Each week, we will be analyzing our favorite PGA Tour props and picks for the upcoming golf tournament, focusing on who we think will be first round leader of the event.
The first round leader sweat in golf is a fun one, so join us as we try to make some winning golf picks!
PGA Tour First Round Leader – Props, Picks & Predictions
Below, we take a look at the most intriguing first round leader picks and bets for the upcoming PGA Tour tournament.
Editor’s Note: Looking for more golf props content? Be sure to check out our outright winner and Round 2/3/4 picks for this week’s event!
Genesis Scottish Open Picks
The PGA TOUR’s annual stop at the Scottish Open, which combines PGA TOUR and DP World Tour fields, serves as our appetizer for The Open Championship.
There are plenty of poetic storylines and analysis about “links golf” and the conditions, but for our purposes, we will be leaning mostly on hard data. The Renaissance Club in North Berwick has hosted this tournament since 2019, and it gives us a pretty good set of numbers to draw some conclusions from.
Those conclusions draw a fairly stark contrast to a lot of the PGA TOUR courses, and rather than trying to analyze ball flights or “familiarity” with the conditions, we’re going to look at what categories have actually saved the most strokes in the several competitions we have to look at here.
The story of the day is going to be the fact that the course plays much more open than many North American courses.
Per tradition, the grounds allow players to take really wide sight lines off the tee and still access greens, and there’s not much punishment for missing fairways. This helps courses stay playable in tough weather conditions but effectively is a good chance to bring some really wild drivers into the fray.
Rasmus Neergaard
Much like Rasmus Hojgaard (see our outright article), Neergaard is someone with distance, and this course will reward that.
He’s not quite the prospect that Hojgaard is, but he’s a classic European ballstriking dynamo who has gotten a couple of starts on the PGA TOUR this season (including a 2nd place in Puerto Rico).
Neergaard differs from Hojgaard in that he doesn’t consistently flash good putting stats; in fact, he consistently loses strokes. But he does manage to putt well once every five or ten events, and he hits the ball so well that he still manages to contend fairly often even without that.
There’s really nothing about this course that helps him. He’s both long and straight off the tee, but that’s never a disadvantage. He’s mostly just a 26-year-old on a very, very steady upward career arc, who has flashed the potential that we are trying to get ahead of.
Since he doesn’t show that potential as often, it’s a lot more fun of a play to hope for one good putting round out of him at the beginning of the tournament, rather than risking money on several good putting rounds in a week.
Haotong Li
Li seems like he should be 40 years old at this point, but he is only 29, and the career DP stalwart gets a home game this week.
Haotong has been pretty dicey throughout his whole career, but this is statistically the best he’s ever played. He’s actually quite long off the tee, but he sprays it a little bit. However, the main story is that he’s having by far the best year on approach that he’s ever had in his career, which is an area that has decimated him in the past.
He’s figured something out this year. Li has clipped off a win and three other top 5s on the Euro Tour this season. He’s got kind of a long-established reputation as kind of a joke, to put it bluntly, having struggled with some truly terrible ball striking years in his career.
But the recent run is no fluke. He hit the ball pretty decently last year as well, and he fits the course. Overall, he’s got a big number because of his reputation and simply comes in undervalued here, especially in a situation where a streaky putting round could net him a low score.
Justin Thomas
Everyone by now knows the story of who he was, and how he struggled by his standards two years ago. Thomas still made the Ryder Cup and has regained form this season.
There’s no hiding that after his win at the RBC and three other 2nd-place finishes. However, he tapered off a little bit through the PGA, Memorial, and the US Open. The Travelers, however, was a bounce-back week that showed he might not be ready to rest on his laurels after the return to the podium in April.
But statistically speaking, something is interesting about JT. He’s always been a fairly inaccurate driver of the golf ball, which doesn’t matter so much here. Combine that with a little bit of a lull in bettors’ minds, and he’s just slightly undervalued here. If you can get a good number at FanDuel, he’s got +EV in the Round 1 market.
FRL Best Bets:
- Justin Thomas +5500
- Haotong Li +11000
- Rasmus Neergaard +8000
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PGA First Round Betting Strategy & Best Practices
When dealing with PGA Tour betting, there’s a lot more variance, risk/reward, long shots, and an aspect of a lottery-like ticket than we deal with in most weekly or daily match sports.
When dealing with “First Round Leader” markets, we take that to an eleven!
