This time, DeChambeau was emotionless. A bystander named Lee Woody, holding two cans of White Claw soda, seemed pleased to see DeChambeau miss the green on a par-3 hole.
“There’s a line, so I’m just going to dip my toe in there,” Woody said of the taunt, who had also bet another $100 on FanDuel that Hideki Matsuyama would make the shot. under His score that day was 71.5. “He’s very calm and collected,” Woody said of Matsuyama. “He doesn’t get upset when someone makes noise.”
Apparently neither did DeChambeau, who saved par and shot 67 to win his second U.S. Open.
This was the first U.S. Open played in a state where sports betting is legal, allowing spectators to bet on every aspect of the tournament from their cellphones, and booing from gamblers in the stands made an already difficult second hole at Pinehurst even more difficult. On Friday, one fan yelled at Viktor Hovlan that his bet was on whether Hovlan would make the cut. (He didn’t.) Another offered to bet on how Phil Mickelson, a self-confessed gambler, would do on the 17th hole.
“We’re listening to everything,” DeChambeau said earlier this week. “It’s not like we’re indifferent to it.” He joked that it’s hard to hear what onlookers are saying at LIV Golf events with music playing during rounds, adding, “Whether gambling is a good thing is up for debate. Personally, if it helps grow golf and increase attendance, I’m all for it.”
Golf betting and daily fantasy contests have exploded in recent years. PrizePicks, which runs daily fantasy, said the first round of the U.S. Open this year attracted more than twice as much entry money as it will in 2022. Bets placed during the round, rather than before play begins, account for 45% of golf wagers, according to DraftKings, and for some, playing in a golf tournament offers a chance to take advantage of variables invisible to TV viewers, place a quick bet before the sportsbook adjusts the odds and, in some cases, try to understand what the players are thinking.
Two-time major champion Collin Morikawa says he hears fans yelling about gambling all the time, but it’s usually to cheer him on. “In a lot of other sports, you don’t hear that because you’re not around and it’s loud,” he says. “It’s crazy that we play harder just for them.”
Fans were able to bet last week not only on the winner, but also on the nationality of the winner, the top five finishes (and top 10 and top 20), the leaders after each round, each group’s best performance (on the day and on each hole), the group’s total scores on each hole, the number of birdies and bogeys each player would score on the day, and even whether a particular player would hit a particular fairway or land their approach shot within 20 feet.
Max Homa agreed that most of what gamblers yell during tournaments seems to come from the good side, but he did recount a story from last year at the BMW Championship in Illinois where a gambler yelled “Pull!” while Homa was putting. Worse than the taunts on the course are the ones gamblers send him via social media, which is “really, really ugly,” he said.
Bettors also track his Venmo account and send him requests for cash multiple times a week after losing money playing with him. “I’m sick of it,” he said.
Serious bettors create predictive models to determine how each player’s tendencies – their driving distance, their preference for drawing or cutting, their chipping and putting, their performance in different weather conditions – will apply to that week’s course. But the widespread availability of detailed golf data has made it much harder to beat the bookmakers in recent years. Rufus Peabody, described by one astute bettor as “the apex predator of golf gamblers”, said that when he started betting on golf 15 years ago, all he had to do was recognise that players with long drives had an advantage on long courses.
Peabody’s approach is largely data-driven, but he says golf allows for some subjective analysis. At this year’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Peabody thought heavy rain would be particularly detrimental to Scheffler, who plays an unconventional game, sliding his back foot with driver.
Gamblers crave non-public information, perhaps more so in golf than in any other sport. Before this year’s Masters, Golf Digest gambling analyst Andy Lack spotted Hovlan working with a swing coach on an empty driving range at 6 p.m. “When you play golf tournaments for years, you know who’s playing easy and who’s really working hard,” Lack said. (Hovlan has since failed to qualify.)
Another time at the Masters, FTNFantasy analyst Alex Brickle noticed Paul Casey struggling to loosen his back during a practice round, causing him to withdraw just hours before the first round. Fantasy Golf Degenerates podcast host Kenny Kim watched Sergio Garcia sink putt after putt on the practice green and made a bet, and won, that the traditionally erratic putter would win the Masters in 2017.
Last week, one savvy bettor, who asked to remain anonymous because sportsbooks are known to limit customer bets if they see a winning trend, scouted Pinehurst’s second hole throughout three practice rounds to see if it was as difficult as advertised. Players didn’t seem to despair when their drivers hit the wiregrass. This favors long drivers like DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy, who may not be as accurate. Also, the 16th hole wasn’t as hard to birdie as one would expect. SuperBook Sports set the winning score at 5 under, and the bettor was confident in betting a score lower than that. (DeChambeau finished at 6 under.)
