Open Championship betting tips 2022

The Open Championship overview, market analysis, and top 5 tips based on value.

Old Course St Andrews Scotland

This is the 30th staging of the British Open held at the Old Course. It also happens to be the 150th Open Championship, allowing the winner's achievement to be that much more significant.

Fun fact: The Old Course is quite literally the oldest course in the world, dating back to 1552.

With rollings greens, hidden pot bunkers and demanding winds, we are bound to see hazards taking a toll on many players. With all this taken into account, let's get into the analysis.

Who are the favourites?

The top picks by bookmakers as of writing this article are Rory Mcilroy (10/1), Scottie Scheffler (14/1), John Rahm (17/1), and Justin Thomas (20/1). It's safe to say we won't be spending time on these players, as the overall value of these players is among the worst. Read about how often favourites win here.

How much value are the bookies giving for the British Open?

Bookmakers know how popular majors are. With that increased demand, comes increased value to attract more bets. GolfForecast and our members bet on every tournament of the year, so seeing that extra value on majors gets us pretty excited.

If you’re reading this article, you may be wondering, how do I bet on The British Open? Or even, should I bet on The Open Championship? First, let’s look at the tournament’s overall value. This will surely encourage you to get some bets in.

There are 94 golfers competing, each with different odds and each-way terms from a variety of different bookmakers. If you took the best available British Open betting odds right now for every player and put them into a percentage, you’d get a total of 104.2%.Learn the bookies margins on golf.

This means that, if you bet on every player to win outright, using the best available odds, you’d lose 4.2%. Our goal isn't to lose money. However, that’s much better than losing 100% of your stake, so let’s keep going. If you're looking to do these calculations yourself, you'll need to scrape the betting markets, the best resources are the official world golf ranking website and, our personal favourite, oddschecker.com.

Now, lets take the best available odds AND each-way terms and put them into a percentage. We get a total of 101.1%, meaning, if you bet on every player, using the best available odds and each-way terms, you'd only lose 1.1%. A bit better, however, you're still losing money. We have now determined that the each-way markets are more valuable than the outright win markets. Using the each-way markets, we need to determine the players that are most undervalued to maximize our chances of winning.

Learn why each-way betting is so valuable

The maths behind the tips

Now that we know the tournament’s value, we want to find which players are making up most of the value. Another way to look at it is to find which players the bookmakers are undervaluing. That’s how we can shift losing bets to winning ones. Many punters, even the good ones, are spending hours on research trying to figure out who is most likely to perform. What they don't realize, is the bookmakers, with billions of dollars and unlimited resources, do a better job at predicting this than they can. So rather than doing the research yourself, why not leverage the bookie's work and find where they're giving up value.

What we do

Here at GolfForecast, we take the top 22% of undervalued players, rank them from highest to lowest, and voila, there are your British Open Championship tips. Obviously, it's not that simple, so let me show you how we do the maths.

Here is the calculation process (we’ll use our top pick, Will Zalatoris as an example).

Step 1

Viewing the chart above, we determine the implied percentage (the odds made by a bookmaker in the form of a percentage). 3.85%

Step 2

Next is the normalised percentage (the odds made by a bookmaker in the form of a percentage if they were to break even). 2.88%. This is done by normalizing the sum of odds made by the bookmaker to 100%.

Step 3

Predicted percentage (the odds made by our algorithm in the form of a percentage). 2.54%. This is based on available player data, course data, and weather predictions from the official world golf ranking website.

Step 4

Discrepancy percentage (the difference between our algorithms prediction and the normalised percentage). 2.54% - 2.88% = -0.34%

We do this calculation for every player in the field and filter by the discrepancy percentage. The discrepancy percentage uncovers the real value for each player. A bookmaker's odds are what represents a player's likelihood to win, however, it's also tied to how much you'll make on that bet. The player "most likely" to win will also pay the least, that's usually bad value. The discrepancy percentage helps us find the players with good chances of winning, that are valued accurately, or undervalued. Our algorithm generates the top 22% of discrepancy percentages, and excludes longshots and favourites, this is what our members use to bet. But for the sake of this article, to give you some free bets, we’ll provide our top 5 British Open Championship tips.Get the full list of tips by registering for GolfForecast.

Please note that our tips automatically update until the Tuesday before the event. These are the highest value tips at the time of writing this article. To view the most current tips please registerhere

Your free bets for the 2022 British Open Championship

Our top 5 golf betting tips are the ones highlighted in green - all tips are intended to be placed as each-way bets, using the bookmaker highlighted in green. If you don't have accounts with that bookmaker, using another one is sufficient, but slightly less valuable. Learn why we bet e/w here. You may be wondering why the other players with high discrepancy percentages aren’t being tipped. As mentioned before, our algorithm is designed to exclude long shots and favourites, any player with odds above 130/1 and below 22/1 will be excluded, no matter how high their discrepancy percentage. Learn how often favourites actually win.

Why don't you tip favourites?

We often get asked why we don't tip favourites. The answer is that they don't win very often, and their returns are poor.

The bookmaker or exchange highlighted in green next to each player has the best value at the time of writing this. That will likely change as well, so it’s wise to do some bookie comparison before you bet. GolfForecast members benefit from automatic updates based on the bookies they are signed up with – we highlight the top bookmaker from the ones they have accounts with. Want the full list of British Open Championship tips?Register with GolfForecast to claim your 30-day trial.

How much to bet on each tip?

The final step is determining stake. The general idea is to bet the most on Lowry and Zalatoris (they have equal value in this scenario), then a bit less on Matsuyama, a bit less on Smith, and so on. At GolfForecast, members indicate how much they’d like to stake in total, and our algorithm strategically distributes their stake across all tips. Learn about our stake per event feature here.

Here is a screenshot from inside the member's area. This account stakes £100 per tournament, the amount staked per player gets slightly lower as you go down the list.

Under the bookie column, you will see a list of bookmakers ranked by value. When using GolfForecast, our system will ask which bookmakers you have accounts with. At that point, this page will only show the bookies you indicated and will highlight which is best to use for each player.

The best betting sites for the 2022 Open Championship

Another important topic is bookmakers. When looking at the overall market value, we can determine which bookmakers are best to use as a whole. Did you know by using the bookmaker offering the best value you can increase your profits by 10-20%? You can take two approaches to gain value with bookmakers. Firstly, is using multiple, which is recommended. You will either need to do your own analysis or gain access to GolfForecast to discover which bookmaker is best for each player. See the photo below.

Secondly, if you're looking to use just one, the photo below will be useful. This info can be found for free at the bottom of forecast pages each week. We have ranked the best bookmakers for this specific tournament - the 'true overround' percentages are the ones to analyze below.

Now that we’ve uncovered the value in the market, you can officially say you have the best British Open Championship betting tips. Want to learn more about GolfForecast?Read our FAQ's

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jon rahm, jordan spieth, collin morikawa, xander schauffele, matthew fitzpatrick, patrick cantlay, shane lowry, sam burns, cameron smith