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Chris Meaney
The PGA Tour playoffs come to an end this week in Atlanta. It’s the Tour Championship at East Lake.
You may be familiar with the format of the event but if not, here is a quick refresher. The top 30 golfers in the FedEx Cup standings are invited to play in the finale. The scoring format is a 72-hour stroke-play event, but the unique aspect is the starting strokes assigned to each golfer. Golfers will start from anywhere between 0 and 10 strokes under-par, based on their FedEx Cup rank to start the week.
This is a wonky format, but it gets the weird math out of the way and does let us focus on the 72 holes of action at East Lake. So, let’s jump right in and talk about the course.
Course Fit
East Lake Golf Club is the host venue this week. It’s the longtime host of this playoff finale, but it did receive a renovation since last year.
Right out of the gate we notice this Donald Ross design is now a par 71 with the par-4 14th now being played as a par 5. Other notable changes include regrassing to new variations of zoysia and bermuda while the fairways and greens have been recontoured to fit more in line with old aerial photos.
As we often see when courses regrass the greens, we get a year or two of settling in while they play very firm those first few editions. That looks to be the case here based on quotes from Andrew Green who led the renovation efforts, “Yeah, the greens are probably as firm as they’ll ever be, but that’s also OK. It maximizes the players’ intention. Augusta this year played really different because of how firm the greens were. So I think you’ll see something similar here.”
With bermuda rough and firm greens, we should expect the penalty for missing the fairway to remain large, as we’ve seen in previous editions here.
Comfort putting on those bermuda greens will be a big positive as well, so let’s use those two angles for our split-stat attack to course fit.
Here are the names who show the biggest increase in performance when playing courses with similar splits, relative to their baseline.
- Keegan Bradley
- Viktor Hovland
- Matthieu Pavon
- Sungjae Im
- Justin Thomas
- Patrick Cantlay
- Sepp Straka
- Wyndham Clark
- Byeong Hun An
- Chris Kirk
Head over to the Split Stats page to see who the top performers are in these split stat categories.
Outright Odds
Here’s what the top of the board looks like on DraftKings Sportsbook:
The starting strokes play a huge role in these prices. Make sure you check where your golfers are starting before tossing out any outrights this week.
Tour Championship Free Golf Bets
Sungjae Im over Keegan Bradley — R1 Matchup (-120)
First let’s look at baseline data and we see that Sungjae gets the better of Bradley in performance over 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years. When we isolate same-course-same-round results from the last year, Sungjae wins 58% of those rounds together which would imply a -138 fair price here.
Add in the local comfort angle, with Sungjae being a local resident, and I like this opening-round price.
Russell Henley Top 10 Finish (+220)
When you look at past results at East Lake, hitting more greens than the field in particular, Henley stands out.
When looking at percentage of rounds where a golfer hits more greens than the field that list is Adam Scott, Viktor Hovland, and then Russell Henley.
He’s opening the week with two starting strokes which is two shots outside of 10th place but that’s a small hill to climb over the course of four days.
Viktor Hovland to Win 14-1 (72-hole stroke-play, one-fourth each-way for 4 places)
It will be very tough to catch Scottie and Xander this week but there are plenty of markets that take those starting strokes out of the equation. This one in particular is looking at the best 72-hole score regardless of starting strokes.
What stands out for Hovland? He’s fifth in the world in ball-striking over the last three months, getting back to his old ways after a slow start to the year.
East Lake has a very big penalty for missing the fairway and Hovland ranks second in the field in go-low rates on similar courses, behind only Scottie Scheffler. He’s only seventh in the field in terms of baseline go-low rates over the two-year window, so this kind of course definitely elevates his game. He’s proven that too with a plus-5 course monster score which is third behind only Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele.
Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.
