GOLF
Gdula's Golf Simulations: Wells Fargo Championship
Quail Hollow requires distance off the tee. How does that affect the simulations this week?

Volatility is the name of the game in golf, and picking winners isn't easy. With fields of 150-plus golfers sometimes being separated by how a putt or two falls each week, predicting golf can be absurdly tough.

We'll never be able to capture everything that goes into a golfer's expectations for a week, but we can try to account for that by simulating out the weekend and seeing what happens.

The Process

Over the years, I have made plenty of tweaks to my original golf model, which uses a combination of the OWGR's field strength numbers and datagolf's field strength numbers to adjust each golfer's score relative to the field (on the PGA Tour, the European Tour, and the Korn Ferry Tour).

The ultimate goal is to place a score from the Waste Management Open, the BMW International Open, and the Knoxville Open on level playing fields. This adjusted strokes metric lets me see how golfers are performing across all tours. From there, a golfer's adjusted stroke data is combined with their round-to-round variance to see how the field is likely to perform when playing out the event thousands of times.

In addition to that long-term adjusted form, I factor in course-level adjustments for course fit.

I run a second model that uses more granular strokes gained data, which allows me to very easily adjust for course fit. The results are averaged out.

I let the data do the talking and don't make many tweaks -- if any. Golfers with a small sample get regressed to a low-end PGA Tour player to round out their samples. Data points are weighted more heavily toward recent performance.

Here are the most likely winners for the Wells Fargo Championship, according to the models.

Golfer Simulated
Win%
Simulated
Top-10%
Simulated
Made Cut%
FanDuel
Sportsbook
Win Odds
Jon Rahm 8.2% 42.6% 85.4% +1200
Justin Thomas 6.9% 38.4% 83.6% +1000
Bryson DeChambeau 6.7% 36.9% 82.3% +1400
Xander Schauffele 5.3% 33.9% 81.4% +1800
Webb Simpson 4.2% 30.1% 78.9% +2700
Viktor Hovland 4.0% 28.4% 77.9% +2000
Tony Finau 4.0% 28.3% 77.7% +2900
Rory McIlroy 3.5% 25.8% 76.0% +1600
Patrick Reed 3.3% 25.9% 76.2% +2900
Patrick Cantlay 3.2% 25.3% 75.6% +2700
Corey Conners 2.5% 22.0% 73.7% +2900
Joaquin Niemann 2.5% 21.8% 73.4% +3400
Will Zalatoris 2.4% 20.9% 72.4% +2900
Abraham Ancer 1.8% 17.4% 69.7% +3400
Cameron Tringale 1.8% 17.6% 69.2% +3400
Brian Harman 1.7% 16.9% 69.4% +4100
Sungjae Im 1.4% 14.0% 65.7% +3300
Max Homa 1.3% 14.2% 65.0% +3400
Harris English 1.3% 13.9% 64.8% +6500
Jason Day 1.2% 13.5% 64.9% +4100
Russell Henley 1.2% 14.4% 66.0% +4500
Tommy Fleetwood 1.0% 11.1% 61.7% +5000
Bubba Watson 0.9% 11.6% 63.1% +5500
Stewart Cink 0.9% 10.7% 60.7% +5500
Shane Lowry 0.8% 10.4% 60.8% +4500
Keegan Bradley 0.8% 10.7% 61.2% +5000
Matt Jones 0.8% 10.4% 60.5% +9000
Carlos Ortiz 0.8% 10.6% 60.7% +10000
Lanto Griffin 0.8% 9.9% 60.4% +12000
Emiliano Grillo 0.8% 10.7% 60.5% +6500
Kevin Streelman 0.7% 9.9% 59.5% +8000
Lucas Glover 0.7% 9.3% 58.2% +6500
Cameron Davis 0.7% 9.5% 59.0% +10000
Brendon Todd 0.7% 8.7% 57.8% +10000
Harold Varner III 0.7% 9.4% 58.7% +6500
Talor Gooch 0.6% 9.6% 59.0% +10000
Matt Wallace 0.6% 8.3% 57.1% +6500
Sebastian J Munoz 0.6% 7.9% 56.3% +12000
Brendan Steele 0.5% 7.3% 54.4% +9000
Gary Woodland 0.5% 7.1% 54.4% +9000
Rickie Fowler 0.5% 6.4% 52.4% +6000
Mackenzie Hughes 0.5% 7.6% 55.6% +15000
Patton Kizzire 0.5% 6.0% 51.5% +15000
Zach Johnson 0.5% 6.7% 53.9% +15000
James Hahn 0.5% 6.1% 52.7% +15000


Boy, this is a loaded card at the top, and that'll make it hard to do a few things.

The first is to narrow down who we should expect to win among the favorites, and the second is to get excited about long-shots. Factor in the difficult course and the importance of driving distance, and we should be anticipating the elite to rise to the top.

The model prefers Jon Rahm (+1200) at the top overall and when factoring in odds. He, Xander Schauffele (+1800), and Bryson DeChambeau (+1400) are positive-to-fair values.

There's similar value on both Webb Simpson (+2700) and Tony Finau (+2900) despite the vastly different games. I have the most early-week interest in Finau.

The next tier and the long shots aren't looking particularly valuable. It's really the favorites -- the five mentioned and Patrick Reed (+2900) looking to be the best bets.

I have outrights on DeChambeau, Finau, and Watson and some top-10 action on Joaquin Niemann, Matt Jones, and Harold Varner.

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