When golf tournaments come around, the golfers are placed into groups in order to play the first two rounds before moving to two-balls for the final two days. If you decide to get involved with the group betting market then you’re placing a wager on which golfer will do the best out of the specified group over the course of the entire competition. It might well be that bookmakers decide to create their own groups rather than going off the groups that the golfers are put into by the competition organisers, but the way that the bet will work remains the same: bet on the most successful golfer of the group.
A Nice Alternative to Overall Winner Bets
Obviously it is entirely possible that you might want to bet on the favourite for any given tournament when it comes to group betting, but the joy of it as a wager is that you don’t need to think about who will end up as the person that lifts the trophy. Instead, you can look to place a bet on a specific group of players that doesn’t even need to contain the likely winner. This bet type gives you the chance to place a bet on one player being better than two or three others, regardless of where they finish in the overall pecking order come the end of the competition. It means you can limit how much research you need to do, for example.
If you’re betting on a group of just five players, say, then you only need to have a look at how those five players have been playing heading into the tournament. You can look at how they’ve played on the specific golf course in the past as well as how they’ve got on if they’ve played each other before. You can choose to spend time looking into which player has the best form at the time that the competition that you’re betting on got underway. There is plenty of information that you can find on golfers that you can then use to help inform you about the best bet to place on the group that you have chosen to wager on.
Things You Need to Know
If you’ve placed a group bet then you need to be aware that the winner will be the player that finishes in the highest place at the end of the tournament. This doesn’t mean that they need to win it or even finish within what would be considered the places for an each-way bet, but they just need to finish up higher than the other golfers within their group. If a player misses the cut then they will be considered to be a loser, which will help you to understand why you didn’t win the bet if they were the one that you bet on. Things become slightly more complex if all of the players in the group miss the cut, though.
If this happens then the lowest score, or the highest score if the tournament in question is using the Stableford method of scoring, after the cut has been made is considered to be the determining factor. If there is a player that ends up not taking part then the bookmaker will use the same non-runner, no-bet rules that you might know better from horse racing, with rule 4 deductions made accordingly. If more than one player ends up on the same score, dead-heat rules will apply unless the players concerned go to a playoff to decide the winner. If weather affects the competition, bets will be settled provided at least 36 holes are played and a tournament winner is declared.
The most important thing that you need to consider when you’re getting involved in group betting is that you are only betting on the outcome of the players within the group that you’re betting on. There is no point considering the likes of the of which golfer is going to end up winning the entire tournament unless that golfer is involved in the group that you’ve chosen to bet on. It is essentially as if the players in your chosen group are the only ones playing in the tournament, so don’t get too caught up in focussing on the leader moving five shots clear of your group leader or anything along those lines.