Smart Golf Betting Isn’t Easy

With the close of March Madness, let’s turn a smart gambling eye to another compelling event for wagering: the Masters.

Professional golf tournaments are really fun to bet on! There’s plenty of drama over four consecutive days and a massive swath of bet types to consider.

Unfortunately, betting golf profitably is very difficult.

Sportsbooks build in a massive (and hard to detect) house edge to many betting markets, popular bet types are paid differently by different books, and there are a ton of variables to consider when trying to handicap a field.

Today, as the Robin Hood of sports betting — taking from the books and giving back to bettors — I’m excited to educate you on how to maximize your golf betting outcomes.

We’ll talk through the most important nuances to understand and plan around, and include strategies for maximizing your golf bets’ chance to strike gold.

As always, we’ll close with our bets of the week, focused on golf.

Let’s get after it.

Large House Edge in Golf Betting Markets

The first challenge to overcome in golf betting is avoiding the wrong markets to play.

The most popular types of golf bets include:

1. Outright Winner — pretty self explanatory; your golfer must win the tournament.

2. Top 5/10/20 — a bet that your golfer finishes in the top 5, top 10, or top 20 golfers. Ties add complexity to these bets; more on that in our next section.

3. Matchup Bets — head to head comparisons between two golfers, either for a specific round or the whole tournament.

4. Make/Miss the Cut – whether a golfer will make or miss the cut after the first two rounds.

5. Props – creative wagers such as “will there be a hole in one” or “over/under 270 total birdies on day one”.

We’ve talked about how to calculate house edge in various betting markets, and even identified markets with a negative house edge when betting season long futures.

Sadly, the house edge in the most popular “outright winner” and “top 5/10/20” markets is ugly. It’s at least five times larger than a typical spread bet.

The “overround” (the sum of implied probabilities across all golfers) in outright winner markets often exceeds 140%. This translates into a house edge of 30% or more.

Even when shopping across all eight sportsbooks I use in New York, I was unable to create an outright winner market with less than 20% hold.

Matchup bets, by contrast, show a much more modest house edge to overcome.

Here’s a look at typical house edge by bet type in golf:

You can see the benefit of focusing on “matchup” or “make/miss the cut” bets and being wary of “winner” or “top 5” markets based on the numbers alone.

Pro tip: If you really want to make “Outright Winner” bets, or otherwise reduce the house edge you need to overcome in tough markets, place your bets on exchanges like NoVig or even Kalshi.

The best sportsbook line on Scheffler to win after Thursday’s round was BetMGM at +225.

Kalshi has Scheffler trading at 29%, which is equal to a +245 money line.

That difference is a big deal.

Let’s now explore the complex rules around ties in golf betting.

Ties and “Dead Heat” Rules

A frequent scenario when betting “Top 5/10/20” markets, or even prop bets like “first round leader,” is having two or more golfers finish in a tie.

For example, you might have 3 golfers finish the first round at -4, creating three winners when one winning slot was accounted for.

Or you could have 6 golfers tie in 19th on a “Top 20” bet, creating six winners when two slots (19th place and 20th place) were accounted for.

Confusingly, different sportsbooks handle this exact scenario differently, so comparing odds amongst them becomes a really complex problem.

Let’s break it down with an example comparing the approach of three popular books:

We place a $100 bet on Viktor Hovland to finish in the top 5 of a golf tournament at odds of +500. At the end of the tournament, Hovland ties for 4th place with three other golfers. This creates a four-way tie for two spots (4th place and 5th place) in the top 5.

How will you be paid at different sportsbooks?

Scenario 1: BetMGM — “Pay All Ties”

BetMGM pays all ties in full, taking the most generous approach. This means your bet is unaffected by the number of tied players. You receive the full payout as if Hovland finished outright fifth.

Stake: $100

Odds: +500

Payout: $100 × 5.0 + $100 (initial stake) = $600

Scenario 2: DraftKings — “Dead Heat Rules with Reduced Odds”

Books that apply “Dead Heat” rules to ties reduce your payout based on the ratio of available winning positions to tied winning golfers.

In our example, Hovland was one of four winning golfers tied for an allocation of two spots (4th and 5th).

Here’s how DraftKings would do the math:

Stake: $100

Odds Adjustment: 2/4 = 0.5 * +500 odds = +250 odds

Payout: $100 × 2.5 + $100 (initial stake) = $350

Scenario 3: FanDuel — “Dead Heat Rules with Reduced Stake”

This approach is the worst for the bettor.

FanDuel also uses Dead Heat rules, but reduces your stake by dividing it amongst tied participants, while keeping the odds the same.

Let’s do the math:

Adjusted Stake: $50 (half of our initial $100 stake due to two available spots for four tied golfers)

Odds: +500

Payout: $50 × 5 + $50 (adjusted stake) = $300

Here’s a table to sum up all three scenarios:

While it might seem like an obvious move to make Top 5/10/20 bets at BetMGM, they nearly always offer lower odds than their competitors to balance out the benefits of paying all ties in full.

Pro tip: The best rule of thumb I found on where to place Top 5/10/20 bets (if you must), came from this thoughtful analysis by Byron Lindeque.

He found that placing Top 20 bets at odds of +200 or shorter had better ROI at DraftKings, inclusive of their more generous lines. By contrast, long shot bets to finish in the Top 20 had higher ROI with BetMGM’s “pay all ties” approach, even when accounting for weaker odds.

FanDuel’s approach to Dead Heat payouts is so oppressive that I’d only consider their lines when they had a meaningful (read: 20%) improvement over BetMGM, and beat DraftKings by 5% or more.

For those in the golf betting game, I’m confident incorporating the guidance above will cut your losses and juice your winnings.

Now let’s make some bets.

Bets of the Week $$

Last week we went 2-0 and won 1.47 units. Houston delivered a comeback for the ages against Duke, winning both our spread bet and our money line add-on!

This clip seemed to validate our hypothesis that Houston would get a “home court” style lift from the crowd and proximity to campus. What a game.

Since starting the newsletter, bets given out in this section are ahead 12.97 units, at a positive 19% ROI. A $100 bettor would be up $1297! We’ll continue updating this each week.

Based on my research, I am making the following bets before Friday’s golf:

• Rory McIlroy @-155 matchup vs Ludvig Aberg on DraftKings for 0.5 units

• John Rahm @-150 matchup vs Tommy Fleetwood on DraftKings for 0.5 units

I find the content on Datagolf as good as any for handicapping golf tournaments midstream. Both of these bets are based on reads I’m making from their live blog.

Next week we’ll talk about the NBA play-in tournament and playoff landscape.

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