I rarely play tournament H2H and round H2H are not common either.
I have better luck finding value in the 3 balls.
Tournament 3 balls are pretty good when you can find them.
In general you want props with 3-10 players, that’s where Datagolf seems to really excel. The place markets is another gold mine
Oh I see. I would think that tournament matchups would very lucrative. The place market being a “gold mine” is interesting. Are you referring to mainly T5, T10, and T20’s? Right now when I sort by EV on DraftKings for T20 there are 9 golfers with an EV of 0.20 or more. Does this mean you are betting all 9 of them? Similarly to outrights, on Fanduel there are 7 golfers with an EV of 0.20 or more to win outright. Are you betting all of those as well?
I’m primarily a H2H bettor and I’ve been successful. I’m going to dabble in the place market as well, so I’m trying to get a feel for it. Do you kind of put together a portfolio of bets each week with various outrights, t20’s, and 3 balls? Again, thanks for your time and the info.
I find that tournament matchups are hit-and-miss, I’m lucky to get 5 a week and my EV is probably like <5% on those. I prefer tournament 3-balls and groups where I have better opportunities to get good prices.
Similar story with round matchups, hard to get value on those. 3 balls are definitely better. The prop bets (things like low Australian, etc.) are very good as well and the place markets (T5/T10/T20/T30/T40) is where the majority of the volume comes from.
Cut market is another avenue but I find that DG is very inconsistent on those. I think it’s losing money overall but I’m not sure.
You also really need to pay attention to the adjusted win and place odds. There’s a real gold mine after Round 1 and to a lesser extent after Round 2. The books add a ton of juice after Round 3 so your opportunities are probably gone by then.
I am betting all the place and win odds of EV 0.20 or more, and many with smaller EV’s (depending on the odds I’m laying). Yes, I’m betting them all. This is another reason why I bet like 10-15% Kelly. If Oliver Bekker is highlighted by DG I’m going to be on him on the win market, place markets, matchups, 3-balls, Groups, Low South African, etc. I need to avoid overexposure since it’s possible to have like 5-10 bets on the same golfer.
I’ve always thought the cut bets were the among the most profitable, at least at Bet365. Books consistently don’t adjust their cut offerings when their is a weird distribution of skill (e.g. very low-quality bottom 25% like at the Puerto Rico Open resulted in 10-20 bets on the top guys to make the cut).
Bet365 may be a special case, the other books usually only offer the top golfers and for the most part the lines are tight
I almost always end up betting them to miss the cut and I’m left disappointed fairly often
I guess that’s why they are top golfers, they always seem to find a couple of birdies on the back 9 in R2 to sneak into the weekend
Great stuff. So for the prop bets you are just simply checking the odds on DG and then comparing them to other sites and betting them based on how far off the EV is? And then for group betting you are using the group simulator on DG and then doing the same thing with EV?
Yes sir
It takes a while to get like 200 bets in, LOL
It’s a race to get as many bets in as possible before the inevitable line movement
Curious if the EV >= .07 is in fact optimal. I would expect the threshold to change based on the type of bet and the likelihood
As far as the sizing, from whatever your minimum EV threshold is you can scale up from there, but you’ll need to put a cap on at some point. I personally use .3 in a kelly calculator with adjustments for correlated bets Kelly Criterion Bet Calculator: Optimize Sports Betting Bet Size My cap is 5% for other sports but I haven’t quite worked out what it should be for golf yet
I also think it’s important to not bet the recommended amounts blindly. Betting a lot on a longshot or on something with a low return usually isn’t the best idea, and there’s a thread in here somewhere on not doubling/tripling down between rounds on the same bets already placed earlier
Are you primarily betting Round 3 balls? I don’t see anything on DG about tournament 3 balls. Thanks again!
I’m betting whatever I can find using the simulator.
Round 3 balls are great but the line movements kill me. Much better chance of being able to grab Tournament 3 balls.
Some markets are more sensitive to line movement than others.
By the way I did provide a Kelly-inspired formula for bet sizing on an earlier post above and you can use that formula blindly and do pretty well.
