3 Free Bets for the 2024 Presidents Cup

Once a year, golf fans are graced with team competition, alternating between the Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup. This year it’s the Presidents Cup, hosted by the International Squad at Royal Montreal Golf Club.

This biennial competition has seen the American win nine straight editions. The 2003 edition was a tie, and the only outright International win came way back in 1998. Could this be the year the Canadians and crew break that slump? Possibly, but let’s dig into the course first to see what it tells us.

Course Fit

Royal Monteal is the host venue this week. The course setup will be dictated by the home team, as usual.

This Dick Wilson design was built in the 1950s and renovated by Rees Jones in 2004. We saw it as recently as 2007 when it hosted this very same event.

Glancing at the scorecard, we see a par 70 that can stretch to as long as 7,413 yards from the tips. That is pretty beefy for a par 70 with just one par 4 under 425 yards and six of the par 4s lining up over 460 yards. That should put plenty of mid- and long irons into the hands of these players.

Looking at the turf, we see typical bent/poa grass, as you’d expect when entering the Great White North.

When listening to the Day 1 pressers, we heard a ton about the small, undulated greens. Ruffles would be a great sponsor of the event with all of the talk of ridges this week. We also heard golfers talk about the importance of finding the fairway. The rough is not overly penal in most spots but with tiny greens and lots of undulations on the greens, the importance of spin control from the fairways is vital for setting up birdie looks.

Looking at courses with similar splits (long irons, big penalty for missing the fairway, and bent-poa turf), we find the following 10 names showing the most improvement on their low round rates relative to their baseline:

Max Homa
Hideki Matsuyama
Corey Conners
Keegan Bradley
Min Woo Lee
Collin Morikawa
Taylor Pendrith
Brian Harman
Scottie Scheffler
Russell Henley

Seven of these 10 names were Captain’s Picks, so perhaps the analytics teams were looking at similar data when making their final selections.

Outright Odds

Here’s what the top of the match odds looks like on DraftKings Sportsbook:

Based on history, you’d probably expect the Americans to be implied to win more than 71% of the time but that is what we see. The Internationals are a trendy upset pick but does +275 provide enough incentive to take the underdog? Let’s see.

Presidents Cup Free Golf Bets

Team USA to Win -250

On paper, this is one of the closer gaps between Team USA and the International Team. That said, there is still a big gap. The Americans lost in Rome last year (Ryder Cup) so they should be hungry to regroup and not overlook the Internationals just because they’ve won so many in a row.

I don’t love eating this much chalk so I may try to sprinkle some additional bets in favor of the Americans but when picking one team of the other, I’d still rather lay the big price with Team USA.

Russell Henley Top Captain’s Pick (+900)

Back in the old days it may have been hard for a team rookie of his age to play enough matches to win this category. However, in the era of advanced analytics, the US team room likely knows how dangerous a weapon Henley can be.

Looking at my weighted baseline metrics, he ranks 5th in the entire field and fourth on Team USA behind workhorses Scottie, Xander and Morikawa. He deserves to be priced closer to Sam Burns here (+210), but we get more than 4x that price on Henley.

Russell Henley Top Rookie (+550)

Everything I just said about Russ still applies but now he’s facing off against Wyndham Clark, Sahith Theegala and Brian Harman in this category.

The assumption with this bet is that the Americans will use analytics to see that Henley is potentially their fourth best player and if we assume all four of these golfers play four matches then Henley does not deserve to be more than double the price of everyone else in this prop category.

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