2023 Performance review
FormGolfer 2022/3 PGA Tour Season Review
45 events previewed, 12 outright winners, 1006 points staked, 1538 points returned for a profit of 532 points and an astonishing 53% return on investment. We had thought our debut season was a good start at 38%, but to improve on that defied even our high expectations.
We’re now showing over 800 points profit in just two years; having suggested staking roughly 1/1000th of your bank per point, we’re already getting very close to having doubled the initial investment, even if stakes have not been increased as the bank has grown.
The highlights were plentiful, with the likes of Taylor Moore, Wyndham Clark, Emiliano Grillo, Sepp Straka and Erik Van Rooyen all winning for us at odds of 50/1 or more. But it wasn’t a case of occasional big-priced winners interspersed with long losing runs; over the course of the season we had nine winning months from twelve, and after a slow start we were in profit by January and steadily built this position over the course of the season.
From an initial long-term target of 10% ROI, we’re now building confidence that we can maintain at least 20% and hopefully more as we further develop our approach to finding value in golf markets.
We remain focused on the PGA Tour – having long held the belief that doing one thing and doing it well is a better long-term strategy than spreading our analysis time and effort too widely. One of the key advantages we have over the bookmakers is that they have to price every player in every event; whereas we can pick and choose.
As we dug a bit deeper into our results, it has become apparent that backing our picks win only would have been an even more profitable approach. For the 2021/2 season, backing win only would have mirrored our overall performance with a high 30s return on investment. During 2022/3, we would have made a scarcely believable 94% backing win only. Furthermore, had we not been taking advantage of the best available each way terms (which tend to mean taking a slightly reduced price), we would have been able to secure better prices win only, which we estimate would have taken the return to around 120%.
Clearly backing win only is more volatile, carries a greater risk of a long run of adverse results, and as such won’t be a suitable strategy for everyone, however this is well worth considering when determining how you want to invest in our picks. Just be conscious that a single shot here and there can make a huge difference; more so than when you have the prospect of a decent each way return for your close misses.
A slight disappointment was results in the season’s majors, with just a couple of places to show for our efforts. To some extent it’s to be expected, since they are arguably the easiest events to price accurately and tend to follow more predictable patterns (which also appears to be the case for the new ‘elevated’ events that feature the world’s top players). We’ll be considering whether or not a slightly different approach to majors may pay dividends, but we’re just as happy picking up profits in the minor events, and we’d certainly encourage our followers not to focus their golf betting purely on the majors if they want to make as much profit as possible.
Overall though, we’re delighted with how things have gone this season, particularly having picked out first time winners (Taylor Moore, Wyndham Clark), guys who hadn’t won in donkey’s years (Grillo, Van Rooyen), and more obvious form contenders, which gives us confidence that our approach is able to find players who are ready to win and offer value, whatever their profile.
We’ll be taking a well-earned rest over the festive period but can’t wait to get started on finding the winners through the 2024 season, which starts with the Sentry in the first week of January.