The PGA Tour's fall swing continues this week in Utah with the inaugural Black Desert Championship. This isn't one of the Tour's best fields, but there are plenty of familiar names who should be able to post low scores at a resort course.
Our staff of betting analysts has laid out its betting strategies for the week and identified the players it's targeting. Let's dig into the Black Desert Championship picks that our guys have made.
Black Desert Championship Preview
Favorite We’re Backing
Matt Gannon: Kurt Kitayama +2500 (DraftKings)
Tony Sartori: Keith Mitchell +1600 (DraftKings)
Spencer Aguiar: Seamus Power +2800 (FanDuel)
Best Long Shot
Matt Gannon: Nate Lashley +10000 (DraftKings)
Tony Sartori: Rico Hoey +6600 (BetMGM)
Spencer Aguiar: Sami Valimaki +12500 (BetRivers)
Player To Fade
Matt Gannon: Beau Hossler
Tony Sartori: Kurt Kitayama
Spencer Aguiar: Ryan Fox
Black Desert Championship Betting Strategy
Matt Gannon: It’s lovely to see a new PGA Tour golf course for the week. After looking at pictures from above of the Black Desert Resort, it is surely a pretty place. With that, we do not know much about how the course will play. What we do know is that this is a RESORT course. With that being said, resort course scoring is easy.
Off the tee should not be much of an issue unless of course you are extremely off line then you will be in some lava rock. But the fairways are on the more generous side here. From there, it will turn into a middle iron, wedge, and putting fest. I am going to be keying on players who excel in those two areas of their game.
Tony Sartori: Black Desert Resort hosts the inaugural Black Desert Championship, and it is the first time that the Tour is visiting this location. This new course just opened in May and was designed by Tom Weiskopf in collaboration with Phil Smith and plays at 7,371 yards as a par-71 track.
Black Desert Resort features wide fairways and minimal hazards, which forgives those in the field who normally struggle with their accuracy. This venue is also projected to play easy and result in a birdie fest, so I will be looking at birdie or better percentage as well as those who may benefit from a course with this amount of fairway forgiveness.
Spencer Aguiar: There will always be unknowns about a course when a professional golf tournament hasn't been held in that state since 1963.
That alone is going to be challenging to handicap for what Utah golf looks like when most of us have never seen it in action, but the construction of a statistical model does start generating more questions than answers when you realize the facility only finished around a year ago and was the last course Tom Weiskopf undertook before his death at the end of 2022.
I am not going to spend a ton of time talking about a landscape with no data since we are playing a guessing game there, but some visually unique features will be prevalent when you watch it on television.
The most stark feature will be how the course runs through a lava field and is surrounded by mountains. That factor provides one of the most impressive components any property will have all season, adding to the irregular aspect of a venue that sits over 3,000 feet above sea level.
2024 Black Desert Championship Predictions
Matt Gannon: Ryan Fox Top 10 (+330, FanDuel)
If you or I chipped for Ryan Fox last week, he wins the event. Yes, he was that bad around the greens last week. All other facets of his game were perfect. He was striping it off the tee, flushing irons, and rolling the rock. If you look deeper into Fox’s profile you will learn that he is not that bad around the green. I am expecting his ARG baseline to increase during this event while the ball striking baseline stays where it is. If that is the case, Fox can be in the mix to win the event this week. We will grab the +330 on the top ten which is great number for him in this field.
Tony Sartori: Vince Whaley Top 20 (+360, FanDuel)
Vince Whaley enters this week in good form with two top-16 finishes over his past four tournaments. One of those performances included his runner-up finish at the Barracuda Championship, and he should find somewhat similar success against this watered down field.
Whaley’s biggest weakness, by far, is his inaccurate driver. However, that problem will be nullified at Black Desert Resort, which features wide fairways and minimal hazards.
With this fairway forgiveness, Whaley should be able to contribute heavily in what is expected to be a birdie fest, especially when you consider that he ranks in the 62nd percentile on Tour in birdie or better percentage.
Spencer Aguiar: Sami Valimaki Top 30 (+225, BetRivers)
You are going to be hard-pressed to find quite the same recent trajectory of the data we talked about last week for Michael Thorbjornsen to come top 20, but I thought there were a lot of similarities between the two profiles, where the ceiling remained intact, but the floor got a slight boost because of the statistical fit of this week's unknown test.
Only Seamus Power, Patrick Fishburn, Erik Van Rooyen, Ben Kohles, and Sami Valimaki were graded inside the top 60 of all seven data categories I ran for the Black Desert Championship. That might feel like a reduced total to qualify, but the fact that Valimaki achieved it after landing outside the top 30 in 12 of his past 13 starts did paint a picture of a golfer who might be able to surprise on the leaderboard this week.
