Winning your Golf Bets

Betting on golf can be a tricky task. With a tournament almost every weekend of the year, and with the ever changing landscape of different tournament settings, sometimes its hard to find the right bet. With that being said, let's go over a few things you can look into to help reform your golf betting strategy.

Current form

Current form is where the oddsmakers start when building out the weekly tournament odds, so it’s where golf bettors should begin their handicapping. Just like teams, golfers can go through hot and cold streaks.

These streaks can include tournament wins, Top-5, and Top-10 finishes or just playing beyond their usual standard and average finish. You’ll want to look closely at these streaks and what’s driving them. Sometimes it’s an uptick in performance but other times it’s simply competing against weaker tournament fields.

Cold streaks can also manifest themselves, and many times these skids can be connected to a particular part of a player’s game, like poor putting or driving accuracy. Injuries and recovery time, as well as tinkering with swing mechanics, techniques, and working in new clubs, can also impact a golfer’s results.

Course fit

The popular golf betting term is “horse for courses”: matching a player’s strengths and weaknesses to the current course layout.

Some golf courses have wider fairways and boast a longer average length per hole, making them better suited to golfers who carry a hefty average distance per drive and can quickly find the green. On the flip of this, courses with narrow fairways and hazards off the tee box reward player’s with greater driving accuracy.

A surplus of water and sand bunkers, as well as tricky pin placement, emphasizes finding players with an accurate approach and solid scrambling metrics, while unpredictable undulating greens can quickly give those elite putters the edge on the leaderboard.

Course history

Be it layout, familiarity, or just consistent comfort, golfers often take to certain courses and can be counted on to follow their recent history from those past rounds. The same can be said for struggles on particular courses.

Golf bettors should always look at a player’s history on a course, dissecting for round-by-round consistencies and how the tournament’s layout matches those of the previous years. Regional familiarity should also be considered, as golfers from that state or region likely have experience playing these courses outside of pro events.

Weather

Weather can completely change how a course plays, from strong winds forcing players to shorten their drives and lean on accuracy to rain soaking the fairways and greens, making the course play slower. Before betting the golf futures, head-to-head markets, or prop odds, always look at the extended forecast for the entire tournament as well the detailed daily forecasts.

From there, you can measure how much the weather can help or hurt a player based on their skill sets or look at which players are used to playing in less-than-ideal conditions based on where they’re from.

Depending on start times, golfers could face varying degrees of weather during the day. A player scheduled to go out in the early morning could face a softer and slower course than a golfer playing later in the afternoon when the sun and heat have dried out the fairways and greens, making them play faster.

Join our Golf Group

In each PGA tournament the Insiders will upload a full slate of golf bets. These come from our own historical analysis, player breakdowns, and custom built golf models. You can expect to find a ton of different bets like: miss the cuts, top 40's, 20's, 10's, number of bogeys, O/U strokes gained, and much more!

Click below to join the group!

INSIDER GOLF BETS

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