It’s been a weird start to the golf betting year.
The first PGA Tour tournament of 2024 saw Chris Kirk win The Sentry as a 200-1 long shot, per ESPN BET odds. The next week, Grayson Murray took home the Sony Open in Hawaii at 350-1, and the week after that, Nick Dunlap became the first amateur to win on the Tour since Phil Mickelson in 1991 after entering the tournament at 300-1.
Somehow, the trend continued through March 10, with every winner but one closing at 80-1 pre-tournament odds or longer; Jake Knapp was 45-1 when he won the Mexico Open at Vidanta, but that field was pretty devoid of starpower (Tony Finau was the big favorite at +800).
During that two-month period, four golfers recorded their maiden PGA Tour victories and a remarkable seven won at 125-1 or longer. The only past major champions to win during that time were Wyndham Clark at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and Hideki Matsuyama at The Genesis Invitational — and even they were both 80-1 at ESPN BET.
In recent weeks, Peter Malnati won the Valspar Championship as a 350-1 long shot, then Stephan Jaeger (Texas Children’s Houston Open) and Akshay Bhatia (Valero Texas Open) both prevailed as 50-1 underdogs. Malnati, Murray and Dunlap had the longest odds of any winner on the PGA Tour in the last five seasons.
“When you get three or four or five long shots out the gate to start the 2024 year, it’s a lot of fun. It just represents the parity in golf now,” Caesars Sportsbook golf trader Anthony Salleroli tells ESPN. “Anybody can have four straight days of glory and take home a trophy. That’s the beauty of it.”
There’s only one other class of golfer who has won on the Tour this year and it contains just one man: Scottie Scheffler.
The 27-year-old notched his seventh career victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and his eighth at The Players Championship the very next week; his +650 and +550 odds to win those respective tournaments led the field both times.
The very next week, he entered the Houston Open at +275 — the shortest odds to win any PGA Tour event with a cut since Tiger Woods at the 2013 Memorial Tournament, per ESPN Stats & Information; since 2008, there have been only 19 instances of a golfer showing +300 odds or shorter at any Tour cut event, and the other 18 were all Woods. Scheffler narrowly missed winning in Houston.
For the sportsbooks, this trend has mostly been positive. Long shots tend to attract very limited handle, so even the big payouts from the long odds tend to be few and far between. Meanwhile, Salleroli says pricing Scheffler is “easy” because books can just keep getting shorter with him, but they start running into liability trouble when the hugely popular superstar gets a “full head of steam” from the betting public and starts attracting ticket percentages in the double digits.
While Scheffler seems to be in perfectly fine form heading into the first major of the year at The Masters, the rest of the players occupying the top portion of odds boards have been ramping up more slowly. It’s not without precedent, according to some bookmakers.
“I’ve seen years where a lot of the long shots come in earlier in the year, so it’s not that big of a surprise to me,” DraftKings director of sportsbook and race operations Johnny Avello tells ESPN. “The guys are getting ready for the big tournaments, and so far we’ve played some decent tournaments, but this is what kicks it off for them and it kind of kicks it off for me too.”
Scheffler comes to Augusta as an enormous betting favorite (+475, with the next closest, Rory McIlroy, at 11-1), so the question now becomes whether those other elite players can finally step up and deliver for the middle range of odds, where a large share of bettors invest their money.
“We got some really, really juicy names right in that winner’s wheelhouse, we’ll call it, that have the potential to win as history pretty much dictates,” says Salleroli. Indeed, since Charl Schwartzel’s Masters triumph as a 100-1 underdog in 2011, all of the tournament’s winners have had odds of 40-1 or shorter, with Danny Willett in 2016 (50-1) standing as the lone exception.
Which is not to say long shots can’t win at Augusta. Two years before Schwartzel, Angel Cabrera won with 125-1 pre-tournament odds, while Trevor Immelman did it at 150-1 the year before; Immelman is the longest shot to win the prestigious tournament since 2008.
However, the complexities of the modern Masters — with everything from the condition of the course, which is being reported as fast and firm, to the pageantry ratcheting up the pressure — causes the elites to come out and play.
“While we’ve seen some long shot winners so far this year on the tour, The Masters is a different beast,” ESPN BET head of sportsbook Patrick Jay tells ESPN. “The tournament is a very tough test, and Augusta can be a difficult course to manage, meaning we usually see the cream rise to the top. These factors give past winners and Masters veterans an edge when setting the lines.”
While Scheffler will almost certainly at least be in contention — he’s the only player in minus-money to finish top 10 (-195) and the only player above -1000 to make the cut (-2500) — it seems likely that one of the non-long shots may break through, if history is to be believed.
LIV A Little
Among those potentially in the mix will be a handful of players from LIV Golf, who are actually attracting considerable attention in that “winner’s wheelhouse” range.
Reigning Masters champion Jon Rahm has the third-shortest odds of any golfer on ESPN BET, showing 12-1. His colleague Brooks Koepka, himself a five-time major champion, including the 2023 PGA Championship, comes in tied for fourth at 14-1 and has already taken “quite a bit of money” at DraftKings, per Avello.
Then there’s Joaquin Niemann, who is the only LIV player joining the Masters field on a special invitation. The 25-year-old had a scorching hot start to the year, winning two of the first three LIV events to earn a spot at Augusta. He sits at 25-1 on ESPN BET, but was as long as 66-1 at some sportsbooks upon the announcement that he would play the tournament.
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