API and Puerto Rico Open - Recap
Sam Burns played well enough for us to believe, at least until Saturday afternoon when he missed his 3rd under 8-foot putt of the day and 7th of the week to take him pretty much entirely out of contention.
While he did have a prayer going into Sunday, that was quickly dashed with a triple bogey at the first hole, which was his first triple of the day. Yes, he had multiple. If that wasn’t bad enough, he played so poorly that he missed what should have been an easy Top 10 and Top 20 and that is before we get to the disaster Roy was yesterday to blow apart that Top 10 bet.
The only bright spot was that Benny got back into the Top 10 and Putnam had a great last 3 days to easily cash our match-up bet.
And I wish, I could tell you that the PR Open went any better, but that would be a lie.
Losing all 5 bets is not really that much of a disaster, but none of our guys really contended at all.
The PLAYERS Championship
The course:
The PGA Tour now heads from the Orlando area (and Puerto Rico) up the coast to the home of the PGA Tour, in Ponte Vedra Beach, which is in the Jacksonville metro area, to contest what is commonly referred to as the 5th major!
This 144-man field takes place at TPC Sawgrass's Pete and Alice Dye-designed Stadium Course, where it has been contested since 1982. The course was listed as the 41st best course in the country, plays to a par 72 across ~7,250 yards, and boasts one of the most famous wholes in the world of golf with its island green on 17. That hole can give professionals nightmares in normal circumstances, but if the wind blows, WATCH OUT!
This course brings with it a two-sided sword when trying to handicap it as this course doesn’t favor any specific type of player and it is the guy who plays best that takes home the top prize. Look at the past champions (below) and add Webb Simpson, Si Woo Kim, Jason Day, and Rickie Fowler; you can see that is a pretty good grouping of different types of players.
Not only has a player ever won this tournament in consecutive years, per Andy Lack, no defending champ has ever finished better than 5th! If you go back to 1990, only Steve Elkington (1991 and 1997), DL3 (1992 and 2003), and Tiger Woods (2001 and 2013) have won multiple times over that span. Tiger in 2001 is the only time in the last 25 years that someone won Bay Hill and PLAYERS back-to-back.
Some interesting points as we think about this tournament:
The $25 million purse is the largest on Tour1
17 of the 18 holes have water hazards on them
Fairways and rough are Bermuda and overseeded with rye
Greens are Bermuda and overseeded with poa
There are 92 bunkers on the course
The closing stretch, including the 17th, is one of the best / most exciting in golf. Per Justin Ray, over the last 3 seasons, 16-17-18 have yielded scores other than par 48.2% of the time - the highest such rate for a closing 3-hole stretch of any PGA Tour venue in that span.
Being a Pete Dye course, TPC Sawgrass will challenge players by making them stare down hazards and take them head-on. The course has doglegs both right and left, but to be successful you need to score on the Par 5s and the short Par 4 12 hole. If you want to see a bit more about his course, I highly recommend this fantastic Golf Digest hole-by-hole for this course.
Now, at the time of this posting, the weather seems to look okay for the week with wind gusts topping out around 15-20mph. There is a possibility of rain in the afternoons for a couple of the days, but it is Florida in March, which is pretty much a constant. Sunday’s weather is the one day that looks like it could get sketchy, but hard to know until we get closer.
The PLAYERS always has a monster field and this week is no different with 9 of the top 10, 23 of the top 25, and 47 of the top 50 in the OWGR and former champions like Scottie, JT, Rickie, Si Woo, and Day to name a few.
Given all of the above, the leaderboard almost always has some shocking names on it so something to consider when building your full card, but you would expect nothing else from the 50th playing of this great tournament!
Prior results:
2023 - 3rd favorite Scottie Scheffler (10-1) shot -17 to run away from the field as Tyrrell Hatton (30-1) had a tremendous final round but still came in a distant 2nd place, 5 strokes back
2022 - Cameron Smith (30-1) won while shooting -13 to top Anirban Lahiri (1000-1) by 1 stroke
2021 - Justin Thomas (20-1) shot -14 to best Lee Westwood (100-1) by 1 stroke2
2019 - Joint favorite Rory McIlroy (14-1) shot -16 to beat Jim Furyk (125-1) by 1 stroke
Ron Klos, as always, has the winners and their odds going back to 2010, but something to keep in mind is that this tournament was contested in May prior to the 2019 edition.
Last year’s first-round leader was Chad Ramey who shot a 66 to lead by 1 stroke on his way to a T27 finish (-5). Eventual winner Scottie Scheffler was tied for 5th after shooting a 68 in round 1.
The event 72-hole record is -24 (264) which was shot by LIV CEO Greg Norman in 1994. The record for wins in this event is held by Jack Nicklaus who won 3 times.
Last year’s PLAYERS saw us lose 0.2u for a -2% ROI.
The bets:
When thinking about betting this week it is easy to see Scottie’s ball striking and putting last week and thinking you want to go all in with him. I get it, but I expect to see him on a TON of cards (even at short prices), I need to see the putting again, and history tells us that it is hard to win across these two courses in consecutive weeks and no one has ever gone back-to-back at TPC Sawgrass.
Other guys that I looked at that I think were really interesting but passed on were Brian Harman (last week’s course was just too long for him, but this week fits him better - that said, he is public as heck this week), Matty Fitz (Could he have looked worse last week?), Tom Hoge (course fit and history, but another super public pick), Hideki (I reallllllly wanted to play him but his odds have dropped and I expect he is going to be very well picked by the Twitter crew), JT (see Hideki), and Sam Burns (Bermuda Burns is one of the better putters on tour, but watching him miss short putts last week hurt my soul).
Let’s get to this week’s card with about 7u of risk:
Outright:
0.55u Collin Morikawa 30-1
0.48u Jordan Speith 35-1
0.33u Russell Henley 50-1
0.26u Corey Conners 65-1
0.16u Emiliano Grillo 100-1
0.15u Brendon Todd 110-1
Top 10 (0.25u on each):
Collin Morikawa +275
Jordan Speith +350
Corey Conners +450
Top 20
0.75u Collin Morikawa +125
0.5u Russell Henley +130
0.25u Corey Conners +165
0.25u Emiliano Grillo +300
0.25u Brendon Todd +300
0.25u Austin Eckroat +400
Top 40
0.25u Emiliano Grillo +125
0.25u Brendon Todd +155
0.25u Andrew Putnam +155
0.25u Austin Eckroat +185
Matchups
0.3925u Andrew Putnam over Davis Thompson -157
0.345u Luke List over Ryan Fox -138
0.3225u Adam Schenk over Thomas Detry -129
Note: I happen to live in North Carolina and we now have onshore gambling as of TODAY! As such, I will now be using a new combination of books to get my action in. That said, I will still be doing my action as I write this so odds will be up as I send them.
Good luck with all your action!
Yes, that is more than the elevated / signature events and the majors.
2020 was canceled due to COVID