The best we can hope to do is think of ourselves as buying “weighted lottery tickets” – hope to pick plays that have valid reasons that they might hit slightly more often than their stated odds, and rely on long-term volume for those hits to play out over the course of an entire season.
The first and most important thing is to make sure the player you are considering has OVERALL VALUE. There aren’t a lot of big angles to the first round market that can take an otherwise-mediocre play and turn them into a lean in the FRL market.
In general, FRL picks should also be good value plays in general markets, usually meaning that regardless of their course fit or other factors, they have been outperforming or are otherwise undervalued by the oddsmakers or the public.
Weather
We’ll get to how to identify those players, and check whether a FRL play makes sense for them – but first: one of the biggest factors in getting an edge on FRL plays is looking at the tee times / weather. For most articles, the tee times aren’t usually out yet, but they can be found on Tuesday afternoons, usually.
The main things to look for are AM/PM tee time splits. All else being equal, morning scores can trend lower than afternoon scores. Wind usually picks up in the afternoon, but sometimes due to a storm front, it can be opposite, so check the local forecasts.
Very rarely, and even more difficult to predict, there can be an afternoon storm that, if the afternoon wave has to play through, can really hurt scores in the rain. But if they get pulled off and get to start on Friday morning in super soft conditions, it can be a huge advantage for R1 scoring.
This is extremely difficult to predict 24 hours in advance, as it requires perfect timing and intensity and duration of storm coverage. The best is to check to make sure AM/PM wind splits are neutral or favorable before firing, although anything can and does happen.
Weather and tee times aside, we are looking at a few key things to establish overall value, and then a few more to lean that player into a FRL play.
Recent Form
For overall value, the biggest factors are looking at recent form versus longterm form, and gleaning an edge.
For example, a player who is playing well recently but hasn’t garnered much or enough change in odds from Vegas or has simply had some bad luck on the greens but has been hitting it well in SG:APP and SG:OTT for several weeks is definitely a player to look into more.
On the flip side, if somebody has a great track record but hasn’t been up to form, look for news articles about things like a swing or coaching change, off-course life events (baby, marriage, etc) or an injury that might give some context to the slump. See if you can identify a scenario where he is worth betting on being a bounce-back while his odds are lulling.
Course Fit
The next avenue is course fit. This is factored into the market to an extent, but the players who are in the top 5 or 10 most extreme outliers when it comes to driving stats or putting stats can still have an edge at courses that are setup dramatically longer or shorter than your average tour stop.
Generally for a FRL bet, we get longer odds on the best players and shorter odds on the bottom of the field. For example, a favorite who is 10-1 to win could be 15-1 or 20-1 to be FRL and a guy who is 100-1 could be 60-1 or 70-1 to be FRL.
Vegas does the math here decently, following standard projection models and variance in play per-round, but when trying to squeak out all the edge we can, there can be players that stack up out of line with their overall odds.
There are opportunities to shop for an outlier line in the more volatile and lower-handle FRL market that can help turn a lean into a play.
Putting Variance
The thing that can really ice a FRL play is that putting is by far the highest variance stat in golf. Oftentimes the leader after one round will simply be the guy who made everything that day.
This could be a good ball striker who finally got all of his looks to go, but likely won’t keep that up, or a great putter who just delivered on his strength in the opening round. But it gives a situational lean to guys who probably can’t keep that performance up for all four rounds – where they will likely get overtaken by a Scottie Scheffler or other well-rounded ball striker – but can have an outlier performance where they gain 4, 5, 6+ strokes chipping and putting in a single hot round to open the tournament.
Many players at this level can end up shooting something in the low 60s with a little luck.
This gives an advantage to otherwise mediocre players who are prone to having a high-variance putting day, which if you are interested in somebody, you can check to see if they have that kind of profile in their previous rounds, and go for some of the more volatile boom-or-bust players in the FRL market, for sure.
Keep in mind the concept of buying “weighted lottery tickets” and make sure to have an EXTRA solid edge in mind when chasing FRL markets – because there is more juice here overall due to the volatility – and with a little patience you can score a few big hits over the course of a season.
Remember the Ricky Bobby mantra “if you’re not first, you’re last!”, and don’t get discouraged if a guy you picked completely throws a dud out of the gates.
Just keep making informed decisions and keep firing. Golf is not just the most mental pro sport to play — it’s the most mental one to bet on as well.
Develop a good process, make small refinements, and trust in it!
