Search for golf betting tips and you will find no shortage of people claiming a big return. Almost none of them show you enough to check the claim. This page explains what to look for, so you can tell a real edge from a lucky month, whether you are judging us or anyone else.
Strike rate tells you almost nothing
A tipster who only backs favourites will win often and still lose money. One who backs 40/1 shots will lose most weeks and can be hugely profitable. In golf this matters more than in almost any other sport, because a typical field holds 120 to 156 players and even the best in the world wins only a handful of times a year.
Return on investment is the number that counts: total profit divided by total staked. Ask for that, and ask what stake it assumes. A record quoted at level stakes is honest. One that quietly varies the stake is not comparable to anything.
Ask how long the record is
Golf betting returns are noisy. A single 50/1 winner can carry a whole year, and a quiet spell of six weeks proves nothing either way. Treat any record shorter than a full season as a sample too small to judge, and be suspicious of a record that starts at a conveniently chosen date.
We publish ours from the start of 2022 onwards, every tip, including the losing ones, on the track record page. You can see the flat spells as well as the good runs, because hiding them would make the figure meaningless.
Check whether the price was actually available
This is where most published records quietly fall apart. A tip is only worth the price you could really get when it was posted. If a service quotes the best price in the market after the event, or a price that vanished within minutes, the record is describing bets nobody could place.
It is worth knowing which firms are consistently generous, because the gap is real money over a season. We measured it across every event we have odds for in which bookmaker is best for golf.
Favourites are rarely where the value is
Bookmakers price the top of the market tightly, because that is where most money goes. The margin they build in is heaviest on the players everyone has heard of. Further down the field, prices are set with less care and more often sit away from a player's true chance.
We looked at how often the market leader actually delivers in how often favourites win golf events. The answer surprises most people.
Each-way terms change the maths
Golf is an each-way sport. Whether a firm pays five places or eight, at a quarter or a fifth of the odds, changes the value of the same bet enormously. A tip quoted without its each-way terms is incomplete. We cover how to read them in each-way golf betting explained and compare the terms themselves in each-way value comparison.
A short checklist
- Return on investment, not strike rate, and at level stakes.
- At least a full season, starting where the record starts, not where it looks best.
- Every tip published, losers included.
- The price and the bookmaker named at the time of posting.
- Each-way terms stated.
- Past performance written plainly, with no guarantee attached to it.
What we do
GolfForecast prices every player in a tour event against the bookmakers and flags the ones trading above their modelled chance. You set the firms you bet with and how much you want to stake, and you get the player, the stake and the bookmaker with the best price. The current week is on the forecasts page, and the pricing is on the pricing page.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. Betting involves risk and you should only stake what you can afford to lose. 18+. BeGambleAware.org
