Betting on Golf
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When the pandemic hit, sports went into hibernation. The first one to emerge from the slumber was MMA. After MMA, the next to return to the scene was golf. The betting handle on the PGA Tour was massive upon its return. It was a sharp move by the PGA, because many gamblers were itching for action and started to bet on golf for the first time.
Many of those first-time golf bettors are still wagering weekly. Golf betting is not as widely understood as some of the more mainstream sports, but it is a fun four days’ worth of gambling action. You have two major hurdles to sweat out when placing a golf bet. The first is whether your golfer makes the cut heading into the weekend. The second is, assuming he does make the cut, where he finishes up the tournament Sunday. When it comes to getting the most bang for your gambling dollars, few wagers offer the multiple days of excitement that you get from betting on PGA futures.
What is the PGA futures market? Before every tournament, the sportsbooks will offer odds on every golfer to be the outright winner. The best players with the best chance to win typically come in at odds ranging from 4-1 all the way up to 10-1. You will also have longshots that are priced at 100-1 or higher and everything else in between those two extremes. The shorter-priced golfers who are favorites are more likely to cash, but the payouts on the longer shots are going to pay more. Winners come from every tier of the pricing list. Sometimes you get a Tiger Woods winning as the chalk at under 10-1 and sometimes you get a 50-year-old Phil Mickelson winning the PGA Championship at odds of 300-1. The former is more likely to happen often than the latter, but we have seen winners with short prices, middle tier odds, and even the occasional longshot all cash.
When sportsbooks list PGA futures, they will have odds for each individual golfer to bet on in the tournament. The odds on each golfer can be converted into a probability of winning. A golfer at 4-1 or +400 odds would have an implied probability of 20%. This would be a very high number for a tournament that usually has 80-120 golfers. A golfer at odds of 99-1 or +9900 would be someone who has an implied 1% chance of winning. To figure out what the implied probability is, you have to do a little math. The equation is very simple: 100/(100+listed odds).
So in our examples above, the first golfer was +400. That would mean we would divide 100 by (100+400). So 100/500 would equal one-fifth or 20%. The second golfer was at odds of 99-1 or +9900. We would again take 100 and divide it by (100+9,900). Breaking that down further, 100/10,000 would be 1/100 or 1%.
If you have Excel skills, you can easily input this equation into a list of odds and let the computer do the math for you. This allows you to take the listed odds and convert them into implied percentage chance to win for each golfer. This is the basic analysis that Tipico Sportsbook and handicappers perform as a step one in the process. This step is the same no matter which side of the gambling transaction you are on. Whether you are the book offering the line or the bettor accepting the terms, you would start here. The next steps to take are different depending on which side of the equation you are on.
Sportsbooks are in the business of making money, so when you break down all the odds you will notice the implied chance of winning adds up to over 100%. The reason it adds to over 100% is because Tipico needs to build in a little cushion and profit margin. Again, sportsbooks are a business, so we can not begrudge them taking some profits in order to run their business and be able to continue to offer us ways to wager. It is not uncommon to see the probabilities add up to 120-140%. This is the advantage that books have, but they also have a disadvantage we can exploit. Tipico has to offer odds on these events if they want to induce us to wager on them, but as gamblers we are not obligated to bet if we do not like the price being offered. This is where us gamblers get our advantage from.
We know that the implied probabilities of the total field based on offered odds is going to add up to over 100%. We also know that the winner of any golf tournament is in that pool of potential golfers to bet on. This means if all the golfers that can win are present, the odds should add up to 100%. This is where the savvy gambler can find his value. Whether you create the numbers yourself or buy them from a stat provider, it is not hard to get true odds of winning based on 100% from a projection system or stat provider. Once you have projections that you trust, you can begin to hunt for the mispriced golfers. If a golfer has an implied probability of winning that is greater than his actual chance of winning, you do not bet on that golfer. This will end up being most of the list of potential bets. What you are looking for is the couple golfers that you think have a better chance to win than their odds are implying. If you find a golfer at 9-1, that implies he has a 10% chance of winning. If you think he actually has a 20% chance of winning, then his true odds are greater. At 20%, he should be 4-1, not 9-1. This is an extreme example, but in this case, you would absolutely want to bet on that golfer. You are likely to find multiple golfers that have true odds greater than the odds offered by the sportsbooks. These are the ones you want to bet on. It does not mean you will win these bets every time you find value, but the thought process is that if you continue to bet only the good values, you will end up winning in the long run. Bettors who bet golf futures might make 100 bets during a year and cash only 2-3 of them. Those 2-3 though are at odds that make up for 20-30 losing bets along the way. If you are constantly betting on things that pay out at a higher rate than they should, you will be profitable over the long term and that is the name of the game.
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