2023 Tour Championship Betting Preview

This weeks Tour Championship is the final event of the 2023 PGA Tour campaign. It should be a huge deal, but the tournament usually goes off with a whimper thanks to the format. 

With just 30 golfers remaining, match play would be the ideal format for viewing, but they’ve opted for a handicapped stroke-play format. 

We will work with what they’ve given us and see if there are any interesting betting markets available. 

Course Fit

Our first stop each week is the course-fit zone. 

It’s much harder to analyze past course fit at East Lake when we are dealing with small samples (30-man fields), a handicapped scoring format (golfers starting close to the bottom needed to play more aggressive) and a stacked field (these are the best of the best, so it’s hard to find many cracks in their game). 

That said, let’s take a quick glance at the leaderboards from the last five Tour Championships. We will filter for the top-five finishes and look at their lead-in form (24 rounds) before the big finish. 

Here are my takeaways. 

The lowest tee-to-green performance among eventual contenders was +13.6 gained over their 24 lead-in rounds. There are 12 golfers in the field this week that have gained fewer than 13 strokes tee-to-green in recent rounds. It’s unlikely they are live to contend in a stacked field like this. 

When breaking those categories down individually, only two (of 28) past contenders were losing strokes off-the-tee in the lead up while just one was losing on approach. On the flip side, five were losing strokes around-the-green and seven were losing strokes putting. This is a classic case of wanting to lean on the in-form ball strikers. 

What about power versus precision? Only 28% of the stacks fields in the last five years arrived with a driving distance less than Tour average. That number shrinks even more when looking at the eventual contenders. Only seven percent of top-5 finishers had arrived with driving distance less than Tour average. The course is not overly long but you can give yourself some good wedge opportunities if you can pound it out there at East Lake. 

Who would rank highly in this simply ball-striking model that puts an emphasis on power? Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, Patrick Cantlay, Viktor Hovland, Jon Rahm, Corey Conners, Lucas Glover, Ricke Fowler, Xander Schauffele and Sam Burns would be the top 10 this week while Matt Fitzpatrick, Brian Harman, Nick Taylor, Sepp Straka and Emiliano Grillo would be the five bottom scrapers.  

Outright Odds

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

The handicapping element of the Tour Championship really shrinks this board down to a few likely winners and the betting board reflects that. 

Odds Shopping

There are often large gaps in pricing when it comes to betting golf. Using our prop shop tool is vital when it comes to saving time and money betting golf. 

Patrick Cantlay Top 10 Finish

Best available: -185 (PointsBet)
Worst available: -225

Patty will start in a share of sixth place this week, so this bet is cashing right out of the gate. 

When looking at past metrics of eventual contenders at East Lake, Cantlay checks all of the boxes for me. The other four that check all of the boxes are Rory, Rahm, Scheffler, and Hovland and they all populate the top four spots on the starting strokes leaderboard this week. 

Cantlay has managed some decent finishes the last two years at East Lake despite some historically putrid putting at the course over his career. If he can gain strokes putting this week I think he’ll have a chance to podium but could hold on for a top 10 even if his putting woes continue here. 

This may be the last event of the 2023 season but I’m super excited for the first year of the FedEx Fall Series. Most of the stars will be on the sidelines and when the stars sit, that is when the books are more proned to misprice the field. It’s a good time to join FTNBets and FTNDaily, use promo code CULP for 10% off.