This is a guest post by PoolGenius, whose subscribers report winning sports pools more than 3x as often as expected.
The pick strategy for tiers-based golf pools, such as 2024 PGA Championship pools or pools covering multiple Majors tournaments, can vary widely depending on the number of golfers to select, how golfers are grouped in each tier, and your pool’s scoring rules.
As a result, it can be difficult to find good data to analyze your specific pool. Our new Golf Majors & Masters Picks product gives you an edge by aggregating relevant odds and stats and providing customized pick advice that incorporates your pool’s exact characteristics.
In this article, we’ll cover the importance of identifying value plays in your Majors pool and also identify some early value picks to consider in 2024 PGA Championship pools.
2024 PGA Championship: Why Value Picks Matter
As with all sports pools and picking contests, you typically win a Majors pool by identifying some key picks that not only come through but that your opponents also do not make. You can only win a pool when you score more than your opponents do, so you need to differentiate your picks from the crowd to at least some degree.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll consider a hypothetical PGA Championship pool where you have to make multiple picks, selecting one golfer from each of several predefined tiers of golfers.
Depending on the total number of entries in your pool, you want to find the right balance of two strategy factors that are rarely in perfect harmony:
- Picking the best golfers that have the highest chances to win
- Finding undervalued picks that are less popular selections in your pool
You rarely want to consider taking one of the golfers who has the lowest odds of being the top-scoring golfer in a tier, even if they are an unpopular pick. But if you can identify a golfer who has decent win odds relative to the other golfers in his tier and is flying under the radar in terms of pick popularity, that’s typically the type of value pick worth targeting.
At smaller pool sizes, you also want to be a little more conservative. You can take the top favorites (even if popular) in some tiers while adding a few more contrarian plays in other tiers. For example, you can still take Scottie Scheffler as one of your picks, even if he is very popular, because the risk of dropping down to another golfer in his tier may not be worth it in small pools. But if you do that, you will also want to add in some picks that differentiate you from all the other entries in your pool that are also picking Scheffler.
As pool size increases, you want to place more emphasis on value over safety in your overall pick set and be more contrarian as your baseline odds of winning the pool go down. Winning large pools is very difficult to do, and following the crowd only makes it harder. However, all longer shot picks aren’t equal, and you need to identify the best risk vs. reward trade-offs.
2024 PGA Championship Golfer Value Picks
Identifying value picks for a tiers-based Majors contest is tough business because rules and tier construction can differ greatly from pool to pool. A golfer who is at the bottom of a tier in terms of win odds in one pool, and therefore not worth picking, might be a great value in another pool, where he’s in a different tier with different golfers.
That’s exactly why we designed the Golf Majors & Masters Picks product. You customize your tiers of golfers to reflect your specific pool, and you can edit your tiers as needed:
Once you have your tiers set up, the product generates a customized Data Grid of information for each of your pool’s tiers, which includes things like:
- Betting market odds and line changes
- Each golfer’s odds to be the top performer in his tier
- Each golfer’s estimated pick popularity
- Our rank for each golfer based on Strokes Gained
- Tournament history and results
- Customized pick grades based on each golfer’s win odds and pick popularity and your pool’s size
The pick grades and some other data, such as estimated pick popularity, will be different than what someone playing in a different pool will see—and those types of pool-specific adjustments make all the difference in maximizing your edge.
To provide some high-level examples, though, here are some value plays that we see showing up for a few common pool and tier formats for the 2024 PGA Championship. Just keep in mind that this analysis won’t apply to all pools, especially if your pool’s structure differs from the defaults of a few popular golf pool hosting sites, which we used to generate this analysis.
Min Woo Lee
While hardcore golf fans may be willing to let Min Woo Lee cook, he’s not exactly a household name in most kitchens across America.
The 25-year-old Australian joined the PGA Tour this year after a win at the Australian PGA Championship at the end of 2023, but he hasn’t yet delivered a signature win. He did come close with a second-place finish at the Cognizant Classic, and he has consecutive top-25 finishes in his last two starts, including the Masters.
Part of finding value is picking golfers who have a decent chance of performing well relative to the other players in their tier and who are unpopular picks. Lee fits that bill for the PGA Championship. He is typically showing up outside the top two tiers in most pool structure, but still in one of the middle/upper tiers. He is often grouped with bigger names like Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Sahith Theegala, and/or Will Zalatoris and is a fairly unpopular pick as a result.
Lee’s putting has let him down so far in 2024, but he ranks 10th in Strokes Gained Off The Tee this year, and Valhalla is a long course that likely favors those who can drive the ball well.
Dean Burmester
Burmester has a few things going for him when it comes to value as a pool pick. He’s from South Africa and plays on the LIV Tour, but is not one of the big names who is a past Majors winner on that Tour. He also was not part of the LIV group of golfers that competed at The Masters this year, so this is his first Majors appearance of 2024.
Most casual American golf pool participants are likely going to look right past him in search of names they recognize.
There’s an argument, though, that Burmester is one of the most in-form golfers on the LIV Tour. He won the LIV Miami event in April. He also won twice on the DP World Tour in his native South Africa at the end of 2023.
And in the betting market, he has similar win odds as guys like Tony Finau, Shane Lowry, and Sepp Straka, at a small fraction of the pick popularity those other guys are drawing.
Keith Mitchell
“Cashmere Keith” Mitchell is one of the most stylish players on the Tour, but his fashion sense apparently is not resonating with the PGA Championship pool crowd.
Similar to Min Woo Lee, though, Mitchell has some of the characteristics we want to target for value. His putting has let him down, but he is one of the best in 2024 at Strokes Gained Off The Tee and hitting long approach shots. His game sets up well for Valhalla’s length, where he can realistically reach some of the longer holes with good scoring opportunities.
Those factors are likely why he has similar odds to win in the betting market as some recent PGA Tour winners or near-winners like Taylor Pendrith, Brian Harman, Stephen Jaeger, and Denny McCarthy, who have all featured prominently on some recent Sundays.
Mitchell, meanwhile, has been pretty solid all year, but his best finishes are just inside the top 10 at the Cognizant Classic and American Express. As a result, he’s got fairly low popularity relative to his similarly risky peers.
The PoolGenius Advantage: Golf Majors & Masters Picks
While the three golfers we highlighted above may not show up as value picks in your specific PGA Championship pool, you can customize the PoolGenius tools to identify your top contrarian options.
Subscribers to our Golf Majors & Masters Picks product can set up an unlimited number of Majors pools for the 2024 season, whether for individual tournaments or contests that cover all remaining Majors. We also have a Golf One And Done Picks product that provides customized data and pick advice for another popular format of golf pools.
Good luck with your 2024 PGA championship picks, and remember that the smarter your pick strategy going in, the less luck you need to win your pool!