Wyndham Championship - Recap
The final event of the season wrapped and it was super fun in Greensboro! Congrats to Lucas Glover and those that bet on him 100-1 or even higher. That is an incredible shout.
It was a tad unfortunate for us how it all turned out as Brendan Todd had a massive Friday to put himself right into contention, but was unable to keep the momentum and good vibes going into Saturday. Thankfully he was able to rebound a bit on Sunday to secure a Top 10 finish at +450. When you add the Todd T10 to Billy Hoho (+600) T10, they powered us to a profitable week!
You know it is a good week when even our Head-to-Heads don’t lose us money! Yes, that is how bad things have gotten for that portion of our cards that I am celebrating a $1 win hahah! Overall, I will always take a profit, and having two really nice T10 tickets in there, as well as some nice T20’s makes me happy.
FedEx St Jude’s Championship
The PGA Tour travels west from NC to Memphis, TN for the start of the FedEx Playoffs (for those unfamiliar with the FedEx Cup scroll to the bottom of his newsletter to the section titled “FedEx Cup Explainer”).
The St Jude’s Invitational is hosted by TPC Southwind which plays to a par of 70 across ~7,250 yards and has hosted this event, and its predecessor, since 1989. As a resident of the South East US, I can tell you with certainty they are not kidding when they talk about the heat and the humidity that these golfers will be facing!
Some things to keep in mind this week:
After the last few weeks of super low winning scores, expect this one to be more challenging for the players, especially the Par 3 14th hole. Given there are only 2 Par 5s I expect the winning score to be in the range of -13 to -16 like it has been in the last 4 years and for ball strikers who are very good tee-to-green to carry this one home.
There is no cut this week
As opposed to the normal 3-ball split tees starts to tournaments this will have twosomes that all start on the first tee
The 2022 St Jude’s saw Willy Z (20-1 odds) capture his only Tour title when he shot -15 and beat Sepp Straka (400-1) in a playoff. The 2021 edition1 saw Abe Ancer (50-1 odds) shoot -16 to capture only Tour win when he topped Sam Burns (60-1) and Hideki Matsuyama (40-1) in a playoff, and 2020 saw Justin Thomas (-13) win his 2nd WGC Invitational as co-2nd favorite at 12-1 odds when he topped Daniel Berger (25-1), Brooks Koepka (25-1), Tom Lewis (250-1), and Phil Mickelson (150-1) by 3 strokes.
The course record of 61 has been achieved bt Jay Delsing (1993), Bob Estes (2001), and Tom Lewis (2020). Last year at the St Jude, we had a very ho-hum tournament with a small loss of 2u which correlated to a -27% ROI.
Before I get to this week’s card I want to take a moment to recognize the special sponsor of this tournament - St. Jude’s. If you know me or have hung out on the Gamblers Paradise Discord, you will know that one of the things I often do is take some of my winnings when I hit outrights and donate it to the golfer’s charity and have told folks in the past to make a donation to a charity instead of giving me a tip and my personal charities of choice are St. Jude’s2 and the National Down Syndrome Society. As such, I am going to commit that 25% of any profits I generate this week with golf bets will be donated to St, Jude’s3. I hope you will join me in this regard with a percentage that is right for you to help this amazing charity.
This week’s dance card is 7.9u of risk:
Outright4:
1u Patrick Cantaly +1800
0.75u on Collin Morikawa +2500
0.5u on Tom Kim +4000
0.5u Matthew Fitzpatrick +4500
0.25u on Hideki Matsuyama +5000
T10:
0.65u on Scottie Scheffer -130
0.25u on Matt Fitzpatrick +240
0.25u on Tom Kim +320
0.25u on Harris English +550
T20
1.7u on Patrick Cantlay -170
0.55u on Matt Fitzpatrick -110
0.5u on Tom Kim +120
0.25u on Harris English +200
0.25u on Aaron Rai +210
0.25u on Stephan Jaeger +210
Matchups - Taking a pass for official plays, might have some fun at Gamblers Paradise
As always, I am using BetOnline and Bovada to pull these odds. I bet them as I write this so they are live within the 30 min or so of publication.
Daily Fantasy
For those unfamiliar with Daily Fantasy, this is a game you can play (I use Draft Kings) where they give you a budget and use allocate that budget to golfers and use their scoring criteria to try and win money. The dollar values below are the “salaries” for each golfer I select. You can mirror what I do, do your own thing, or do some combo and as always I am just showing what I am doing, and is good for me.
Taking the following swag:
Cantlay 9,800
Day 8,900
Deki 8,400
Sungjae 8,000
Tom Kim 7,800
English 7,000
FedEx Cup Explainer
I know this might be something that many of my readers/subscribers already know, but for those who do not, I wanted to have a little section on what the FedEx Cup is.
Starting in 2007 the PGA Tour wanted to create a new way to reward the players who had been successful across the PGA Tour calendar (starts in late Sept and rolls all the way through late August the following year) with a grouping of tournaments with a huge prize at the end - Rory McIlroy won last year and received $18 million5 of the total $75 million prize fund.
The way it works now is that throughout the year each tournament awards FedEx Cup points based on where you finish and the Top 70 players make the FedEx Cup playoffs6. The playoffs consist of 3 events:
FedEx St. Jude Championship
BMW Championship
Tour Championship
What makes this rather unique is that each tournament is a little bit different starting with the fact they have progressively smaller fields (70 to 50 to 30) and none of them have a cut. The progression from one tournament to the next is based on FedEx Cup points that carry over from the regular season, BUT these tournaments are worth quadruple the number of points vs a regular event so guys can move up the rankings quickly if they play well (like Adam Scott last year). Another unique point is that if a player is unable to play they do not replace that player, they just make the field smaller.
Once the final 30 have been determined for the Tour Championship they will be given a starting score for the tournament based on the final FedEx Cup standings (aka the standings after the BMW is over):
1st place will start -10
2nd place -8
3rd place -7
4th place -6
5th place -5
6th - 10th place -4
11th-15th place -3
16-20th place -2
21-25the place -1
26-30th place even Par
The player with the lowest aggerate score after the 4 rounds of the Tour Championship (aka the score they shoot + their starting score) will be crowned Tour Champion and FedEx Cup Champion and score the $18 million payday along with a 5 year PGA Tour exemption.
This year these tournaments somehow even mean more given that there is some uncertainty about next year, but we believe only the top 50 (aka those who make the BMW) are guaranteed to play in the elevated events next year AND we are in a Ryder Cup year so these events could go a long way to locking up the final spots on some of these rosters.
Which was called the WGC St Jude Invitational and was not part of the FedEx Cup Playoff
For those unfamiliar with St Jude’s please take a few minutes to read their Wikipedia page or their official page to get an understanding of why I am so partial to them
Even if we do not have a full profit, I will be donating something to the charity, but I just hope it will be more with a big winning week!
I am going to be looking at Scottie, Cam Young, Hovland, and Day from a parlay perspective
For those who care, This is not $18 million in cash, but rather this ends up in a cash-deferred account
In addition to making the playoffs these players receive a bonus as well as full Tour status for next year, which is HUGE this year given the changes that are coming.