At some point though you’ll get limited by the books if you’re having success so you’ll just be pushing those max wagers, LOL
“Death by a thousand cuts” is my motto and I try to get in about 1,000 golf bets a month. If I have an average bet size of $20 and an ROI of 5% then you’re looking at $1K/month.
Yes, I think I’m going to start using that. I jumped on a ton of the DK top 20 odds on those guys. Correct me if I’m wrong but for a $50,000 bankroll I should be risking $500 for bets around EV. Then lets say I bet on Hickok +1200 to Top 20. On that bet I should only be betting $42? Essentially to win $500 on all those T20 bets?
Also, if a bet is 0.30 EV or higher like some of these T20 bets, is it okay to break the Kelly formula rule? Seems like we should be taking advantage of these big EV spots more even if the odds are like +1200 or more.
Yes you should bet only $42. The longshots will slowly drain your bankroll in between the hits so you want to bet small
As for the high EV plays, it depends. If it’s Kisner at +1200 it’s an obvious mistake so you might slam $100 on the play. But if it’s Hickok at +1200 then well it might be model error and not book error. In my experience the high EV plays don’t perform that much better than the lower EV plays.
This is where your personal judgment comes in. If the model EV is high and you feel it’s justified then you might make a 1.5X or 2X wager.
While the Top 5/10/20 markets have been good to me I have been getting destroyed on Matchups. Usually don’t bet unless i have 8 cents of value or more.
My worst weekend of matchup betting as well. I would be interested to know whether there were any changes to the model for calendar year 2022 (or since the last blog update). I did quite well betting primarily matchups starting in the back half of last year, generating an ROI of around 8% on 1,025 bets at harmean odds of 2.37. Using exactly the same criteria, I am negative YTD (following the Byron Nelson) after 969 bets. Adjusting for the slightly longer harmean odds and slightly smaller sample size in 2022, there is only a 1.4% chance of that happening due to variance alone. Still strongly believe in the model, just trying to figure out whether this is something anyone else has been dealing with/whether I need to adjust my thresholds… harder to compare now that the betting results page isn’t being updated.
Where are you betting?
I think matchups are probably the hardest to win against with our model (as a few people have stated in this forum) for a couple reasons. First the market just seems sharper, as even if you don’t have a full-blown simulation model you can still price h2h matchups okay. And second, matchup markets seem to copy us pretty heavily. Just take this week… other than a few guys the market really thinks we are off on (e.g. DJ) there isn’t much value to be had anywhere. This copying problem is worse for matchups likely because we post our stuff on Monday even though books generally don’t post their matchups until Tuesday morning (B365, BetOnline being the 2 exceptions I know of who post on Monday). DK is an exception – since leaving Kambi they don’t copy us anymore it seems.
Regarding the model, there haven’t been any meaningful changes, just cleaning up a few things. Those changes are detailed in a couple of the posts in the model talk series.
I’ve quickly grabbed our results at various EV thresholds using all bets (matchups & 3-balls) from 2021 and 2022 separately. 2021 was a better year, no doubt. (“pb” is Pinnacle by the way… don’t ask why.)
total profits across all books in '21:
profits by book for optimal threshold (6%):
total profits for '22:
profits by book @ 8% threshold:
We will eventually write another blog that explores this more fully. I’m definitely more confident in the PGA betting than Euro, I think the SG data is sometimes inaccurate on the Euro tour and our course fit stuff is worse probably there as well.
One thing to keep in mind regarding your p-value calculations is that it’s likely assuming independence of bets. In reality lots of your bets are correlated in a few ways: betting against / on the same guy in the same event is an obvious one, but also betting against / on the same guy over a series of events is another more subtle correlation (e.g. we are always betting against Marc Leishman, so if the model is just off on Leishman the EV of those bets will all be over-estimated).
Anyways, hope this helps and I hope the betting results pick up. If you want to see any more figures from 2022 I can see what can I do. I’m just coming back from a bad flu right now (covid, probably), so my productivity is quite low.
Great post, matt, and get well soon!
https://feeds.datagolf.com/betting-tools/matchups-all-pairings?tour=pga&odds_format=decimal&file_format=json&key=API_TOKEN can i ask what is wrong with this
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