Yet another birdiefest, this time with an even weaker field!
You know what this means. This is the tournament you want to focus on from a betting perspective. You should prioritize this one over the Scottish Open and focus on the finishing positions/matchups/round matchups whenever feasible. I’m getting a better handle on how books make prices and I am pretty sure that’s where the money is.
Birdiefest means longshots. Hard to hone in on stats but easy course means shot game is less of a factor and it will come down to who can hit the most approach shots to inside 15 feet and hole a bunch of putts. This is the PGA Tour so anyone, even players with SG of -1 can do it for 4 rounds on an easy golf course.
Favorites:
Daniel Berger - Far and away the best player in the field
Brian Harman - Datagolf seems to love this guy. I think he’s a good player but not quite as bullish on him.
Russell Henley - Trending up, still think his ceiling is a bit higher than what he’s shown and strong on approaches. Win #4 could be coming soon.
Sungjae Im - First top 10 in months and could be rounding into form at the right time.
Kevin Streelman - Playing good golf but can’t quite seem to finish strong on Sunday.
Cameron Davis - Last week’s winner finds another easy target for scoring.
Si Woo Kim - Trending in the wrong direction lately.
Sleepers:
Jhonathan Vegas - Poor man’s version of Morikawa/Thomas/Zalatoris/Bradley. Good ball-striker but close your eyes when he putts.
Troy Merritt - Playing very well lately. A win could be coming.
Patton Kizzire - Streaky player with good upside as good weeks typically land him inside the Top 20
Harold Varner III - He always shows up once or twice a year, usually on easier golf courses
For Streelman, he has 2 Top 10s, 3 Top 20s and 3 Top 40s in his last 10 events. If you backed him in the Top 10/20/40 markets for those, you will be doing well but his value has tightened since the Charles Schwab.
Vegas is positive T2G in his last six events and in the two events that he was positive for SG Putting, he finished Top 10.
I will be surprised if there is value in the place market for either of them given that.
Haha, maybe… Leishman is a good comparison player. But I think we are correct about Higgo – he’s not going to be very good . His year so far is really not that impressive; he has been putting the lights out.
Is there anything factored in for links golf in the Scottish Open predictions? Some of the PGA players DG is recommending seem to have little to no experience on courses like they’ll see this week.
Turns out it’s Steve Stricker week . We have already made an explicit adjustment to Champions Tour data to ensure we aren’t adjusting it incorrectly (I was worried about airing on the side of assigning field strengths that were too strong). Briefly, we just did a simple backtest to see how player’s performed relative to expectation as a function of what fraction of the rounds that went into their prediction were from the Champions Tour.
Stricker’s baseline is good but it’s mainly the course-specific bump doing the work this week. Proceed with caution…
No, there is not. We have course fit adjustments from the Renaissance Club but no general links adjustment. We’ll probably have something for next week, e.g. a general Open Championship fit adjustment.
We are on the Favourites at the Scottish which in general I like, as I think the overall skill of the European Tour is overvalued… but I think we’d all agree Links golf tends to compress the skill distribution, so it could be a bit iffy.
Thanks, I’d agree with both of these points (European Tour standard heavily over-rated, treading carefully with the likes of Conners and Burns who as far as I can see have barely played links golf, let alone had any good results).
Thanks for your encouragement, yeah there are ups and downs but I just fire a few dozen more bets and cross my fingers. Mostly I’m sweating the prices and not the results.
My Top 20 wagers for the week, much thanks to Datagolf. I managed to win the race this week. Not nearly as optimistic about next week.
Golfer
Wagered_Odds
Current_Odds
Units
Stricker
3.300
2.900
0.38
Stanley
3.600
3.200
0.34
Howell III
4.100
3.500
0.30
Bramlett
7.000
5.500
0.18
D Lee
7.000
6.000
0.18
M Thompson
7.000
4.200
0.18
Streb
7.000
5.900
0.18
Whaley
7.000
5.900
0.18
Laird
7.500
4.600
0.16
Burgoon
8.000
7.000
0.16
Dufner
8.000
6.500
0.16
Brown
9.500
8.000
0.14
Long
9.500
5.900
0.14
Sabbatini
9.500
7.000
0.14
Schenk
9.500
5.900
0.14
Landry
10.000
10.000
0.12
Smalley
10.500
9.500
0.12
Villegas
10.500
7.000
0.12
Lahiri
11.000
8.000
0.12
Malnati
11.000
9.500
0.12
Seiffert
11.000
8.000
0.12
Teater
11.000
7.000
0.12
Oppenheim
14.000
11.000
0.10
Shelton
14.000
11.000
0.10
If I hit 4 of 24 I will finish in the green. As last week showed, it is not easy at all. Still, I gave myself the best possible chance of winning.
In general I don’t see any trends here - throwing darts with longshots and hoping a few hit. I don’t think bombing it off the tee will make as big a difference this week.
Sorry. Didn’t realize this until we were emailed this morning by someone. Not that it matters, but it was a bug caused by the PGA Tour listing a made up flag code for Luke Gannon…
Holy cow anyone been looking at the DK odds this weekend? Literally seems like they are copying and pasting DG odds and adding juice. Literally no value
. His 
. We have already made an explicit adjustment to Champions Tour data to ensure we aren’t adjusting it incorrectly (I was worried about airing on the side of assigning field strengths that were too strong). Briefly, we just did a simple backtest to see how player’s performed relative to expectation as a function of what fraction of the rounds that went into their prediction were from the Champions Tour.