Easy courses are the absolute best courses for betting. Just carpet-bomb your betting card with tons of longshots, preferably with T10 and T20 bets. A good number of players are likely to hit at long odds. A big price can win too.
Sure birdiefests aren’t that fun to watch on TV but if you have a lot of longshot wagers going you will have a blast watching the action on Sunday.
If I wanted to truly Tiger-proof a course I would set up the course with no rough, slow and soft greens, and put the pins in the flat spots near the middle of the green. -30 would win and it would come down to the player who made a ton of putts outside of 10 feet.
See I broadly agree with that. Let’s say that to contend for a win this week players are going to need to shoot approximately -20. In the last couple of US Opens, players will have looked at between level par and a couple under as a reasonable score to contend.
It seems to me that there are a lot more players capable of achieivng the former compared to the latter. Kevin Kisner went on record as saying that he knew he couldn’t contend at Torrey Pines, but he was 3rd here last year. The tougher it gets, the more players are immediately eliminated from winning the tournament.
Just a thought here. Maybe update the “'Custom tools” page a bit early with the correct course/field so that members can do the extra work to evaluate matchups without making it super easy for the bookmakers to literally just copy/paste your true odds.
What happened with the experiment of releasing the model later the other week? I mean did people find a bunch of value that week that wasn’t available other weeks?
From a pure golf standpoint though, the easy courses don’t punish bad shots enough and those that are a little loose can still contend. That’s why you have “lesser” golfers in contention more. At a major if any part of your game is off you get exposed which is why the best players usually rise to the top. Whereas in an “easy” tour event, someone could be be a little loose with the long game and just putt well and still contend, for example.
You can never prevent the bookmakers from updating the odds in real time or increasing the juice with every update. However it does seem that they are scraping off the odds from the Betting Tools (Outright, Matchup/3-ball). I actually prefer it when the odds from Betting Tools are not up. Doing a manual check using the Pre-tourney predictions and the Prop tool takes longer, but it also takes the bookmakers longer so I have a better chance of beating them to the punch.
(Exception: the Top 10 odds during the 1st two rounds, when the betting tools is the only way to see them)
Unless I’m mistaken Louis Oosthuizen played well in many of the events where Wolff and DeChambeau excelled at.
I guess it’s always easy to build a narrative after the fact.
The stats say that accuracy isn’t punished too bad at Detroit Golf Club and that it’s a birdiefest. Maybe the right way to go about this is to go after the short-to-medium hitters who are inaccurate off the tee but excel in other parts of the game.
Out of interest which books do you think are scraping the outright odds?
I agree the pre-tourney predictions are the main thing for me. The outright betting tool is quite nice to have at this stage.
Honestly i could live without the matchup/3ball & tournament props till tomorrow - they seem to be pretty static in the UK books unless they see some serious money, so I tend to attack those later on.
Those place markets have pretty hefty overrounds though, and are less popular than outrights with recreational players - so they probably cut on money… what comes first the chicken or the egg? I.e. are they directly copying datagolf or just reacting to bets from datagolf customers. Again I would be curious to know if a bunch of value sat around in the other weeks experiment of releasing the model late?
Don’t believe draftkings are copying outright -
Doug Ghim was one the bookies got wrong, a lot of smart money has driven his price down. Draftkings now appear to be standout price and value v datagolf. If the model had been released late we might have missed doug ghim was ever over 126 because the smart money was driving him down regardless of datagolf.
Dahmen is one i believe datagolf have priced too short and showing as value. No-one has really cut his price since yesterday and Draftkings have entered the market at a standout higher price. So they certainly haven’t copied datagolf there.
I don’t think anyone is literally just copy/pasting our odds. There are always a few guys that the market is willing to take a stand on when our model seems off. However, as Daniel mentions, Pinnacle and DK are particularly bad, especially in the place markets. Pinnacle some weeks will show zero value with our model!
For those who have been around our site for a long time, they would know that something is amiss when there are only 7-8 guys showing positive EV in an outright market. That is a very, very small amount of disagreement for 2 independent models to show on a field of 156 guys. Yes, there is a lot of juice, and so some of the model disagreement is “hidden” in the sea of negative EV (i.e. some guys are -10%, others are -50%), but still if you start playing around with our my-model tool you’ll quickly realize that altering a few lower-ranked guys’ skill levels by a few tenths of a stroke can often make them value. And I would argue that independent models should show that kind of disagreement not infrequently in a field of 156 guys.
