Welcome to our weekly PGA Tour gambling-tips column, featuring our favorite plays for this week’s BMW Championship, which starts Thursday at Olympia FIelds, outside Chicago. Along with our recommended plays, you’ll also see data from Chirp, a free-to-play mobile platform that features a range of games with enticing prizes, giving fans all kinds of ways to engage in the action without risking any money.
Trying to handicap tournament golf is like trying to predict the mood of a teenager when they wake up in the morning. It’s pretty much impossible.
Cinderella stories arise frequently, just as runaway favorites often shoot bad rounds. The game is fickle. Anyone who tells you they can see what’s coming is likely either lying or deluded.
None of which will stop us from giving it a stab.
And this week, at least, our odds are slightly improved. The BMW Championship is on tap, the second event of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and the field has been whittled to 50 players. That’s three less than an NFL roster. With such a tiny pool, we stand a fighting chance.
The course is Olympia Fields, on the outskirts of Chicago, and the current betting favorite is Rory McIlroy, but that’s not who we’re taking. We’ve arrived at three other picks below. You can see their names, the odds and our reasoning below.
Jon Rahm (+900)
By his own lofty standards, Rahm put up something of a stinker last week with a middle-of-the-pack finish at the St. Jude Classic. But we’ll cut him some slack, as he entered the event atop the FedEx Cup standings. There was zero chance he wasn’t moving on. From a handicapping standpoint, the good news is that Rahm’s so-so showing cooled him in the eyes of the betting public. It’s rare to get Rahm at these odds when he only has 49 guys to beat.
Jon Rahm’s Porta-Potty demand actually reveals something important
Hideki Matsuyama (+3000)
You can’t spell “motivation” without Matsuyama, and the Japanese star has plenty of it. At 47th in the FedEx Cup standings, he’ll need a strong showing to crack the top 30 and earn a place in the Tour Championship. It’s a good time for Hideki to dial it in (he finished 16th at Memphis last week) and Olympia Fields is a good place for him to do it. He notched a T3 when the BMW was held here three years ago.
Emiliano Grillo (+7000)
At this point in the year, with the playoff herd culled down to 50, there are no dark horses. Everyone in the field has enjoyed a strong season. But over the past month, few have been running better than Grillo, who has three top 15s in his last five tries. He’s a juicy pick at these long odds.
Who Chirp users are betting on this week
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