What to know before betting golf

The 106th rendition of the PGA Championship tees off on Thursday at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky. bringing with it waves upon waves of ill-advised wagers, perilously foolish parlays, and people blaming their misfortunes on bad luck instead of bad betting.

The amount of money spent on sports betting for the event should far exceed the $3.15 million purse designated for first place, too.

Just last month alone, Barstool Sports founder and CEO Dave Portnoy doled out $300,000 on Scottie Scheffler to win his second Masters at +450 odds, a bet that netted hima cool $1.35 million.

Sportsbooks offer a smorgasbord of bets each year leading up to each of the PGA Tour’s four majors, and this week is no different.

From betting the over/under on an individual’s round one score to who will finish first among the field’s South African golfers (yes, nationality props are a thing), it’s hard to find a bet that you can’t make ahead of golf’s second major of the 2024 season.

But before you dump your weekly pizza allowance into betting Tiger Woods to win the PGA Championship at 180:1 odds next weekend, let’s get back to the basics of sports betting 101 and how to actually win money while wagering on golf.

Let’s call them 10 commandments of golf betting here below, starting with …

I. Thou shalt always price shop

Not all of us have Portnoy’s level of disposable income and can’t afford to lay down six-figure golf bets. But what we can do is always place our bets at the cheapest shops, or in this case, the best-priced sportsbook apps.

Over time, these margins addup: for example, placing a bet at “-130” means you must bet $130 to win $100 (or $13 to win $10), as opposed to finding a different sportsbook that has the same bet offered for “-105” (bet $105 to win $100, for example). Time is money, and price shopping is always worth the time.

II. Know thy bankroll

In layman’s terms, know what you can afford to lose. The best sports bettors in the world lose roughly 46-47 bets out of every 100 they place. That’s a lot of losing. It might not sound sexy, but the industry’s biggest “sharp” bettors rarely bet more than 2% of their total bankroll on any wager.

If you start with a $1,000 bankroll, that means your standard bet size (“unit”) should never exceed $20. That’s not only how you manage your money, but how you grow it over time. Rome wasn’t built in one day, nor was anyone’s sports betting bankroll.

III. Thou shalt read the (dead heat) rules

Imagine you place a bet on Xander Schauffele to finish in the top 10 at last year’s Masters. You run to the leader board and see him listed as “T10” and fist-pump the air with joy. Then you check your account balance on your sportsbook’s app and see that your $50 bet at +400 odds netted you just $50 in return.

Wait what? Most sportsbooks employ “dead heat rules” where if you bet on a golfer to finish in a specific position by tournament’s end, and that golfer ties, then the winnings are split via the number of golfers he tied with.

IV. Bet with thy head, not thy heart

At every major event, we might as well call this “The Tiger Woods Rule.” As much as we all love Tiger and his unflinching status as golf’s G.O.A.T., it’s a fool’s errand to bet a 180:1 long-shot price on a 48-year-old man still on a long journey toward rehabbing his way back to consistent form.

Want to bet $10 or $100 on Tiger this weekend in a reasonable way? It’s simple: don’t bet it on him to win the whole damn thing. Bet it on him to make the cut, something he did successfully at lastmonth’s Masters.

V. Honor thy early tee time golfers

Early morning golfers usually have a sizeable firstround advantage on a typical clear weather day because the greens are softer and more conducive to lower scores.

This isn’t the end-all, be-all for golf betting, but it should almost always be used as a guide toward placing those round-one specific wagers. Always monitor for “bad weather” here, too.

VI. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s parlay

Parlays are losing bets. Sucker bets. These bets win money for the sportsbooks, not us. Needle-in-the-haystack bets are what you almost always want to avoid in any sport when it comes to betting.

Sportsbooks love to sell us pipe-dream, millionaire overnight tales of gamblers hitting these gargantuan parlays on a daily basis. You know what they don’t do? Tell you about the 99%+ who LOSE these bets. The lottery is nothing new, folks.

VII. Bet with purpose, not with prayers

It’s not just about avoiding parlays here. It’s about embracing the one avenue we can take advantage of the sportsbooks: two-way markets. Over/under on a golfer’s score for a round, head-to-head matchups between two golfers or make vs. miss cut bets are wagers where the bookies cannot hide their tax.

Most of your bankroll should be used exclusively to bet two-way markets where that golden number of 53% winners can be attained over time. This is a long-term, profitable betting strategy.

VIII. Thou shalt not bet all thy money before Round 1

This is all about live betting. More than any other major sport, golf is as much a numbers game as a mental one. Metrics like recent form, course history, betting certain tee time waves and using stokes gained data to bet can all be essential, readily-available tools to help us profit when betting on golf.

Websites DataGolf.com pull data directly from the ShotLink technology used at sanctioned PGA events and can show you things like which golfer’s skill profile fits a given course and how a golfer is performing on key course metrics (e.g., “strokes gained off the tee”) after a given round. Trust the data.

IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness to ‘putting variance’

Research has shown that putting is the most challenging stat to predict in golf. Most of the world’s topranked golfers (and recent champions) are ranked near the top in both strokes gained approach and strokes gained off the tee, but not in putting.

Conversely, there are four types of strokes gained data that a golfer exhibits each time they approach a new tee on a typical par-4 hole: off the tee (first shot), approach (second shot), around the green (chipping/third shot) and putting (likely the fourth shot of a given hole). We’ll get into this a bit more below.

X. Observe the strokes gained data, for it is holy

Data-driven golf betting has gained in popularity over the years and for good reason. Depending on a particular course, one of these strokes gained stats mentioned above might also hold more weight than the others. It can also help you discover hidden betting edges after roundone of a tournament.

It’s before a tournament begins when things are the most unpredictable for us to handicap. After a tournament starts, though? That’s when we have the most significant edge.

Chris Dell is the founder of BettingPredators.com and former sports betting analyst for ESPN 97.5’s “Late Hits.” He’s also the sports editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. You can reach him via email cdell@post-gazette.com and @MaddJournalist on X