As you will see quickly here, I have changed the format of the Recap section this week. Would love some feedback on it!
Recap - Vaplspar Championship
Recently these have been me doing recaps and sort of a retrospective and me attempting to recall how I felt throughout the tournament so I wanted to try something new that steals from an old Bill Simmons idea of a running diary. As such, this week I am going to write mini-recaps each day and will put them here.
Let me know what you think!
Round 1: Cinderella stories are being written in college basketball (Thank you Princeton Tigers for crushing my bracket!) will we see our own this week in Florida? Jaeger put together a beautiful round and cashed my 65-1 First Round Leader ticket1 so let’s hope it can continue. We also had a couple of our Top 10 / Top 20 guys end the day in contention and Brian Harman is sitting 4 strokes back. As of now, the cut line is +1 so the only two guys who are projected to miss the cut are unfortunately Tyler Duncan (+6) and Luke List (+4) and they are pretty far adrift. I am feeling pretty good.
Round 2: Well that was less than ideal. It’s very clear over the first two days that you want to be playing early and unfortunately many of our guys were playing in the afternoon and they road the struggle bus for most of it. Luckily Jaeger stayed in contention and some of our T10/T20 guys stayed in striking distance, but Harman had a quad and couldn’t recover, and Duncan and List did nothing to fight back. We lost both our missed cut bets (whoops), but did pick up wins in 3 of the 5 matchups! Let’s see how moving day goes.
Round 3: Well that did not really work out that well. We have seen the course is going to play tougher as the day goes on so I was hoping some of our early starters might make a run, but none of the could really get too much traction. We are still in shouting distance for T10 and T20 profits and Jaeger holds a 4-stroke lead over Gordon for our big H2H matchup so a profitable week is well within our sights, just wishJaeger had been able to shoot a bit better and give us a good Sunday sweat. Fingers crossed for Round 4.
Tournament Recap: I thought we had used up all of our razzle dazzle magic last week when we had a host of guys come in the top 20 late, but that was nothing compared to this week when we had a T10 and T20 happen as guys flew backward down the leaderboard. We also had Jaeger make things as interesting as possible with his matchup, though he eventually won it. I will never complain about 30.5% ROI, but can this ever be easy?!? The answer seems to be no haha
WGC Match Play Championship
The PGA Tour now heads from Florida to Texas for what seems to be the final Dell Technologies Match Play event.
This 64-person tournament has taken place since 1999 and has called Austin Country Club home since 2016. This tournament will be contested over another short Pete Dye course2 that plays to a par 71 across ~7,100 yards.
For those unfamiliar with this event, it is NOT a normal stroke play event but rather a match play event (USGA explainer here), and what they do is take the top 64 players from the OWGR3 and split them into 16 4-person groups. Each group will play a round-robin style format where each win is worth 1 point and each draw is worth a half point. The winners from each of the 16 groups will then play in an NCAA basketball-style knock-out tournament until 1 man wins it all.
The 2022 edition saw Scottie Scheffler keep his amazing start to 2022 going when he beat Kevin Kisner 4 & 34. The 2021 edition was won by Billy Horschel who beat Scottie Scheffler 2 &1 and in 2019 Kevin Kisner beat Matt Kuchar 3 & 25.
The three men who have won this event multiple times are Geoff Ogilvy, Jason Day, and Tiger Woods. Tiger has the most wins, with 3, and is the only golfer to ever defend his title. Tiger also has the largest win ever at 9 & 8 over Stephen Ames6.
This is a very odd tournament for betting so I will have a few “to win” bets, some small action on who is going to win each group, and MAY add round-by-round matchups, but those will be unofficial and on discord.
Look, Scheffler is the man to beat as he is playing better than anyone and this is a course he might know better than any other one, but at 9-1, I am just not able to pull the trigger unless I was doing 1u one and done. If you want to go that route, I would not at all think you did something wrong.
We will have a lot of action this week, but the risk will actually be less than normal, with only 5.5u of risk:
To win:
0.5u on Patrick Cantlay +1800
0.5u on Tony Finau +2800
0.5u on Sungjae Im +3300
Groups (0.25u on each):
Group 1 - Scottie Scheffler +100
Group 2 - Keith Mitchell +315
Group 3 - Denny McCarthy +335
Group 4 - Patrick Cantlay +115
Group 5 - Max Homa +140
Group 6 - Tom Hoge +265
Group 7 - Willy Z +160
Group 8 - Si Woo Kim +285
Group 9 - Jason Day +185
Group 10 - Tony Finau +130
Group 11 - Sahith Theegala +240
Group 12 - Jordan Spieth +175
Group 13 - Adam Hadwin +265
Group 14 - Russell Henley +250
Group 15 - Corey Conners +225
Group 16 - Sungjae Im +175
NOTE!!!! This tournament starts on Wednesday this week!
As always, I am using BetOnline and Bovada to pull these odds.
Make sure you are coming over to the Gamblers Paradise Discord where we are chatting all things sports and better. The Discord is entirely free and there are a ton of folks on there talking about the bets they like, and the games they are watching, and you can even get some of my picks early (like I did yesterday with my outright picks while I waited for group pricing to be posted).
Daily Fantasy
DFS really doesn’t make sense to me in this format so I am taking a pass.
Good luck with all your action!
Because of dead heat rules, this paid 21.666-1. As I have said MANY times, I bet my outright as FRL for VERY small amounts.
For those who do not know, Pete Dye is a very famous golf course designer and architect and we will be seeing a fair number of his courses here pretty quickly, starting with THE PLAYERS and I will do my best to call them out as certain players seem to play his course better than others.
If anyone can’t play they just move further down the list
This is read “four and three” and means he was up 4 holes with only 3 remaining
The 2020 edition was canceled after the first round due to the outbreak of COVID 19
If you do not know this story, before the tournament Ames made some comments about how Tiger had not been hitting the ball well, and to paraphrase Michel Jordan “he took it personally”