My TOP Golf betting & trading tips
Curiously, Golf was the first ever bet I placed on Betfair. Since that early tenner on the US Open, I’ve expanded my activity considerably and enjoy Betfair trading on Golf.
Golf Betting is unique for trading due to its large fields. The US Masters typically has around 80 players, but larger tournaments can feature 140 to 150. Major golf tournaments see significant betting turnover and liquidity on the Betfair exchange. This high liquidity allows for large-scale trading, which isn’t possible in smaller tournaments.
When trading on a major, it’s important to note that markets can turn over millions before the first shot is even taken. However, the real activity happens in-play over the tournament’s four-day span, resulting in massive total matched amounts.
Whatever Betfair trading strategies you favour, the huge amount of money being matched on a Golf Major will give you many chances to lock in a profit. It could be that you trade small profits and add to that during the tournament itself. But there is no reason why you couldn’t do a longer-term trade before the cut, or on the deciding two days when the price movement is at it’s most extreme in a closely fought contest.
There are many ways to participate in a major Golf tournament, here are my tops tips for doing so.
Know your position
Make sure you take a very conscious decision about how long you’re going to hold your position for and how you are going to take that position, is very important. So before you attempt to do something in a golf tournament, make sure that you take that into account.
You will find that the spread, the difference between the back and the lay prices on a golf tournament, will increase over a period of time. So if you’re going to take an active position within the market, do it just before the golf tournament is about to start to get this shorter spread and the best price on that particular tournament.
Inplay spreads can widen, so take care to keep an eye on the back and lay book percentage. When that’s low, you can get in and out of the market without losing too much to the other side of the book. The spreads can very large on large field sports.
Pick more than one winner
In golf tournaments the field sizes can be absolutely huge, this is why Golf betting is so hard. You’ll find at some tournaments, depending upon the setup of the tournament, that they are bigger than others, but typically the big majors will have 140 players plus in each of them.
So that makes picking a winner at a golf tournament incredibly hard… So why not pick more than one winner?
I know it may sound a bit crazy, but in fact, if fire up your Bet Angel and use a method such as Dutching to capture value across a range of players, that gives you a much better chance of being able to pick one of the winners.
Another element to consider in golf is that you have a cut. In golf they cut these large fields down to a much smaller one at the weekends so the top players remain to play at the weekend. What you often find is if you Dutch a range of players you’ll very often find that the price will contract significantly if it looks like they’re going to make the cut and you can trade out at that point.
Keep your eye on the weather
When there are golf tournaments around, one of the things that I do is watch the weather because weather is critically important in a golf tournament. When you get a change of weather, and especially because they’ve played over such a long period of time, that can significantly affect the scoring chances of individual players.
So if you look at the tee times, you see when players are coming out and you look at the weather, that can tell you if some of the difficult holes are going to become impossible or some of the easier holes are going to become a little bit easier.
If you watch the weather it allows you to have a good indication of the potential for a player’s performance at different points throughout the day as well as the tournament.
Know the course
So a key part to trading golf is to understand the actual golf course itself. As regular golfers will know, different courses have different characteristics. Some holes are easy to play, some holes are much harder. This concept is the same at all of these tournaments.
Getting an understanding of which of these holes, harder or easier, will allow you to calculate when a player is going in to a harder part of the course or is likely to pick up the odd birdie or two and see his price contract. So understanding the course will allow you to get a much better handle on where the likely odds movements are going to be.
On the first two days you may find the leader in the clubhouse. So keeping an eye on the chasing players and where they are on the course, will give you a great steer on the price action on the lader.
The easy way to understand a course is to look at the course card because the stroke index will give you a clue as to which are the hardest and the easiest holes. Equally, there’s also tons of information available on the websites of these specific tournaments about how the course is going to play.
So do your research figure out where the hardest and easiest holes are and you can position yourself ahead of those particular points within the market.
Pre and post cut
When we go into the last two days of the tournament, it will trade very differently from the first two days. In the first two days, all of the pairings are set up, and the players play with a variety of different types of opponents.
But as we enter those last two days, then we end up in a situation where the players that are most likely to win the tournament will be playing last overall. Therefore, it’s quite competitive at that particular point in time.
So we can actually bring all of the characteristics we’ve talked about together to create the perfect golf trade. And in fact, I have done a video on this, so if you want to watch a fuller explanation of how this trade can occur watch the video.
As we head into that last day, you’re going to have two or three pairings that are all fighting for the title and if you get that situation that develops, then it’s quite possible that you can easily lay one of the leaders as they pass through some of the harder or easier parts of the course.
That will allow you to anticipate quite clearly what’s going to happen to the odds if they pick up or drop a shot at any one particular point, then you can back or lay appropriately.