In most golf tournaments, there comes a point at the halfway stage when the number of golfers playing needs to be cut down. This tends to be after the first two days of play, with a certain scoreline chosen as the point for the ‘cut’ to be made. From that moment on, only the players that have made the cut will get to play the rest of the tournament, whilst those that didn’t make it end up going home early. As a bettor, you can bet on whether or not a golfer will indeed make the cut, with the wager that you place being a binary one: if you bet on them making the cut and they do, you’ll win your bet, if they don’t then you’ll lose it. Conversely, you can bet on them to miss the cut and the opposite will apply.
How the Cut Works
When it comes to PGA competitions, the fields taking part are usually much larger than the number of players that will receive a payout at the end of the four days of play. As a result, a ‘cut’ takes place after 36 holes have been played, which helps to reduce the size of the field. In the majority of PGA Tour events, the magical number is 65. That means that the 65th-placed player’s score is used to determine the Cut. In other words, if the player in 65th place is on +2 after 36 holes of golf have been played, any player who has a better score than +2 or has +2 exactly, therefore being tied for 65th, will make the cut and anyone with +3 or over won’t.
That hasn’t always been the rule and might well change in the future, but it is a good guide to give you a sense of whether a player will or won’t make the cut. It also isn’t the case for all competitions, why the US Open having had a cut point of 60th and the Masters 50th. What the exact number will be for the cut will change from competition to competition, but it is made clear and commentators will often talk about it as the end of the second day of a tournament approaches. On some occasions, there is a need to have a second cut after 54 holes, which reduces the field even further if the first cut didn’t do the job.
Not a Bet for LIV Golf Tournaments
It is entirely possible that you simply love golf in general and are therefore happy to watch it in all of its forms, placing bets accordingly. If that is the case then you will no doubt have parked any moral objections that might rise up when it comes to the sports-washing project from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is LIV Golf. The relatively new form of the sport doesn’t play 72 holes of golf like the PGA. Instead, it asks the players to take on 54 holes of golf, removing the need for there to be a cut. As a result, every golfer players every day of the tournament, contributing to the individual competition as well as the team competition.
If you’ve grown used to placing bets on golf tournaments and don’t understand why you can’t wager on a golfer to make or miss the cut in a LIV Golf competition, that should help to explain why. There are plenty of other things that you’ll be able to bet on, of course; which is highly ironic considering the fact that betting is illegal in Saudi Arabia. On the PGA Tour, the cut is used to decide which players will get paid, but there is no such issue when it comes to LIV Golf as everyone is making a large amount of money in the pursuit from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia to clean up the country’s imagine on a global scale.
Think About the Odds
The most important thing to think about when you’re looking at placing a bet on whether or not a player will Make the Cut is the odds. The favourite for the competition that you’re betting on is extremely unlikely to have particularly favourable odds for the ‘Make the Cut’ market, given the fact that they are very much expected to do so. At the same time, the odds on one of the long-shots for the tournament will also have long odds to make the cut, given the fact that they really aren’t fancied to well by the bookmakers. That is the sort of thing that you’ll want to take into account when you’re placing your wager.
Some bookies will offer a market on players to miss the cut. If you think that a golfer has been marked up incorrectly, offered significantly shorter odds to win than you feel they deserve, you might want to consider a look at the miss the cut market. The likelihood is that their odds will be long for that, given that the bookmakers think they’re going to do well in the tournament, so you can have a bet on them missing the cut instead. It is also worth bearing in mind that some golfers can play much better than expected and make the cut against the odds, just as others can have a nightmare and miss the cut when they weren’t expected to.