3 Free Bets for the 2024 Scottish Open

The summer scoring bonanza gets put on hold as the PGA Tour leaves the Midwest to head across the pond. It’s the Scottish Open at The Renaissance Club.

Course Fit

The Renaissance Club is set to host this week’s event in Scotland.

This par 70 plays to 7,237 yards, but it’s not the traditional setup you’d expect from a par 70. There are five par 3s and three par 5s. The trio of par 5s keep scoring chances alive but the five-pack for par 3s make it tough to build many birdie streaks.

The result is a challenging test that requires a lot of mid-iron approach shots.

Situated on sandy soil by the Scottish coast, weather and deep bunkers are the main defense of the course. The ground game is heavily encouraged. Most wouldn’t hesitate to call this links. However, purists will say there are too many trees or come up with some other reasons to shout that it’s not a links layout.

Finding itself on the PGA Tour schedule for two years now, the field has averaged just 17% birdie or better rates while the field swallows bogey on 20% of the holes. That puts it into tough-course category although weather could always shift that closer to easy. The round-the-round scoring deviations is about as high as we see all year which doubles down on the thought that weather plays a huge part here.

Seeing fescue-based greens, you could look at bent/poa performance, but overall it’s probably better just to look at performance on slow greens or avoid grass splits entirely this week.

So now we have four split stats to consider in our course fit analysis. We are referencing costal and links performance, looking at history in the area (GB&I) while also factoring in performance on tough courses. If we weigh all of those split stats, here are the names who show the biggest increase in performance over their baseline.

Victor Perez
Antoine Rozner
Andrew Putnam
Emiliano Grillo
Connor Syme
Jordan Spieth
Robert Macintyre
Tom Kim
Kurt Kitayama
Jordan Smith

Looking at this list, I mostly see mid-iron play and creativity.

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:

Scheffler isn’t in the field this week which leaves Rory and Xander as the “Big 2” atop the odds board. According to the FTN Betting model, they account for nearly 20% of the win equity, which is a lot but also leaves 80% for the field. There is one name not even on this top-10 list that stands out to me. Which brings me to my three bets for the Scottish Open.

Scottish Open Free Bets

Wyndham Clark to Win (45-1 each way, 6 spots)

He’s twirled top-five-worthy finishes in 23% of his starts over the last year and ranks seventh in the field in top-five rate when isolating to courses with similar splits.

That one-year baseline rate would imply a +335 price for a top-five, but instead with this each-way bet we get +900 for a top-six finish while the win is always in his range of outcomes. He has three wins over his last 30 starts.

Jordan Spieth Top 10 Finish +550

The Texan has more birdies than the field in eight of his last 11 rounds. He’s simmering just in time for the Scottish and British. When it comes to the latter, he leads the field in go-low rounds in the Open Championship over the last five years (15 go-low rounds in 20 rounds).

What that says is this style of course is right up Spieth’s alley as it requires creativity and it’s not just point-and-shoot boring golf.

He’s gone 10 straight starts without a top 25, but I’d be surprised if that streak continued this week.

Brian Harman Top 20 Finish +210

Harman has top 20s in four of his last five tries when you lump Scottish Open and Open Championship results together. That obviously includes last year’s win at The Open.

It’s not just those two events though, if you grab all results from courses with similar splits then you see he’s posted top-20 finishes in 45% of his starts over the last two years. That is sixth-best in the field and makes this +210 price an appealing one.

He also arrives off a top 10 in his most recent start, so he brings some momentum to the table as well.

Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.