Combined golf and gambling question iow Gambling On Golf

Factual Questions
1

I have recently started gambling on golf. A friend tipped me off about a site that provides (for a fee) tips on all the golf tournaments. They had a free trial in January and the first week I had a bet I coupled their win bets in South Africa with their PGA place bets in doubles and won enough to keep betting.

As a subscriber I have access to their database and can do head-to-head comparisons. My bookmaker bets on any pairings available each round. He has a price for each golfer and then pays $9 for them to tie. This seemed over the odds to me so I started checking every pairing (when they are available - usually it’s threesomes). If the correct dividend works out to less than $9 I back them.

So far I have had 9 bets for 4 winners. For instance, before this weekend’s tournament Justin Leonard and Vijay Singh had returned the same score in 7 of 56 ($8.00) rounds both played since 1/1/04. They were paired and returned the same score on Thursday and Friday. For Saturdays round Nick Watney and Jesper Parnevik were paired. They had finished level 5 of 25 times they played the same tournament round. They both shot 74.

Now, while I realise that my run of luck is over the odds, can anyone figure out how to verify if I have flukily found an opportunity to get the better end of a bet with a bookie. I remember years ago a group of punters in the UK made a fortune betting on holes-in-one because bookies got the odds wrong.

It seems (intuitively at least) that the large bulk of players finish within a limitted range of scores and getting 8/1 about people who historically finish level more often, seems too good to be true.

Any thoughts or ideas?

By the way, no pairings have been listed yet for the PGA event but at Qatar Barry Lane and Richard Green draw 6 of 32 late rounds and Henrik Stenson and Nicolas Fasth draw 3 of 14 but no early rounds. I will take 80/1 the double for a little bit.

2

Maybe you need to rephrase this in dumb American…

Are you saying you are getting 8-1 odds for two paired players scoring identically in a given round? In the examples you showed, one was exactly 8-1 and the other was a 5-1 return. If this is the case, you just may have stumbled on to something.

So, what is the website that offers this? :slight_smile:
Maybe you are talking about a local bookie.

3

Yes the odds of the same score are always 8/1 regardless of the “real” odds from past performances. Sometimes it works the other way. Like if I was paired with Tiger Woods the odds would be Woods $1.01, Me $50, Tie $9 when the chance of a tie is really very slight.

For instance there are now markets for round 4 of the Honda Classic

Robert Damron 3.00
David Toms1.53
Tie 9.00

Kevin Stadler 2.10
Sean O’Hair 2.10
Tie 9.00

See, one pairing is considered a fairly even match (4/3 to Stadler so far in their careers) and is 8/1 the tie. The other pairing is considered to heavily favour Toms but is still 8/1 the tie. Makes no sense to me.

Just to add some more confusion I will however take the Damron/Toms tie because although Toms has beaten Damron home in *&% of tournaments they have played, they have tied 6 of their last 49 rounds ($8.16).