The Journey into Developing a Winning Golf Betting Strategy

The following post will be multiple parts and detail my recent journey into golf betting. A quick background is that I’m first and foremost an analyst when it comes to anything worth doing. Often as most, these type of endeavors start as something fun to do, but for me and in the spirit of competition and seeking knowledge the drive to win takes over after my first foray and I need to find ways to be sucessful or prove to myself that the time investment is not worth it anymore. What you will see below details the journey of a fun bet that led to something more as I branched out into a new field of sports betting that was unfamiliar to me.

Event 1 – WM Phoenix:

I didn’t think I would ever enjoy betting golf. I typically play just one to two rounds a year but when it comes to seeing it on TV it’s always seemed like the most boring thing to watch. One weekend for fun (as how most initially dive into the endeavor of sports betting) I placed a bet on a player whom shares the same name as me to place Top 20. I barely paid attention that weekend, but the bet cashed and I was intrigued to figure out if I could cash in golf tournaments consistently despite it being a sport I barely paid attention. Fast forward a few weeks later and now I know all the top current players, not just the names of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and Jordan Spieth as the few I recognized. I’m now developing full pre-tournament cards that are starting to show signs of success despite some rocky times to start.

How did I do it? Let’s dive in!

Event 2 – The Genesis Invitational:

That second week of betting was the 2023 Genesis tournament. My strategy when betting is to win and win consistently. I don’t shoot for the homeruns (not typically at least lol), but instead try to show small and steady gains over the long run. I spent a few hours before the tournament downloading golf stats and trying to model out performance on various stroke metrics. I came up with a card with 4 Top 5 picks, 11 top 10 picks, and 22 top 20 picks each with the same amount of unit per pick. The idea was to hope that a few hit proportionally on each bet type would be good enough to show profit and help me develop stronger cards for future weeks as I watched how a full event and betting card played out.

This event was quite disastrous as Jason Day had the best finish on my card for a T10 tie, which provided me with an education into the dynamics of a dead heat reduction (something I will discuss in future posts if you are not familiar with the term). I did have the overall winner of Jon Rahm, but only in my T20. Overall, I ended up losing 85% of my entire tournament bet.

Event 3 – The Players Cup:

I took a hiatus for a few weeks after my first big tournament card. For the Players Cup I decided to abandon the stroke metrics I initially developed and go with a measure of average score performance in recent tournaments for players. I had my own rankings and chose Jon Rahm of course as he was a recent winner.  I also opted to bet him with two others to win overall and then waterfall those picks down with T5/T10/T20 selections adding a few more players down the waterfall on the ticket. Even throwing a single bet on my namesake in at T40 which cashed, always bet on yourself they say.

Well after one day Rahm got sick and quit and my card was looking sunk again. I ended up hitting Scheffler as a T5 pick, but ended up losing 56% of my initial stake on the tournament betting card. Nonetheless, there was improvement from the previous event in terms of my betting card results.

Event 4 – Valspar Championship:

This event looked like it had a weaker field than previous tournaments. I changed up the model again to focus more on identifying players who consistently made the cut and had high percentage showings in the T20. This time I went with a card that had 6 To Win / 7 T5 / 7 T10/ and 8 T20. It was a hodgepodge selection this time with varying bet sizes so a win in each placement was roughly the same for either player in that group based on the odds they were given. I also didn’t waterfall them all down. Only placing some in the To Win and not repeating them further down in other lower categories.

I ended up with 1 player hitting in the T20 picks, but the card was saved by my namesake who ended up cashing a T5 and a T10 ticket for me and an overall championship for themselves.

I ended up with a +13% profit on the card this week. Again, I will repeat the moral of the story here, always bet on yourself!

To be Continued…

This is part I of my foray into golf betting and although the first few tournaments were rocky I did eventually get on track and found ways to win outside the not-so-sound strategy of betting on a player by the statistic of their birth name alone. That’s not the type of sports bettor I typically am, but it is a fun feature that has proved fruitful as this stage. I will hopefully have Part II up tomorrow which will get us to where the golf model is today.

For a quick flash forward check out how I did on the Zurich Classic this past week.