The PGA Tour expects to roll out expanded prop betting for the 2020 season, a move which will provide bettors with the opportunity to wager on a shot-by-shot basis. The wagers could include live betting on the number of greens hit in regulation by a golfer during a single round, as well as individual props on whether a golfer will birdie a certain hole.
The roll out comes on the heels of a September agreement that designates IMG Arena as the official data distributor for media and betting purposes across all events on the PGA Tour schedule. IMG Arena will gain bettor-sector exclusivity for the delivery of live, shot-by-shot match and event data to global operators.
Through the partnership, the Tour will use its proprietary ShotLink system to create countless new markets for betting on golf, said Senior Vice President for Tournament Administration, Andy Levinson. While encouraged by the added fan engagement that live shot-by-shot betting could generate, the PGA remains concerned on the potential integrity risks that could arise, namely from pirated data.
“If an operator decides to use some form of pirated data, there is no way they will be as accurate as ShotLink,” Levinson told Sports Handle.
Data collection on the PGA Tour is not an easy proposition. During an average event, ShotLink tracks thousands of data points. For each shot, ShotLink creates 25 data points, according to Levinson. Based on a tournament with 144 entrants at the start of a week (with an average score of 70 per round), ShotLink will track more than 30,000 shots.
“In theory, there will be thousands of betting opportunities based on the shot information,” Levinson said.
The data collection system is extremely costly. For each event, Tour workers lay approximately three miles of fiber-optic cable across more than 100 acres, Levinson said. The cable is in addition to numerous lasers and a three-pronged high-speed camera system around each green to track a ball’s flight path.
As a result, Levinson anticipates data pricing for IMG Arena’s golf betting packages to be a bit more expensive than those for other sports. While a data collection system in an NBA or NHL arena only needs to be installed once at a venue, the PGA Tour must repeat the process dozens of times a season. Pricing will likely be based on a percentage of an operator’s gross gaming revenue.
Sports betting and technology services provider Kambi supplied sportsbooks with live proposition bets from the 2018 Ryder Cup, as well as several 2019 tournaments. Although Kambi did not supply books with length-of-drive bet types at the Ryder Cup, it did provide closest-to-the-pin wagers. When Tiger Woods won last month’s ZOZO Championship in Japan, Kambi offered props on Woods’ birdie total in the first round and whether he would record an eagle. Unlike the closest-to-the-pin and longest drive wagers, the bets on birdie totals per round are as clear as the final score of a baseball game.
The PGA Tour does not have any plans to build on-site sportsbooks at individual events. During horse racing’s Triple Crown, some venues set up betting windows inside VIP tents for high rollers. At the PGA’s Northern Trust in August, FanDuel hosted a sports-betting themed lounge at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, N.J. where bettors could wager via mobile phones only.
There is a clear distinction between a lounge that allows mobile betting versus a physical sportsbook that must be licensed and pass strict regulatory requirements. At present, online sports betting is legal in more than a dozen states nationwide, but no Tour events on the remainder of the 2019-20 schedule are in jurisdictions where mobile is live.
But next fall, an annual event at West Virginia’s Greenbrier will be on the 2020-21 schedule. Mobile wagering is legal in West Virginia. By the first half of 2020, mobile sports betting could go live in Illinois and Tennessee and could be legalized in several other states, including Michigan and Ohio, all locales hosting tournaments. Attractive prop bets could bolster handle for a sport that is looking for new ways to cater to Millennials.
Said Levinson: “Hopefully our fans will be able to engage with our sport in a way they have never been able to before.”
