Bellus’ Betting Breakdown: Tour Championship First Clicks

Watching Viktor Hovland win the BMW Championship was a bittersweet feeling. 

As someone who had him 16-1 outright, I was thrilled. But as someone who didn’t write an article last week, I was crushed.

All season we’ve jumped on here and thrown our fair share of picks around, mostly losers, but the winners always bring great feelings. It started with Scottie Scheffler at the Players Championship, and our best cash of the year came at the Woman’s PGA Championship with Ruoning Yin at 42-1. 

It would’ve been sweet to add Hovland at 16-1 last week as a feather in our cap. Sadly, I was the only one who cashed. 

So, let’s change that and find a winner for the last PGA Tour event of the 2022-23 season. 

East Lake provides a challenging test for the 30 players left standing in the playoffs. 

And since the change of format, with the No. 1 seed starting the tournament at -10, and the No. 30 player starting at even par, this event has had four winners. 

Two of them (Dustin Johnson and Patrick Cantlay) were the No. 1 seed entering the week. The other two were Rory McIlroy, doing it in 2019 as a No. 5 seed and in 2022 as the No. 6 seed. 

The odds suggest only four players can win this event. Four players have odds of 8-1 or shorter. The other 26 are all 20-1, with more than half of them 150-1 or longer. 

Let’s get to the picks. I’ll pick one guy from the first group of four and throw a dart at one of the 26 brave men looking to do the impossible. 

The Core Four 

Scottie Scheffler +150 

Rory McIlroy +330 

Viktor Hovland +450 

Jon Rahm +800

Normally I wouldn’t even consider a number below 8-1 in an outright market for a golf tournament, but the Tour Championship is no normal event. 

McIlroy has teed it up 11 times since missing the cut at the Masters (Really, Rory… you made us wait all winter for that?) and has one win, five finishes inside the top six and ten top 10s. 

In most events, someone will clip Rory by one or two agonizingly painfully close shots. At the Tour Championship the starting strokes give him a leg up over 90 per cent of the field. 

And let’s talk about this top four.

Scheffler has been the best golfer on the planet for months, what he does with a golf club in his hand is absolutely magical, it is quite literally Tiger-esque. However, he looks like Luke Bellus on the greens. 

Here’s how East Lake will go for Scheffler: He’s going to be first tee to green and 27th putting. I don’t know if that will be enough to hold off McIlroy and a charging pack. 

Next is Hovland. Our sweet, sweet king. 

Hovland is coming into East Lake on the heels of his best round ever, the biggest win of his career, and a lot of media obligations. It wouldn’t shock me if he didn’t have his ‘A’ game next week. And the winner of this event will need that. 

Speaking of ‘A’ game, what happened to Rahm? 

He dominated the golf world to start the season, winning five of 14 worldwide starts from September to April. That stretch even included him winning the Masters. Rahm has played in just nine events since then and has three top 10s. 

He’s lost strokes to the field in both playoff events and finished outside of the top 30 at FedEx and BMW. 

McIlroy also has the best course history at East Lake of these four players. I’ll roll with him winning his fourth Tour Championship at +330. 

NEXT UP 

Patrick Cantlay +2000 

Max Homa +3300 

Xander Schauffele +3500 

Lucas Glover +5000 

Brian Harman +5500 

Wyndham Clark +5500 

Schauffele loves East Lake. The American has made six starts at the Tour Championship. His worst finish is a tie for seventh. 

His second PGA Tour win came at this event in 2017, and in 2020 he had the lowest gross score of the event despite not winning the tournament. 

Any way you slice it, Schauffele is a horse, and this is his course. 

It’s been a weird season for Schauffele standards. Last week at the BMW Championship, he finished tied for eighth. It was his first top 10 since the U.S. Open in June, but it was also his 10th of the season. 

He finished inside the top 20 at all four majors, but aside from being in the final group in the U.S. Open on Saturday (and immediately ejecting) it never seemed like he was contending to win one this year. 

His closest call on the PGA Tour came at Quail Hallow when he was in the final group on Sunday with Wyndham Clark.

But he’s come up short all year, and a win at the Tour Championship would certainly heal all of those wounds. 

He enters this week tied for 11th at -3 and seven shots behind Scheffler. 

Another reason I like Schauffele this week is his ability to start fast. I looked at the strokes gained data of all 30 players in this field in the First Round of events since the start of the new year. 

Schauffele comes in at fourth in strokes gained: total. He has gained more than three strokes to the field in the opening round of events nine times this year. 

Last week he opened with a 71 at Olympia Fields Country Club, losing 1.28 strokes to the field. 

The good news is that he’s only lost strokes to the field in the opening round six times this season and has bounced back the following week, gaining over three strokes to the field in the opening round of his next event. 

If Schauffele can get off to a fast start, I like his chances of winning it again, and either way, history tells us he should at least be in contention on Sunday.