How to Bet Golf Parlays – Betting on golf provides many different wagering options, depending on the sportsbook and when someone decides to bet. With the various wagers available, it’s possible to use parlays as a way to maximize your winnings when you have strong feelings about multiple bets.
The most popular and probably the highest-profile golf wager is the futures bet on a specific player to win a golf tournament. With only one winner in a tournament, those bets are not particularly reliable to work into a parlay.
However, there are plenty of others to parlay, and given that up to 156 players participate in each tournament, the odds can be quite long for specific outcomes. Parlay two or three of those, and a $20 bet can return well into the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.
Golf Bets
Even though the futures bet on a player to win the tournament gets most of the attention, there are also futures for finishes other than first place. Some sportsbooks offer odds for finishes in the top five, top ten, top twenty, or even to make the cut.
These are generally expressed in American odds, with the favorites normally at +800 or so, meaning a winning $100 bet will net $800 in winnings. The same odds expressed fractionally are 8/1.
If one player has odds of +200 to finish in the top ten, another player has odds of +400 for the same finish, the parlay for both players finishing in the top ten when 156 are entered is likely to pay +1000 or higher.
A bettor can also parlay wagers on the winners of multiple tournaments, especially the four major championships. Those are the Masters Tournament, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open, and the Open Championship (also called the British Open).
Picking the winners of all four championships in a parlay bet is similar to a trifecta or pick six bet in horse racing. The difference is that in horse racing, there are only eight or ten horses in each race.
How to Bet Golf Parlays the right way
In golf, the number of participants is much higher, as we’ve discussed, sending the odds extremely high and the payout into the stratosphere. Sportsbooks don’t usually make the odds for regular PGA Tour events available very far in advance, so parlaying them isn’t an option.
I certainly wish it was, because at one point in my golf preview series, I had the winners among my three picks for four consecutive tournaments and six out of eight. My highest odds pick was Billy Horschel at +8000, so just imagine what it would have been like to string together four of those in a parlay.
There are also wagers for whether one player will beat another in the entire tournament and matchup bets by round. The matchups are not necessarily for players that are paired together, so any number of combinations is possible.
Being knowledgeable about the game of golf and closely following the PGA Tour from week to week can provide an edge to being able to successfully pick matchup winners and parlay them into some serious payouts. The unpredictable nature of golf contributes to the high odds, especially when you consider that even Tiger Woods in his celebrated run from 1999 to 2008 only won 30% of the time. Learn more about golf betting with the BParlay Golf Picks guide.
Tips for Betting on Golf
Professional golfers tend to play well on certain types of courses, and certain courses lend themselves to particular styles of play. It was no coincidence that Jack Nicklaus won six Masters titles, Sam Snead won eight Greater Greensboro Opens, and Tiger Woods was dominant at Torrey Pines, Firestone Country Club, and Bay Hill.
They also tend to play well in six to eight tournament stretches, so it’s possible to predict when someone is ready to win on a particular layout. Take the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in 2021, which Daniel Berger won. He had a good track record at Pebble Beach combined with his excellent stretch of top ten finishes.
The combination pointed to Berger rising to the top of the leaderboard. It was the same logic that led me to make Jordan Spieth and Matt Wallace as two of my picks for the Valero Texas Open. They finished first and third, battling each other the entire weekend.
Another tip is to make multiple bets because with the high odds, hitting just once out of four or five will reap serious rewards. Parlays will just increase the magnitude of the payouts, but only with well-prepared research and knowledge. We hope you have enjoyed our guide on How to Bet Golf Parlays.