GOLF

Gdula's Golf Simulations and Betting Picks: Travelers Championship

The PGA Tour heads to TPC River Highlands after a major week. Who is most likely to win?

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 Travelers Championship, according to the models.

Golfer Simulated
Win%
Simulated
Top-10%
Simulated
Made Cut%
FanDuel
Sportsbook
Win Odds
Dustin Johnson 5.8% 29.1% 77.1% +1200
Patrick Cantlay 4.5% 29.1% 77.0% +1700
Patrick Reed 4.0% 27.3% 75.7% +2300
Paul Casey 3.7% 26.3% 75.7% +1600
Abraham Ancer 3.7% 25.0% 74.6% +3200
Scottie Scheffler 3.6% 24.5% 74.2% +2300
Bryson DeChambeau 3.4% 25.4% 74.8% +1100
Brian Harman 3.0% 24.3% 74.2% +3100
Tony Finau 2.7% 20.8% 71.1% +2900
Brooks Koepka 2.6% 19.8% 70.3% +1500
Harris English 2.4% 18.5% 69.2% +3800
Kevin Streelman 2.4% 20.6% 70.7% +3200
Joaquin Niemann 2.0% 17.5% 68.3% +4400
Cameron Smith 2.0% 16.6% 66.9% +6000
Russell Henley 1.9% 16.5% 67.3% +5000
Si Woo Kim 1.7% 15.8% 66.0% +6500
Brendon Todd 1.7% 15.3% 66.2% +9500
Charley Hoffman 1.6% 15.9% 66.4% +4400
Cameron Tringale 1.5% 12.7% 63.8% +8000
Keegan Bradley 1.4% 16.2% 67.3% +6500
Emiliano Grillo 1.3% 12.9% 63.0% +9500
Jason Day 1.3% 12.6% 62.3% +7500
Sam Burns 1.1% 12.0% 61.3% +7000
Kevin Kisner 1.1% 9.2% 56.9% +14000
Ian Poulter 1.1% 10.3% 59.5% +8500
Talor Gooch 1.0% 10.0% 59.7% +17000
Justin Rose 0.9% 9.8% 58.7% +7000
Steve Stricker 0.9% 9.8% 58.1% +31000
Lanto Griffin 0.9% 9.6% 58.7% +12000
Kevin Na 0.9% 9.2% 57.7% +8500
Max Homa 0.9% 10.2% 59.6% +7500
Carlos Ortiz 0.9% 10.4% 58.7% +10000
Chris Kirk 0.9% 9.8% 59.2% +12000
Bubba Watson 0.9% 11.1% 59.7% +3700
Francesco Molinari 0.9% 8.9% 56.2% +8000
Doug Ghim 0.8% 9.6% 57.8% +25000
Aaron Wise 0.8% 9.2% 57.6% +8500
Adam Scott 0.8% 9.1% 57.2% +7000
Harold Varner III 0.8% 8.8% 56.6% +12000
Stewart Cink 0.8% 8.4% 55.7% +8500
Doc Redman 0.7% 7.1% 53.2% +7500
Zach Johnson 0.7% 7.6% 54.6% +19000
Tom Hoge 0.7% 6.8% 53.3% +31000
Mackenzie Hughes 0.6% 6.7% 52.7% +12000
Brendan Steele 0.6% 8.2% 55.4% +17000
Patton Kizzire 0.6% 6.6% 52.9% +17000
Matthew Wolff 0.6% 6.7% 51.9% +3500
Adam Hadwin 0.6% 7.1% 54.5% +17000
Rickie Fowler 0.6% 8.0% 55.5% +7500
Michael Thompson 0.6% 6.1% 52.2% +25000
Sebastian Munoz 0.5% 7.1% 53.7% +19000
Chez Reavie 0.5% 7.1% 53.7% +17000
Kyle Stanley 0.5% 8.5% 55.5% +17000
Matt Jones 0.5% 7.4% 55.0% +17000
Russell Knox 0.5% 7.2% 54.3% +17000
Ryan Moore 0.5% 7.6% 53.5% +19000
Adam Long 0.5% 5.9% 51.0% +21000
Pat Perez 0.5% 5.7% 51.2% +17000
Erik van Rooyen 0.5% 5.3% 50.2% +14000
Ryan Armour 0.5% 5.9% 50.8% +25000


The model is giving Dustin Johnson top odds to win this week but not at a high enough clip to want to bet him at +1200 on FanDuel Sportsbook.

I like Patrick Cantlay at +1700 despite his underperformance in the model. The model shows only marginally negative value on Patrick Reed (+2300) and views Abraham Ancer (+3200) as a plus value.

Some other options rating out well include Harris English (+3800), Cameron Smith (+6000), Russell Henley (+5000), Si Woo Kim (+6500), Brendon Todd (+9500), Cameron Tringale (+8000), and Emiliano Grillo (+9500).

I'm honing in on Cantlay, Ancer, Smith, and Grillo primarily.