2019 Golf Predictor Betting/Tipping Summary

Another golf year has finished and it's time to report on the Golf Predictor bets/tips for 2019. Only one win this year, a few play-off losses and a plethora of places, which all add up to a loss of just under 41 points for the year*. It's all fine margins and if my 80/1 tip Antoine Rozner had holed his birdie putt on the final hole in Mauritius a few weeks ago or had J.B. Hansen been able to chip on to a green from ten yards away at the penultimate hole in France, it would have meant a profit for the year. Alas, it wasn't to be and those failures coupled with a sizeable number of near miss places (including two at the very last tournament in Australia!) meant a non-profitable year. Overall though, over the longer term, I remain significantly ahead of the bookies.

I like to use Golf Predictor to find golfers to bet one unit each way on in the 40/1 to 80/1 range and this is borne out by some basic statistics. Out of the 224 bets that I made over the year, usually three per tournament (US and European Tour), only twelve (5.4%) were 33/1 or 35/1 and another nine (4%) were 125/1 or greater. As the image below shows, 84.4% of my bets were in my preferred range. 

Odds distribution for 2019 Golf Predictor bets/tips

I like each way bets in this range as it usually offers a (modest) profit for the tournament if just one of the golfers place. While a golfer in the 40/1 to 80/1 range hasn't got as much of a chance of winning as the top rated guys in single figures, they are very good golfers. In addition to being capable of winning, I believe they have a better chance of placing than, say, a 6/1 or 8/1 shot has of winning for a similar return. All you need for a profitable year is about two wins and a steady stream of places. While I had the latter this year, only having Shane Lowry in The Open (at 45/1) meant I just came up short in 2019. The basic stats are as follows:

Number of bets: 224

Profit/Loss: = -40.83

Winners: 1 (Shane Lowry at The Open)

Places: 34 (including two play-off losses and ten dead heat places)

No profit this year, but I'm hoping to get back in the black next year!

*Notes: I stuck with one bookie for convenience. If I used an odds checking site and multiple accounts, I probably would have cut my losses by around 10 to 15 points.