Cashing In on Golf’s Third Major at the Top Online Sportsbooks

Betting on professional golf is basically a year-round activity with a full schedule of events on the betting boards at online sportsbooks on a regular basis. That being said, there are four times a year when golf takes center stage with the entire betting public in the form of a tournament that is referred to as a Major.

The first is the Masters in early April at Augusta National in Georgia followed by the US Open to coincide with Father’s Day weekend in the middle of June. As the summer wears on, the betting action shifts overseas to Great Britain for the Open Championship, which is also known as the British Open. This year’s event at Royal Birkdale Golf Club in Lancashire, England is set to get underway on Thursday, July 20 with first round action and the betting boards at some of the top
online sportsbooks taking action on this events are starting to fill up with any number of different options to try and cash a winning ticket for this event.

The most basic way to bet on any professional golf tournament is on a futures board with odds to win outright. This is also one of the hardest bets out there to win. Anything can happen over the course of four rounds of play as even the best golfers in the world find it extremely hard to keep their A-Game going over 72 holes of highly challenging playing conditions. When a Major rolls around such as the Open Championship, the pressure gets dialed up even higher with the host course set up to play much harder that an average PGA Tour stop or a weekly event on the European Tour.

Dustin Johnson comes in as the favorite to win this year’s Open Championship and his current odds stand at +1200. He is the top ranked golfer in the world and he has already pocketed over $6 million on the PGA Tour and he still has some pretty long odds to win. Henrik Stenson comes into this year’s defending champ and his odds to repeat have been set at +2500.

As we get closer to the start of Thursday’s first round action, many of the books will add betting odds for any number of props that are released in conjunction with the action on the course. These betting props offer quite a bit of value to the posted odds if you know how and where to look. Two of the best ways to cash in on a Major is betting on a Top 5 or Top 10 finish. The payout on these two bets is much lower when wagering on the top favorites, but they are much
easier to hit. Johnson may not win this week, but given just how dominant he has been on the golf course this season, his odds to be one of the 10 best this week can still be rather attractive. The combination of past performance at similar venues combined with current form can often times provide some valuable clues for any pro golfer when it comes to predicting how they will play this week.

One of the best ways to bet on a Major such as the Open Championship are on the multitude of betting odds that are released for head-to-head matchups. To cash in on this bet, the golfer you bet on only has to finish better than the golfer they are pitted against. Odds are sometimes released for round-to-round matchups as well as for the four rounds of the tournament as a whole.