Players, caddies, credentialed media personnel and volunteers are prohibited from betting on tournaments or passing on non-public information to gamblers. But golf tournaments appear to be a prime venue for “courtside” bets, where gamblers bet on outcomes that have already happened before the information reaches the bookmaker. This was a problem about a decade ago, when sportsbooks relied on TV broadcasts that could be delayed by a minute or more, said Matthew Trenhile, a longtime British bookmaker. “If you were really lucky, if the feed that was literally coming off the broadcast truck got leaked or hacked, you could still get it.”
Gambling organizations send “runners” out onto the course to report whether a player has hit a hazard or had a bad lie. But once a gambler gets a head start on the bookmaker, it doesn’t take long for it to become clear. “Bookmakers are very vindictive,” says Trenaill, adding that gamblers suspected of courtside conduct are usually barred from betting more than a few dollars.
Currently, sportsbooks can use location data to determine whether mobile app users are on the course. “The people who have really industrialized this process will open up 50 or so accounts, and by the end of the tournament, they’re all gone,” Trenayar says.
Even though spectators may be aware of bad lies before anyone else, most fans have no intuition for how the odds change. At Pinehurst’s par-4 seventh hole, a group of avid gamblers sitting among the pine trees watched American Charlie Reiter’s tee shot bounce off a tree and roll. “Unplayable!” they yelled. Reiter hit his next shot into the middle of the green for par.
In addition to restricting who “has the pulse” who bets live on golf, many operators will build a 10% or more house edge into their odds “on what should be a 4% or 5% edge,” said Sam Cooney, a top golf oddsmaker at Circa Sports. He said most recreational customers won’t even notice the change.
Fans streaming the U.S. Open on NBC likely experienced a 30- to 50-second delay, according to an analysis by technology firm Phoenix, but spectators at the tournament still couldn’t take advantage of that delay. First, most sportsbooks use a data feed from IMG Arena, which is delivered a second or two after the ball comes to rest.
Friends Miles Wilkins and Christophe Cabanne found seats at the back of one hole and planned to spend Thursday afternoon placing live bets on each group that passed by, only to discover that FanDuel doesn’t allow you to bet on who will actually be playing that hole. “Live betting is an impulse thing you do, like buying a Snickers bar at the register,” Wilkins said after he and Cabanne left to pursue other errands. “We’re not going to go back down the aisle to buy one.”
Gambling from the gallery
A few recent high school graduates from the Charlotte area sat behind the par-3 15th green on Friday and seemed to be having a great time betting on the groups that went by. One of them, Hunter Justice, 19, was there Thursday but didn’t gamble. “I came with my mom,” he explained.
You must be 21 or older to bet on sports in North Carolina. One of Justice’s friends said Justice had placed bets on his brother-in-law’s FanDuel account before the round, but otherwise used PrizePicks, which is open to people 19 and older.
The friends stayed seated, checking FanDuel odds for which groups would play the 15th hole, then each placed a $5 bet. Justice challenged his friend that Garcia would shoot par or better. The Spaniard’s tee shot landed just short of the green but, like many that day, rolled away.
Still, Garcia made a 4-foot putt for par. “Bang!” Justice said. As Garcia left the green, he yelled, “I love you and your stupid pants.”
At Pinehurst, fans could often be heard boasting or worrying about bets. Tyler Cadd followed Tiger Woods during the practice round and, on the bus to the course Thursday morning, saw the pin on Woods’ first hole in the center and bet that he would get a birdie. Woods did get a birdie. The odds were +220, and his $10 bet made him a $22 profit. Another fan, Eric Allen, bet that Woods and a few other players would win the tournament. “If anyone’s going to make a bet, I’ll bet on rain,” he said. “I don’t care.”
Since states began legalizing sports betting, there have been few reported incidents like Homa’s where gamblers have tried to influence the outcome of shots. Still, “the potential for fan interference is concerning,” said Matt Kuchar, a nine-time PGA Tour winner. “I just hope we don’t get to a point where we have to do something that reduces the fans’ enjoyment of the game.”
Asked whether the USGA was concerned that widespread gambling would ruin the spectator experience, John Podany, USGA’s chief commercial officer, would simply say, “We haven’t experienced that.”
On Thursday, it seemed debatable whether gambling had marred Alex Gaspard’s experience at Pinehurst after Justin Thomas, the golfer he bet $25 on to win, bogeyed the ninth hole in the first round.
Gaspard, who came from Texas to watch the U.S. Open, seemed upset that his bet had gone awry so quickly, but he also said he’d already spent $25 on hot dogs.
