PGA Betting Outrights: 2023 Tour Championship

Welcome to the most difficult week in all of golf betting! We lack a course fit model, and the staggered starting scores create a riddle that’s far more difficult to solve than most weeks.

Let’s start with the course fit model — the goal of the model is to explain variation in historical performance at the course from the variation in skill of each player. In addition to limited sample size because the field is so tiny every year, it’s also the best players in the world who make it each year — creating significantly less variation in skill than the model typically has to work from. The result is a useless set of course fit expected strokes gained projections, but I can at least say I think iron play is king at East Lake.

Typically, we take the course fit and baseline expected strokes gained projections and sim the event to feed our betting model, but even that gets thrown off this week. I believe there’s a real effect in golf that it’s easier to chase than protect a lead, which would be impossible to properly code into the simulation.

All of this is to say two things:

1. My betting process this week will be far more intuition driven than usual (and therefore less data driven)
2. My intuition is saying it’s not worth betting anything pre-tourney

Best Outright Bets — 2023 Tour Championship

DataGolf estimates that Scottie Scheffler has a 45.6% chance of winning (fair price of +119). If correct, there’s a tiny bit of value here since his best available is +140, but my bigger takeaway is that Scottie’s win equity is high enough to drain the value from the rest of the field.

Instead, I will look for live opportunities throughout the week. As I said, it’s a weird week to cap — say for example that Scottie shoots +3 on his first 9 and loses the lead. Should he be priced as if he’s one off the lead in a regular event or should the fact that he’s +3 through 9 play a meaningful part? The good news is this also means it’s a tough week for books to set live lines.