Tipico Tips: Betting the 2021 Zurich Classic

This week’s PGA tour event, The Zurich Classic, is a unique tournament for the tour, as its only team event on the FedEx Cup calendar. You read that correctly: This week, the field is made up of 80 two-man teams.

The best 35 teams and ties will make the cut and play the weekend after the first and second rounds. Rounds 1 and 3 will play as four-ball (team best ball), while Rounds 2 and 4 will play alternate shot (each teammate tee off every other hole, alternating every shot thereafter to finish out the hole).

This will be the fourth iteration of this event, and after digging back through the first three versions of this tournament, I’ve decided to take a few deeper shots this week on Tipico Sportsbook. It’s a bit more of a dice roll this week in my opinion because these are all professional golfers who are very capable of scoring low with a partner to help erase any errors they typically couldn’t get away from during a normal week.

Zurich Classic long shot picks

Russell Knox and Brian Stuard +9000
Adam Schenk and Tyler Duncan +10000

With the way I cap an event and run my models, I haven’t found a great way to go about simulating this event. I took a different approach than a usual week of running event simulation and instead broke out a handful on individual stats for each golfer, combined them with their partner, and then tried to identity a couple teams that complement each other well and whose games should mesh well for the alternate shot portion of the event. The biggest spreads were during the alternate shot rounds in the past events and golfer can potentially gain a fair number of strokes on the field playing well during alternate shot.

We will see come Sunday how well this approach will work but the teams I selected are built of golfers that have shown promise in (potentially) key areas to excel at TPC Louisiana and in this team format. Hopefully these teams are using proper strategy on choosing who tees off on odd and even holes to best suit their skill sets because if they do that, I believe both of my selections can find themselves near the top come Sunday afternoon.

I’m hoping that the overall styles of these teams can lead them to excel during the alternate shot portion of this event while they have decent enough birdie or better rates to stay with the rest of the field during the best-ball portion of this tournament.

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