PGA Betting Guide for the Bermuda Championship
Picking winners of a golf tournament is hard. Doing it consistently is downright impossible. But finding value is something all bettors must practice in order to give themselves the best chance to make hay when the day finally comes that they ping a champion.
Below, we will cover the best bets for the Bermuda Championship based on current form, course fit, and -- of course -- the value of their odds over at Golf odds.
After two loaded fields in no-cut events on the West Coast, we are faced with an altogether different task this week in handicapping a field where we find at the top of the market a golfer who does not even have official PGA Tour status. The Bermuda Championship debuted on Tour last season as an alternate event to the WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai, China. The event gets full billing and a full allotment of FedEx Cup Points this year as a standalone event, but with THE CJ CUP and the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP in the rearview and The Masters just around the corner, this is a dead zone on the top player's calendars.
That drop in class, combined with the iffy weather forecasts, adds a whole new level of variance into the equation. While we can find some measure of consistency and a rising talent at the top of the board, this event calls for a bit more diversity and a deeper dive to find some candidates for a small investment with a potentially huge return.
For more info on Port Royal Golf Course, along with this week's key stats and comparable courses, check out the course primer.
At the Top
Denny McCarthy (+2700) - The only pick below 50/1 this week is the putting wizard McCarthy, a divergence from our standard preference for ballstrikers who knock it to five feet only to lip out their birdie putts. McCarthy has consecutive top 10s in his last two times on bermudagrass -- T6 at the Sanderson Farms Championship and T9 at the Wyndham Championship. He is also well suited for the elements, as he performs well in conditions classified by Fantasy National Golf Club as "Windy AF," gaining almost a stroke per round and ranking 20th in the field. The short stick is the strength, but he's turned in a few decent ballstriking performances of late, notably gaining 7.0 strokes with his approaches at the Wyndham. After losing strokes in nine straight events from January to July, he's gained in five of his last seven measured tournaments.
Long Shots
Russell Knox (+5000) - This Scot should also be accustomed to some messy conditions, and we can hope the soft conditions give him some hope on the greens this week. A top 10 at the Safeway Open is encouraging but for the fact that it's his lone such finish since May 2019. A T11 at this event last November was the third of nine consecutive made cuts to wrap around 2019-20, but since a T16 in Phoenix, the game fell to pieces. He gained 4.1 strokes at the Shriners but gave it all back around and on the greens. Like many, he's had a 2020 to forget, but he is still a solid iron player. As a former top-20 player in the world and still just 35 years old, Knox has the feel of a (far less dramatic) Brendon Todd comeback.
Andrew Putnam (+10000) - Like Knox, Putnam impressed in 2019, his best being a T4 at the Scottish Open on the European Tour. Also, like Knox, 2020 was a lost year where the COVID layoff and subsequent restart against super-fields placed Putnam firmly on the wrong side of the cut line. His best finishes the past two years -- the aforementioned T4 at the Scottish Open, a T3 at Colonial, and a runner up at the Sony Open -- were all contested at tracks where wind plays a significant factor.
Keith Mitchell (+10000) - You might say we are developing a type. While not a traditionally good putter, Mitchell does have a noted preference for bermuda, and like our last two selections, he's been an absolute mess for the better part of the past eight months. He was T5 in the grizzly conditions posed by Bay Hill in the last full event before play was halted, but since then has just one finish inside the top 40. Still, he outdueled Brooks Koepka and Rickie Fowler to take down the Honda Classic in 2019, and there are few names in this field who could even dream of such a claim.
Bo Hoag (+13000) - Hoag is second in the field in total strokes gained in his last 12 Windy AF rounds, and at this and similar tracks a year ago, we saw consistent quality. He was T11 at the Bermuda, T20 at the Mayakoba Classic (where Todd pulled off his magical double-dip), and then T9 at the Sony Open, another island bermudagrass course subject to windy conditions.
