2023 Shriners Children’s Open Betting Preview

The FedEx Fall pushes on this week as the PGA Tour heads to Las Vegas for the Shriners Children’s Open. In theory, all of the Tour events contribute to local charities but this one and the St. Jude tug at the heartstrings a bit more. 

Let’s dive into the course, look at the odds board, and then see if any names pop off the page. 

Course Fit

The first step of the process is always to evaluate the course. 

This week’s host venue is the TPC Summerlin. It’s a par 71 that plays to 7,255 yards. When you factor in altitude and generous fairways, this becomes a rather short course. 

Looking at the scoring environment, we see that past winners nearly always land in the 20- to 25-under range so it’s definitely in the easy bucket. 

From there we can also include performance in the West region and performance on bentgrass greens. 

Next we toss all of those splits into a blender and sort by a hybrid of consistency (made-cut-worthy performances) and upside (top-20-worthy performances). This is what that list looks like: 

Ludvig Aberg
Si Woo Kim
Tom Kim
Andrew Putnam
Cam Davis
Taylor Montgomery
Alex Noren
Tom Hoge
J.T. Poston
Austin Eckroat
Taylor Pendrith
Beau Hossler
J.J. Spaun
Justin Suh
Adam Hadwin

Tom Kim is the defending champ and grades out well again this week. Taylor Montgomery has Vegas roots so perhaps we see him find some game after a long slump. Justin Suh practices out of TPC Summerlin so there is a lot to like there as well. Check out the Splits Stats page for a complete look at the field. 

Outright Odds

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

There are some appealing names on the list but none that are regulars at the top of an odds board. Perhaps then it’s a good time to look for some value away from the top of the list. 

Finish Position Market

The outright markets are most common when looking at golf bets but there is plenty of value to be found in the other markets. Last week we had Ben Griffin flirt with his first-round lead bet but did end up cashing the top-10 bet. Who stands out this week? 

Matthew NeSmith Top 10 Finish

Best available: +600 (DraftKings Sportsbook)
Worst available: +500

One of the first things that stood out for me this week was NeSmith’s insane course monster score. He’s twirled top-25 percentile rounds in 10-of-16 rounds at TPC Summerlin. During that time, he hasn’t had any rounds in the bottom-25 percentile.

NeSmith has turned that into three top-20s (one being a runner-up finish) and a T40 but kind of surprising that his finishes here don’t look even better. 

When I sift through my database, I notice that golfers with at least a plus-8 course monster score going on to post top 10s at a whopping 47% clip. When I looked at the subset of golfers with comparable weighted baseline numbers as NeSmith, they were hitting top 10s more than 50% of the time so this isn’t just a case of elite golfers beating up on mediocre fields year after year. 

When a golfer has an outlier course history score like these, we should definitely target. His value popped for me in all markets down to the top-30 finish market, but top-10 finish provided the best blend of upside and expected hit rate. 

Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. I may add an each-way on NeSmith if BetRivers puts out a good number. Hop in the discord to get those bet alerts. 

It may feel like a down period for PGA betting or PGA DFS but I’m extremely pumped for this FedEx Fall Series. Use promo code CULP when signing up for FTNBets and FTNDaily to get a 10% discount while staying sharp in the fall. I think it’s going to be a very fun finish to 2023 with so much of the competition having their attention stolen away by NFL.