Golf Betting Tips

Golf is a great sport to bet on with our golf betting tips. It combines the potential to win big, the ability to use data to predict outcomes and the attractiveness of placing long odds bets.  First Round Leader (FRL) bets are also popular and potentially more lucrative than tournament winner betting.

Each week we produce our golf betting tips for the upcoming tournament. The site displays them here. We also show our tipping history, with any of our winning tips highlighted.  We use a variety of factors to derive our golf betting tips including-

Elements of our golf betting tips selections

• the player’s statistical recent form, especially progressive form
• their historical form on that course, or similar layouts
• the ‘value’ they represent versus bookie odds
• and other factors, such as market bias

The course fit model we use is the most important of these. This predicts how each golfer’s game compares to the course used for a particular tournament.

We expect our golf betting tips to produce an annual average ROI of about 30%. However, there can be variations from 15% to 50% depending on the year.  We show you our 2021 performance to date on this page, tournament by tournament, starting from the Genesis Open in February 2021.  In general, we focus on the main USPGA and European tournaments. As you can see, 2021 has been a great year for us already.

Types of Betting markets

Win betting is the most obvious.  It can result in big wins, as half of the tournaments are not won by the normal favourites. However, we advise combining a win with a place betting, with so many players now competing for the win.  This is each-way betting.

Places (Each-Way Betting) can differ by bookies, ranging from 4 to 10 places. This depends on the bookie as well as on the tournament. Typically, bigger tournaments offer more places. A place bet normally offers a quarter of the odds and sometimes these are diluted by ties. For example, if there are 5 places available and 3 players tie fifth, your winnings would be that player’s odds divided by 4 (for the place) divided by 3 for the tie.  You would also receive one-third of your bet stake back because 3 players tied.

Example

Let’s take a recent example of one of our golf betting tips, Matt Fitzpatrick. We recommended Matt for a place at odds of 66/1 (American +6600) for the 2021 Genesis Open.  In the event, he tied fifth with 3 others.  So, our winnings were $660 on a $10 bet($10 at odds 66) divided by 4 for a place divided by 3 for a tie =$55.  We also get back a third of our stake = $3.33. Accordingly, total returns were $58.33 on this $10 place bet. This resulted in a Return on Investment of 583% (or 5.83 times our bet). Accordingly, you can see why golf can be an appealing sport to bet on.

Top 10 or 20 markets can be attractive markets, especially for ranked outsiders, who we fancy on a particular course.  Some of the bookies run interesting markets such as top European etc. for the bigger tournaments.

The most specialised markets are in play and First Round Leader(FRL).  FRL lends itself even more to bigger prices than win markets. Accordingly, it can produce the largest winners. We advise taking places here as well when available. In-play betting can also be lucrative.  One only needs to see the market over-reaction to a bad shot to see the potential here. We will focus more on this specialised market in the future and include a section in our golf betting tips.

When to bet

The 2 best times to bet are normally Monday early or late Wednesday. Win bets (especially) can sometimes be most attractive on Monday evening, where an unfancied player is underpriced by the bookies. This price might come in later during the week as the money is placed on the player. Wednesday evening is often the best time to bet on other markets.  Odds can sometimes drift out (in the bettor’s favour) with the tournaments starting the following day. We normally produce our golf betting tips on Monday or Tuesday evening.

Good luck and remember to keep it fun!

Our Expert

Our philosophy on golf betting has largely been informed by Bryan Nicholson, who has a long track record since his operator analyst days with Unibet in insightful golf betting.  You can read more about Bryan in one of his articles here, and indeed consider buying one of his books should you wish to become more of an expert. Links are in the attached article.