Brooks Koepka followed up on second place by competing in last week’s PGA Championship before stumbling on Sunday.
PHOTO FILE: August 9, 2020; San Francisco, California, USA; Brooks Koepka plays from the rough to the second hole during the final round of the 2020 PGA championship golf tournament at TPC Harding Park. Mandatory Credit: Kelvin Kuo-USA TODAY Sports
Despite recent good results, punters aren’t flocking the 30-year-old to a modest field at this week’s Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, NC.
Koepka will play for the sixth consecutive week and is one of only three top 10 players on the field. It is the second betting favorite at almost all bookmakers, but bettors are not participating in the action. Koepka was responsible for only six percent of the bets and five percent of the overall winner bets at DraftKings as of Wednesday afternoon.
This is compared to Webb Simpson, who was collecting a whopping 17 percent of the handle and 8 percent of the total bets.
Simpson, the sixth player in the world, was +1050 per book. Seasoned bettors know that Simpson hails from nearby Raleigh, NC and has a win and a couple of runners-up in his seven top-10s in 11 career beginnings at Sedgefield Country Club.
Koepka is +1200 at DraftKings. However, he hasn’t played the event since 2015 and although Koepka has seven career wins on the PGA Tour, he’s a relatively modest total for a four-time senior champion.
Koepka has a reputation for working on her game during regular Tour stops to build towards bigger events, and this is the final event before the FedEx Cup playoffs.
Bettors were most interested in Britons Justin Rose (+2300) and Tommy Fleetwood (+2000).
Rose was also in contention until late Sunday until she settled for ninth place at TPC Harding Park, and was responsible for nine percent of the bets and five percent of the total bets at DraftKings.
Fleetwood is playing for the fourth straight week since arriving from Europe ahead of the heavy roster of major events that started with the PGA Championship. He hasn’t won on American soil yet, but has improved his results over the past three weeks. Bettors have noticed this, with Fleetwood taking six percent of the handle and five percent of the total bets.
Another popular bet was Brendon Todd.
Already a two-time Tour winner this season, Todd was Simpson’s junior rival in Raleigh. Todd was also picking up six percent of the handle and six percent of the total bets at DraftKings, where he was also leading with nine percent of the total bets to be the leader after the first round with a +5000 payline.
Todd’s average first-round scores of 69.0 equals fifth place on this year’s PGA Tour. He was in the lead after round one last week and was two shots ahead of the opening round the week before.
Another player more popular with punters than Koepka was Kevin Kisner (+2900, six handle percent, five percent bet). The Aiken native SC has also enjoyed steady success over the years at Sedgefield. Like Todd, Kisner was up by +5000 after the first round, but only three percent of the total bets were coming on him.
—Average at the field level
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