Most punters that have a bet on the golf target the outright winner market with their wagers.
Whether they bet on the nose or each way, the lure of big odds is enough to attract plenty of interest in the winner market for the PGA TOUR, DP World Tour, LIV Golf and LPGA Tour events around the world.
But with some tournaments boasting fields in excess of 150 players, of which comfortably around 30 have a genuine chance of lifting the trophy, is this really the smartest way to bet on golf?
Perhaps exploring the sub-markets will provide more fruitful instead.
As can be seen in The Open betting markets, Rory McIlroy is the favourite at 15/2, closely followed by Scottie Scheffler (8/1) and Jon Rahm (9/1), with the rest of the chasing pack a bit behind. The odds naturally reflect the difficulty of picking the winner. However, if you were to take the golf odds from Paddy Power as an example, you will see that there are stacks of different markets available that could potentially provide better value. As well as betting on the winner, you can also wager on top 10/20/40 finishes, top nationalities, head-to-heads, first-round leader and many other options.
There’s also group betting, where four or five players are pitted against one another in a hypothetical mini-tournament, and 2/3 ball betting, which enables you to bet on the mini-matches that take place between playing partners in each of the four rounds of action.
With so many different options available, there are ways to place golf bets that don’t require you to pick out a tournament winner. Often, the best of the value each week is found outside the outright market.
The uninitiated might think that every golf event is the same; the player that hits their tiny ball into the hole in the fewest shots wins.
That’s true, of course, although there’s a lot more nuance to analysing which players will thrive in any given week with The Open Championship being a perfect example of that.
The vast majority of PGA TOUR events are played in the United States, from California to New York and many other stop-offs in between. But The Open is a major played on UK soil, typically at a coastal course in England or Scotland (although Ireland and Wales have hosted the event in years gone by).
This is important because golf played on the UK coast tends to be different from the lush, tree-lined parkland courses of America. The wind can be frenetic to say the least, which favours those players that have a lower ball flight. Sites such as the PGA TOUR’s website offer plenty of insight for those looking to dig deeper into that particular statistical category.
Because of the fierce wind and typically elevated position of coastal golf courses, the surfaces tend to be extremely hard and dry, which means that they run very fast no matter how much they are watered. It can become extremely difficult to hit approach shots into the greens without your ball running away, therefore, so players with a reliable chipping stroke – one of the hardest skills in the sport – tend to prosper the most.
With tall, tangly grass rather than traditional rough and deep pot bunkers over shallow sand traps, the links golf courses that host The Open bring a very specific type of player to the fore, while others find the going rather more difficult.
As a consequence, this tournament is an opportunity to explore the many different golf betting sub-markets that are available.
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