risked. Knowledge for next week.
• The 1 cash resulted in a loss of 4.5 Units this week for -36% ROI.

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Recap:

• Wells Fargo last week was very rewarding. It had 4 hits in the top 10 with Wyndham Clark winning it all and Corey Conners part of a 6 way Dead Heat Reduction for the last 3 slots.
  • The overall result was a win of +13.0 Units for +124% ROI

The science behind the AT&T Byron Nelson card:

Here’s a review of the implied probabilities of all golfers for this week’s betting odds:

• Winner: Implied Probablities = 145%, Vigorish/Rake/Hold of 45%
• Top 5: Implied Probablities = 637%/ 5 Payouts = 128%, Vigorish/Rake/Hold of 28%
• Top 10: Implied Probablities = 1308%/ 10 Payouts = 131%, Vigorish/Rake/Hold of 31%

If you couldn’t tell before, it should be obvious now that the hold on Golf tournaments is quite high for sports books. I don’t forsee myself ever betting an the outright Winner anytime soon based on these numbers.

• Scottie Scheffler may be the overall favorite to win, but at +360 the juice is not worth the squeeze. Heck all my picks on the card for Top 5 pay better odds and all 5 could possibly hit. Assuming Scheffler is a lock to win that leaves 4 slots available to payout at better odds and I don’t have to move too far down my ranked list to get players with those odds.

Can the vig be overcome?

Well that’s what I’m trying to attempt week in and week out with my golf bets and it seems to be working.

Based on the vigs I just presented it would make the most sense to target “Top 5” bets this week. Also benefit of targeting Top 5 is that these places pay quite well and offer the chance of hitting more than our expected goal amount of players selected.

The AT&T Byron Nelson field:

This field has 156 players and I would say with a large degree of confidence that the majority of this field can be modeled out and determined that they will likely not come close to the Top 5 in final results . In order to be profitable on such a large field I have to make sure I’m at least spreading a wide enough net to capture the right amount of players with a good chance of that type finish and at worthwhile odds.

Bet Target – Decision on Top 5s:

• Assessing the overall competion and the odds available along with Hold considerations. I settled in on Top 5s as my bet target this week over Top 10s.
  • It was a close decision and hence why you’ll see me refer to Top 50 field competivenes.
    • My model has done a good job at seeing about 70% of the Top 10 consistently come out of the field of players modeled with a ranking 25 or lower in a given event.
  • This Top 50 competiveness feature will give me an idea of how sticky those top ranked players will be to those final finishing positions.
    • If the competiveness is low then I would likely want to target Top 10 bets over Top 5s as variance will kick in across the board and see more opportunites for a shake up in final standings of top players in the event. While a less competive field Top 5s will be more preferable due to the known winners likely staying near the top.
• This week’s decision was somewhat tough as the field is weaker than Wells Fargo last week, but stronger than The Mexico Open two weeks prior. In the end I settled on Top 5 bets this week,

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Players to Target and Odds:

• There were only 8 players in my model ranked under the 25 threshold in my model. The magic number for hitting a good portion of Top 10 finishes with players from under this number and naturally Top 5s also.
• With Top 5s a good win target is about 1-2 hits as 1 is usually hard enough hit on its own. I determined that with short field under 25 in rankings I could probably accept +400 as my minimum odds and recover most of my bet. That left only 4 players.
• I probably should’ve tried to cut my card down there, but I was looking to get at least 8 players for the card.
  • Variance is a big factor in these large tournaments as a few players from beyond the top portion of the modeled list often find ways to get up in the top results. Also a couple of the top players headed in usually stumble bad and knock themselves out of contention. There are off days and good days here for golfers and thats what shapes these tournaments.
    • Which to note is how my model is setup, Its a median ranking of a player’s final standings in the tournaments they’ve played the past year. To account for the good and the bad and just show where they typically land.

The final cut:

• The criteria above gave me 4 from the top 25
• Then to round out the card I usually check down my list for the next ranked player with better odds than the last.
• Due to the limited options in the top 25 I rounded out my picks with the next on the rankings who each had good odds well above my +400 initial limit.
• Then I grabbed the next few down the list at larger odds as somewhat lotto type picks to provide more numbers of players to win on the overall card.

The end result is the card below with 11 picks. Due to the in-between nature of the competiveness and odds I placed 1.5 units on the top 4 ranked picks in the 25 threshold, the next 6 at 1 unit apiece, and Kevin Chappell at .5 units for large lottery ticket odds of +5000 to finish Top 5.

6 of the players in the card will result in a small loss, no more than 40% of total bet, if they are the only ones to place Top 5 this weekend. The other 5 or any combination of 2+ finishes will result in profit.

Again my overall goal with each card is to achieve about 50-100% ROI, and anything above that is outstanding. With the potential to fill up to 5 slots we could see another great week like Well’s Fargo where the goal was exceeded,

Top 50 Players playing AT&T Byron Nelson based on Model Rankings:

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Golf not your thing or looking for insights into other sports betting topics? Be sure to check out my latest MLB Bet Tracking.