McIlroy, Johnson Favored At The Players Championship As Golf Bettors Track Tiger’s Progress

The usual suspects, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson, are the betting co-favorites this week at the Players Championship, which again has the strongest field in professional golf with the top 50 golfers in the world participating.

The daunting island green at the par-3 17th is always a star in the Players’ story. Moving the PGA Tour’s premier event from May to March, which is expected to make TPC-Sawgrass’ closing holes more difficult, will also receive ample attention. McIlroy and Johnson start the week as 12-1 favorites to emerge from the 144-man field and claim the $2.25 million winner’s check from the record $12.5 million purse.

McIlroy enters with five top-6 finishes – but no victories – in 2019 while Johnson blitzed the field last month in the WGC-Mexico Championship to ascend to No. 1 in the world. The golfer Vegas will be watching, however, is Tiger Woods, who returns to the course this week after missing the Arnold Palmer Invitational with a neck injury.

Jeff Sherman, the premier golf oddsmaker in Vegas, said his Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook, receives 25-30 percent more action when Woods is in the field. He’s eager to see how Woods performs this week because the start of the Masters is four weeks away and the 14-time major champion is always an attractive option whose presence demands a full page of proposition bets.

Tracking the trends in professional golf helped Sherman create a career.

He started out in 1993 as a teller at the Imperial Palace casino in Las Vegas. Within a couple of years, he’d completed his MBA at UNLV, and was the primary person at the Imperial Palace setting the odds for outright winners of golf tournaments while also crafting the head-to-head matchups, which appeal to the more polished bettor each week.

At the time, the Imperial Palace was one of the only Vegas sportsbooks to offer golf odds, specifically head-to-head matchups. Each week, Sherman contacted the tournament office directly and requested a copy of the field faxed to his office. Now, he grabs the information off the PGA Tour’s website each Friday afternoon.

“It wasn’t readily available for other books to see what I was doing unless they physically came into the book and saw my odds,” he said. “And vice versa. Now you can look on a phone app, it’s a tighter marketplace now because of the availability and resources.”

Golf is an attractive sport for bettors, in part, because the action is spread out over four days. In addition to the head-to-head matchups and outright odds, Sherman has started providing over / under totals on winning scores for the major championships and other big events such as this week’s Players.

Last May the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states other than Nevada and New Jersey could legalize sports betting. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan believes this will lead to increased fan interaction. The exact shape it takes remains unclear, but Sherman doubts fans will be able to place bets on the result of each shot during a tournament, as some have speculated.

“Our most popular handle is the outright market, after each round,” Sherman said. “When we expand beyond Nevada, we will look at doing in-play outrights.”

For example the sports books may update their odds after nine holes in the final round.

“But to bet on what’s this guy going to do on his next shot, that’s so intricate it would be a very specific market that you’re reaching to there,” he said. “Even the hard core golf fan, that’s not something the books would offer on a large basis just because of the intricacies of the market reach on it.”

The hardcore golf bettor and the casual sports fan alike will watch Woods’ progress this week at TPC-Sawgrass, where he won the 1994 U.S. Amateur and Players’ titles in 2001 and 2013.

Also, there’s often discussion on social media and among TV talking heads discussing whether the Players should be considered the fifth major. Based on the action received in Vegas, the answer is no.

“The Players gets twice of what a World Golf Championship or strong weekly Tour event might get but it’s nowhere near the stratosphere of what the four majors tend to get,” Sherman said. “The Masters is far and away our highest handle. Much like the Kentucky Derby or Daytona 500, someone who might bet on golf only once a year will likely bet on the Masters.”