The PGA Championship 2023 Card Summary:
- This week the field of golfers is very elite.
- The Top 50 players this week average a rank of 13.9 on the model
- This week’s card will focus on Top 10 placements due to the elite competition of the field
- The card features 12 player picks to finish in the Top 10 for a total of 11.75 Units wagered.
- The goal this week is to get at least 3 hits for ~90% ROI at a minimum
Final updates:
- Corey Conners had an epic collapse on Day 4 going +5 to land just outside the Top 10
- Very disappointing finish as Conners dropped out of Top 10, but Shane Lowry joined him on the edge for a 12th place finish.
- Also both LIV picks ended up tied at 18th giving the card 4 players within the Top 20, but outside the Top 10.
- A complete loss on the card a review of the final Top 10 shows the following:
- 3 LIV players made Top 10
- 5 players with odds > +650, the cutoff used for selections here made Top 10
- Stretching to 26 from the models preferred cutoff of 25, 7 out of 11 players in the Top 10 were under 26
- Overall as I stated with the card creation that the more elite the field the more variance there will be. Based on the expectations the variance did occur, just not with the players selected for the card.
- Learnings: If anything would be done differently, I’d likely want to examine making Top 20 bets based on the competitiveness of this field. I’ve been focusing mainly on Top 5 or Top 10, but due to the elite quality of this past week’s field I probably should’ve examined making a card of Top 20 bets to better handle the variance.
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Recap:
- The AT&T Byron Nelson last week was a dud. Only Si Woo Kim made it to the Top 5.
- The overall result was a loss of -4.5 Units for -36% ROI
- I blame the card creation on my part for the lackluster result. I didn’t have a problem with the players picked, but the number that I chose for such a limited win possibility
- 11 picks for 5 possible slots was just too much slack in the net I try to cast
The science behind the PGA Champions 2023 card:
Here’s a review of the implied probabilities of all golfers for this week’s betting odds:
- Winner: Implied Probablities = 138%, Hold of 38%
- Top 5: Implied Probablities = 634%/ 5 Payouts = 127%, Hold of 27%
- Top 10: Implied Probablities = 1294%/ 10 Payouts = 129%, Hold of 29%
An interesting drop in the overall Winner Hold from the 45% last week’s event. Perhaps the bookies are catching on that they are overcharging.
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. Only Top 5 or Top 10 bets make sense based on these vigorish numbers.
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.
The Field:
This field has 156 players and portion of them are LIV participants which throws a wrench in my normal model process as I only track PGA events in my data. I don’t want to exclude a portion of this field which has a decent chance at placing in the Top 10. These are PGA Championship caliber players, that should not be excluded from my card it would be like me betting only The Dodgers to win the World Series because I only track National League teams only.
Since I don’t actively track LIV players I had to quickly review the LIV Standings page and luckily it had the current years events and players list neatly arranged in a table format for me by place. I just set the data to arrange the players by median place and selected the top players under a rank of 15, about top 30% consistently in the fields of 50 for each LIV event.
This gave me 10 extra players to flag for the event this weekend to make sure they were included in the selection process as I will usually exclude players with less than 4 events from eligibility in my picks.
Bet Target – Decision on Top 10s:
- Assessing the overall competion and the odds available along with Hold considerations. I settled in on Top 10s as this is a very elite field and there will be a large amount of variance between these top players as to who will jockey their way to the top this week. I wanted to make sure I had the large net size to capture that variance
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Players to Target and Odds:
- The magic number for hitting a good portion of Top 10 finishes will usually be about 2 to breakeven and 3 to show good profit.
- I’ve stated before that my model does a good job in having players under 25 in the rankings place in the Top 10. There are 38 players that are under 25 in the model’s rankings this week. So a lot of extra slack that will need be cut from my final selection to help the card’s profitability.
- I also wanted to make sure the LIV players got a fair shake in my selection criteria, so the 10 players I flagged were included in my selection criteria as if they had 4+ qualifying games. I also disregarded their median rankings in my main model rankings for PGA as their only past event I had on hand was The Masters.
The final cut:
- Based on the failures of last week card of too much slack I knew I wanted the final selection count to be around 12. Not too far over the possible 10 that can cash.
- Last week’s Top 5 was problematic due to 11 picks for just 5 possible winning slots. An overshoot of 120%. This week is just an overshoot of 20% to allow some slack in the overall net of picks, but not too much.
- I started with placing the LIV players in the event that I had pre-selected. Only 6 were playing:
- Cameron Smith +320
- Mito Pereira +850
- Dustin Johnson +260
- Brooks Koepka +225
- Patrick Reed +700
- Talor Gooch +500
- Knowing I wanted my breakeven selection to be about 2 and good profit at 3, I settled on +400 as my starting cutoff for Top 5 odds.
- This left only Mito Pereira, Patrick Reed, and Talor Gooch as my LIV qualifying selections.
- I then added my main qualifying PGA players with under 25 in the model rankings and +400 or better odds.
- Overall this initial selection gave me too many picks and I had to make a cut.
- I was originally going to cut my list down from under 25 rankings to under 20, but that would only penalize the PGA players and I felt like the variance between those two numbers would be insiginificant. Instead I went the profitability route and decided to up my odds selections. This was somewhat sad as some favorites of mine the past few weeks of Tommy Fleetwood and Wyndham Clark had to be cut as a result. But I’m in this to win money, not root for players. I can root for fun, and it’s often the last resort if all the bet picks sink out early.
The end result is the card below with 12 picks and +650 minimum odds. I added Taylor Moore because I always have to bet on myself and I reduced Ryan Fox’s unit bet down a bit as he only has 5 events under his belt which is significantly lacking to the rest of the field and his hit at 0.75 units will cover the cost of the whole card at that amount and odds of +1600.
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 10 slots could easily provide the opportunity to exceed that goal as any 3 will reach that profitability goal.
Top 50 Players playing The PGA Championship 2023 based on Model Rankings:
*LIV players with qualifying criteria for inclusion highlighted
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