Golf Betting Masters principles and reasoning behind the collective

This page opens up our principles and reasoning behind this site. Our collective has generated 12-36% return on investment for past 5 years. It sets up the principles of profitable betting and tells about the goals and reasons behind the collective.

In addition the collectives members are avid golf players and fans of this f*cking hard sport. We even share the opinion that watching golf from TV is really enjoyable (especially when you have live scores with placed bets on hand).

So lets begin with some background and principle number one.

Beating bookmakers & people on the exchanges

Most of the bookmakers enjoy great profits from losing bettors (more than 90% people who are betting are losing).

At the same time online betting is getting more and more popular and legal issues (mainly in USA) are getting clearer. For a consumer (or a bettor in this space) this makes making bets easier than ever. No more visits to local betting shops or casinos - you could say that money is saved when betting online.

Bookmakers offer "too good to be true" signup bonuses to lure bettors in. Truth is that most of the people signing up end up losing their initial deposit way before turnover requirements are filled (f.e. 5x the initial deposit + bonuses should be bet with odds of 1.8 to be able to withdraw). In addition bookmakers have the power to limit successful bettors as much as they want.

Most online betting sites offer bets with cut of 4-8%, meaning that in two-sided bet you get odds of 1.92 to 1.84. So in a situation where bets are placed equally on both sides, the maker profits. In other words, if you as a bettor choose the right side for 10 times in a row with bet size of the initial bet + profits, you leave exponentially bigger cut to bookmaker.

All of this should tell you that betting is risky and beating the bookmakers hard as hell. This also explains why we as a collective of profitable bettors use betting exchanges (like Betfair and Smarkets).

Chairman's note:
The other reason is that most of us are either banned or limited in most of the liquid bookmakers. As said earlier making profitable bets in traditional bookmakers makes you not welcome visitor.

Profitable bettors shop odds and play on exchanges

As a collective we trust in large betting exchanges and encourage our members (the Green Jackets) to use (mainly) these for picking sides and betting with different strategies.

If you're starting with smaller betting units (<50€/$ per unit) you can boost your bankroll with signup bonuses but we'll not focus on those here.

We serve bettors who understand how this market works and think in long term. For past 6 years we've been tracking our results and depending on used model our ROI has been between 12.4% (top20 strategy) and 36.2% (liquid winner strategy). More on different strategies later.

Our members should believe that there's excess profit to be made in niche markets such as golf. We hate the greedy bookmakers who constantly offer 10-20% less for selections that are available on exchanges. Our success is grounded in hundreds of datapoints that are available in professional golf and liquid markets that offer odds with positive expected value.

Everybody that has played golf knows that there's dozens of conditions and small details that affect the score. This is something that can be modelled in professional golf.

Data-backed betting with refined strategy

Our way of generating excess profits is based on different datasets and models that are battle tested for past several years. We do not believe in luck.

The recipe for success is to use the best possible data and clear strategy for the week. Because we've built our dataset for years, we will not share all the details about it, but it consists of strokes gained data, history data (odds and statistics), weather and many other datapoints. We highly recommend datagolf.com for understanding the depth of data about professional golf.

Our previews and insights are always based on our proprietary models and data.

Goals and reasons for building this digital domain (the Clubhouse)

Golf betting has been mainly a side hustle for all the members of the collective. Thus it's evolved slowly but surely without any specific goals. For past few years some of the members have started to believe that it could be more and this site and newsletter are built to manifest that belief. Seeing a continuous stream of profits with ROI of 20+% means that this could easily be a full-time job.

We've built quite many tools to help with selections and making the best possible betting cards and we aim to deliver these tools to our members to help our members succeed. Same goes for live scores that help tracking the situation of bets in realtime. It boosts the experience of watching golf when you can sweat your CUT bets on Friday and Top20s on Sunday for example.

In summary our goal is to bring the knowledge and tools to our members (the Green Jackets) and engage in finding new ways to profit from watching and betting on golf.

The most important reason though is to make the tracking of results more transparent and thus show our wives that it's no joke that money can be made while "watching golf". Transparent results board will be shared with all members.

Welcome to the collective where generations meet!