As I’ve said before, this mainly applies to the outright/place markets. The matchup markets are a different animal, and I think there is less copying going on. BetOnline is an exception, as they always seem to open near our numbers. Pinnacle will be near our numbers by Tuesday (side note: I’ve never seen them open as late as they did this week), but that is usually because their numbers have moved towards ours from opening (i.e. they did not open right at our numbers).
A final point is that whether we post late or not, the information from our model (and other models… I know we aren’t the only one) will still be in the market. When the PGA Tour and European Tour plays similar events many weeks in a row with a lot of overlap in fields, presumably the betting markets get sharper. They know how the market priced guys last week. They know how we priced guys last week. When we have posted later, it often hasn’t made a huge difference in how much value the model shows. The one week it did seem to make a difference was the 54-hole Porsche event, but that was also a unique format so that might have played a role too.
If they aren’t copying/pasting the odds, and are maintaining differences on some players I would be inclined to say the bookies are reacting to people betting from here rather than copying odds.
How many users do you have? What kind of stakes do you think people are putting down? I imagine if your model shows someone big green a book could quite quickly rack up a disproportionate liability on a player in a to be placed market so its natural the price is cut.
Which is how Pinnacles model works, I can’t comment what they use for opening golf lines but I know they start lower limits then adjust prices and raise limits as the markets become active - so if datagolf users are first in the market then they will force Pinnacle to copy datagolf pricing.
Pinnacles current pricing on the european looks OK to me verses datagolf? Plenty showing value. They did cut Pieters but i know he was seeing money this morning in the UK so thats to be expected.
To put things in perspective this is what I’m facing. These are the T20 wagers I made this week.
Golfer
Wagered_Odds
Current_Odds
Ghim
4.60
3.90
Howell III
4.60
3.90
Griffin
5.90
4.60
Jones
5.90
4.80
Dahmen
6.00
5.60
Varner III
6.50
4.20
Hahn
8.00
8.00
Lebioda
8.00
6.50
Werenski
8.00
7.00
Bramlett
8.50
7.50
N Taylor
8.50
7.00
D Lee
9.50
8.00
Frittelli
9.50
7.00
McCarthy
9.50
8.00
Nesmith
9.50
7.00
Whaley
9.50
8.00
Chappell
10.00
8.50
Piercy
10.00
8.50
Sloan
11.00
8.50
An
12.00
7.00
Dufner
12.00
10.50
Burgoon
13.00
11.00
Schenk
13.00
10.50
Duncan
15.00
11.00
Hagy
15.00
14.00
Lahiri
15.00
12.00
McCumber
15.00
10.50
Pak
15.00
12.00
C Thompson
101.00
12.00
Every time the odds come out I feel like I’m in a race and if I don’t win the race, my chances of winning are gone. By the way my ROI in T20 wagering is like 5% so if I don’t get the best odds I’m dead.
I have similar issues Daniel Song. My favoured bookmaker for T20/40 released prices after Datagolf predictions were released so it was a reaction to money rather than DG information that dropped odds. Odds dropped within 3 hours of release though.
My response will probably annoy you but if you are getting that volume of bets down at 5% ROI I would say you are doing well, even if you have to be on the ball for it.
The challenge of having found a betting edge is everyone else wants in - bookmakers will spot it and cut prices/stake restrict players, other players will join in sooner or later adding pressure on the prices too. If the value drips through the exchanges they want a piece, premium charges on profitable players and one exchange here even started levying 5% commission on certain individuals placing back bets on certain markets!
Its a constantly evolving game to keep ahead, I wonder if the success of datagolf is causing a tipping point now in price pressure with bookies
Levying a tax on an exchange is just dumb. An exchange is just that, an avenue for punters to create their own prices.
In an exchange you want volume and price efficiency so I would think you should do the opposite, offer fee remissions for those who over a certain threshold of fees paid. You want liquidity and you accomplish that with lots of trades and small bid-ask spreads.
Also you want to tax people based on the total profits on a given market. That way if you make $2000 in trades in a market and generate $100 in profit (before fees) you tax the people based on the $100 and not the $2000. To do otherwise is shortsighted. You want to generate volume.
By the way I’m not just making stuff up, I observed all of this actually happen in TradeSports (RIP).