How to bet on golf

A field, not a game

Golf is priced like a horse race. Every player gets a price to win, and even the favorite in a strong field usually pays many times the stake, because the best player in the world still loses most weeks. Turn every price on the board into a percentage and add them up and you get a number far above 100, and the gap is the book's margin. On a big field it is much wider than on any two-sided bet, and that is the first thing to know about golf: the bet everybody talks about is the one the book likes best.

That doesn't mean never bet an outright. It means stake it as a longshot. Say you bet $10 a week on a player at +3000, and he really has a 3 percent chance each week. Over a 30-week stretch the chance he never wins once is about 40 percent. That is a long time to keep paying in on a bet that is a fair price at best, and I'd go in knowing it.

Top finishes and the dead heat

The top 5, top 10 and top 20 markets pay less and win more often. They are the bet I'd point most golf bettors toward, with one rule you have to understand first: the dead heat.

Golf finishes tie all the time. If your player finishes tied for 10th with two others, three players are sharing one place, and most books pay you on a third of your stake. Say you bet $10 on a top 10 at +200. A clean 10th place pays $20 in winnings. A three-way tie for 10th pays on $3.33 of it, which returns $10 in all: your money back and nothing more, for a bet you thought you'd won. Two players sharing the last two places is no dead heat at all, while four players sharing them pays half.

None of this is a trick. It is in the house rules of nearly every book, and it is why I'd take a top-20 price with some care: the further down the board, the more players crowd each place.

Matchups

A matchup puts two players against each other, for one round or the whole tournament, and you bet on who shoots the lower score. Some books group three players in one bet. Because it is a two-way price, you can see the cut: two players at -115 each is about 6.5 percent, and that is far less than the outright board takes from you.

This is the bet I like best in golf. You are not trying to beat a field. You are judging two players on one course in one week, and the public pays far less attention to a matchup between two players in the middle of the field than to the names at the top.

Read the rules on each one. Most books settle a tie in a tournament matchup as a push unless a tie was offered as its own result. If one player misses the cut and the other makes it, the one who made it usually wins. If a player withdraws before he tees off, bets on him are normally void; if he withdraws after, many books count it as a loss. The house rules page covers how to read them.

What actually predicts a week

Form carries in golf more than in most sports, because the best players play most weeks and you can see how they are hitting it. Course history matters as well: many events go back to the same course every year, and some players simply suit a course. I'd weigh both.

The thing casual bettors miss is the draw. In the first two rounds the field is split into morning and afternoon tee times, and one half can get calm air while the other plays in the wind. A player can fall behind before he has done anything wrong. The tee times are published before the event, and the forecast is free; it is the cheapest edge in golf, and I'd check it before every first-round matchup.

Betting during the event

Most books keep the board open while the tournament is being played, and the prices move after every round. That is useful when you want to get out of a bet or add to one, but the margin on live betting is usually wider, and a player who shot well on Thursday is priced on Friday as if everybody saw it, because they did.

Golf runs nearly every week of the year. A bet size of 1 or 2 percent of the bankroll, kept the same through the long stretches with nothing cashed, is the only way I know to bet it.