Who needs a LIV-PGA Tour deal to save golf when we can just have players go out in 60+ MPH wind on Sunday and watch chaos ensue at one of the most iconic venues in the sport?
Of course, that is assuming the PGA Tour decides to show those shots or even play the round at all, but the weather is going to be the name of the game this weekend at Pebble Beach.
If you want a deeper dive into that answer, please consider checking out my Links + Locks tournament betting preview podcast with Roberto Arguello. The two of us talked about all those topics, including some of our favorite plays on the board in other markets beyond outright betting.
If you haven't already, you can find me on Twitter (@TeeOffSports). There, I provide a link to my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user input to create custom golf rankings. That sheet is released every Monday, so be sure to check it out and construct your own numbers from my database of information.
2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Data Driven Picks
Every Monday, I take an aggregated total from a handful of books I respect and form a median outright price. None of that suggests you wouldn't be able to find better if you had shopped around, but that is a total I use to compare against a golfer's outright odds movements.
Those returns indicate where the square versus sharp money has entered the market and shows potential DFS value for those looking to round out their player pool. Let's dive into some of the shifts in the market and see how they line up with the outright bets I talked about on Links + Locks.
2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Biggest Market Movers
We always get an eclectic return every Wednesday when we review the notable movers.
I'll get into why I liked Max Homa and Wyndham Clark a little deeper in a second, but I would say options like Kurt Kitayama, Byeong-Hun An and Stephan Jaeger are best considered as DFS targets who may provide marginal leverage against any counterparts in their respective ranges.
We see someone like Jaeger jump toward being one of the better value risers on a DFS site like FanDuel because of his 15-spot shift in price rank between where he is there versus DraftKings.
The negative leverage for upside is noticeable on all three of those names, although you do start seeing high-end safety marks for that group inside of my sheet when you run the data for a higher floor.
2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Data Driven Outright Picks
I didn't plan to have so much exposure to this tournament when I looked into the weather forecast on Monday morning.
Now, I will say this card may look light compared to others since I am never one who finds much bankroll vulnerability in this sector to begin with because of the volatile nature of outright betting. However, two options at sub-30/1 and a 100/1 longshot ended up being much more aggressive than I intended.
I started my card with Max Homa at 20/1.
Bettors with a plethora of books at their disposal could have likely shopped around and found 22/1. I always keep my recommendations to 5-7 shops to make things simple for anyone wanting to tail, but Homa is an ideal fit for Pebble Beach because of his profound scrambling and poor-weather acumen.
My model ranked the American as one of only two golfers in the top-12 projected win equity choices who landed as a top-20 putter on this specific Poa green complex.
Numbers can always be skewed to fit whatever narrative you want, and I do want to mention that Rory McIlroy missed by less than one point of joining that group. He likely is an intriguing contrarian DFS choice this week, but because Homa and Xander Schauffele possessed that skillset over all other favorites, they should also work well as top wind players.
I also grabbed Collin Morikawa at 27/1.
Morikawa's odds have both risen and fallen, shifting from 22/1 to 27/1 and now back down to 22/1 at most shops.
While Morikawa did lose strokes to the field off-the-tee at the Farmers Insurance Open, Roberto Arguello said it best when he stated on Links + Locks how Morikawa lost most of those strokes on one or two shots and did so at the course where it could be tracked.
Because Morikawa missed the cut, he only had one round of tracked data for the tournament compared to three rounds of tracked data for those who made the cut. He also ranked above the field average in both driving accuracy and distance in his one tracked round but had very penal misses when he was wayward off the tee.
There is no guarantee he lost strokes to the field in that area if we had a complete return of the data, and even if he did, Morikawa hasn't lost strokes in back-to-back starts off-the-tee since the 2021 BMW and Tour Championship events.
Then I rounded out my outrights with Wyndham Clark at 100/1.
It is not nearly the biggest hit I have ever had in golf betting financial-wise, but landing on Clark at the U.S. Open at over 100/1 was probably one of the top betting moments for me to date because of the traction it gained me here at Action Network.
There is a lot of volatility with this play when we look into Clark's recent form, but the American jumped to seventh overall in my model in Weighted Strokes Gained: Total over his past 24 rounds when I ran the data to mimic Pebble Beach. That was a total that strongly surpassed him grading outside the top 50 when not running this for a specific venue.
As Babe Ruth once said, "I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can." This bet allows me to swing for the fences.
Top-Two Projected Win Equity Choices In My Model
Best Values To Consider At New Price (Not In Order Of Perceived Edge)
Most of the value has been suppressed out of the market.
