Golf is one of the most popular sports in the world, with around 23.83 million active golf players or participants in the USA alone: the industry is thought to be worth $84 billion.
With such a huge interest in the sport, it makes sense that interest in betting on golf tournaments has boomed considerably in recent years. Since 2018, 21 states and Washington D.C. joined Nevada in permitting legal sports betting, and the practice of betting on pro golf tournaments has only grown in popularity since then. Whilst golf betting only accounted for about 1 percent of all legal sports betting last year, it exceeded NASCAR betting for the first time, and the figures are only going in one direction: up!
Understanding How Golf Gambling Works
The good news is that, if you’re not sure how to bet, then golf betting is a great place to start. Golf betting is very straightforward, and it offers what so many sports bet-fans enjoy the most: the opportunity to bet a little and win a lot. Because there are so many different golfers in a pro golf tournament, many of these often have high odds, which can be incredibly tempting. And the premise can be remarkably simple: in its most basic incarnation, you can pick the player to win the tournament. As you become more confident, and better understand how golf gambling works, you can also place preposition bets, individual hole bets, or spread bet on the top three or top-five finisher for each tournament. The bigger the tournament that you are betting on, the more betting options you are likely to have available to you.
Golf betting isn’t just good news for sports betting fans, but also for the tour officials that organise the big golf tournaments themselves. It is helping to keep existing fans interested in the sport whilst simultaneously attracting new fans to golf. It is a fascinating turnaround for a sport that was opposed to golf betting prior to its official legalisation in 2018.
Attracting New Fans
Golf was one of the first sports that was able to resume play in 2020, meaning that bettors that might normally have placed bets on football or basketball showed a new interest in golf: and the numbers reflected this. One Las Vegas sportsbook saw a 400% increase in wagers during the 2020 PGA tour compared to the 2019 one. Golf has certainly seen an opportunity and taken advantage of it. We are seeing a surge of interest in both the sport and in betting on the sport that hasn’t been experienced before, and if these numbers can be maintained then it could revolutionise the industry.
It is thought that golf will continue to interest fans both old and new: Thanks to the huge amount of data and research available, with numbers that can clearly be broken down, gambling enthusiasts who love data will have a huge array to wade through. Golf betting is an industry that is only forecast to grow and grow: it is exciting to see what 2021 will bring.
