How to Find Value When Betting on Golf

David Caraviello

February 11th, 2019

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For professional golfers, the ultimate goal is to win the tournament. For fans of golf betting, it’s to pick the event winner that week. But with so many elite players and so many variables, even the best can hope to win only a small fraction of the time.

The same goes for those wagering on the sport. It isn’t just that picking tournament winners is incredibly difficult, but the players that win the most tend to sport odds that don’t exactly make for a robust payoff. Therefore, savvy golf wagerers tend to look for something else: value.

Vary Your Bets

How to find value in golf betting? It starts by examining not just several different kinds of players, but also different types of bets. In-play golf wagering, for instance, allows bettors to pounce on an elite player whose odds may have plummeted after a string of bad holes, but still has time remaining to crawl back into contention.

Then there’s head-to-head betting, which pits one player against another in pairs selected by individual sports books. Think Rory McIlroy vs. Ian Poulter, with one a favorite and the other an underdog, and carrying commensurate odds and potential payoffs. The bet can be for a round or for a tournament, and the person you’re wagering on needs to beat just one other player — not the entire field.

Another approach is two-ball or three-ball betting, where bettors wager on which player will finish with the better score in either a twosome (usually in a tournament’s later rounds) or threesome (typically in earlier rounds). Again, the bet can be for a round or a tournament, and value-laden underdogs can pay off by bettering just one or two other players in the event.

Betting Rounds and Holes

Looking for even more options? Consider placing a bet on the player who might lead at the end of a round; it’s not unusual for a high-value player with a lesser name to end up atop the leaderboard after the opening round of a tournament, even a major.

Books can offer tempting odds on even established players to emerge in the lead at the conclusion of a given round.

There’s also the hole winner bet, where wagerers can seize on individual attributes like a big hitter on a par-5 or an accurate iron striker on a tight par-3.

As always, the need for research still applies: it’s always helpful to know past player performances entering a tournament, or on that specific course, as well as pending weather conditions and the historical difficulty of the layout itself.

Any or all of these bets typically offers a wagerer preferred value over choosing a tournament winner, and helps to make betting on golf even more potentially lucrative and more enjoyable.