Three Dark Horse Bets to win Tour Championship
The top 30 golfers in the FedEx Cup Standings head to East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia for the season finale of the 2020-21 PGA Tour season. The winner of this week’s Tour Championship will win a nice, cool, $15 million prize.
Since the PGA Tour implemented a handicap system for the Tour Championship, which sets each player at a certain amount of strokes under par to begin the tournament based on their place in the standings, the list of golfers who can realistically win it is a short one.
Or is it?
We only have a sample size of two years using this format, and Rory McIlroy won the first version of it in 2019. He finished four-strokes clear of 2nd place Xander Schauffele, despite finishing the tournament five-strokes back from the leader.
With that being said, Dustin Johnson won it last year and he entered the event in first place and started the tournament at 10-under par.
If you want to see the odds to win this week, as well as a further explanation of how the scoring will work, check out my betting preview piece.
If you want to find out my top three picks to win the event, I broke them down in my picks article.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s take a look at a few names completely off the board who could very well make a run at the Tour Championship this week.
Dark Horse Bets to Win the Tour Championship
All odds listed below are via WynnBET.
Xander Schauffele +3000
Xander Schauffele will start the Tour Championship at 2-under par, eight strokes back from the leader Patrick Cantlay, so he has a long hill to climb, but that’s the whole point of this article, isn’t it?
The best thing the Olympic gold medalist has going in his favor this week is that he’s probably had the most success at East Lake Golf Club out of all participants in the field. He’s finished in second place in the two years that has utilized the handicap start, and he won the event in 2017 back when you could win the tournament without winning the FedEx Cup.
In three of his last four starts at East Lake, Schauffele has finished 1st or 2nd. That’s some pretty good course history right there. He’s worth a sprinkle on that fact alone.
Scottie Scheffler +7500
If we’re betting on someone who will have to make up a large deficit before they even tee-off, we need a golfer who is able to get birdies in bunches. Scottie Scheffler does exactly that.
He’ll enter the tournament 25th in the FedEx Cup standings, which means he’ll start the event at 1-under par. He’ll start nine shots back from Cantlay, which seems insurmountable, but Scheffler does rank T6 in birdie average this season, so he might be able to pull it off.
He averaged 4.43 birdies per round, but if he gets hot, while also receiving some help from the guys ahead of him, four rounds might be enough for him to catch up.
He started at 2-under par at last season’s Tour Championship, and finished solo 5th. He recorded the second best aggregate score at the event, so a repeat performance could put him in the mix this week.
Jason Kokrak +10000
Jason Kokrak will be starting in the same spot as Xander Schauffele, 2-under par, but yet his odds are wildly different. At 100/1, he has some betting value despite starting eight-strokes back from Cantlay.
Much like Scheffler, Kokrak has the ability to rack up birdies which will be imperative to close the gap on the leaders. He ranks T9 in birdie average this season, averaging 4.31 per round. He finished 14th at the 2019 Tour Championship.
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