Ben Coley's golf betting tips: Australian PGA Championship preview and best bets
Ben Coley has been in sensational form with winners at 9/2, 45/1, 45/1 and 150/1 over the past five weeks. Get his best bets for the Australian PGA Championship.
Golf betting tips: Australian PGA Championship
5pts win Cameron Smith at 9/1 (General; 11+ via Betfair Exchange)
3pts e.w. Cam Davis at 20/1 (Paddy Power, Betfair 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6)
1.5pts e.w. Dave Micheluzzi at 40/1 (Paddy Power, Betfair 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6)
1pt e.w. Kazuma Kobori at 110/1 (Paddy Power 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6)
0.5pt e.w. Haydn Barron at 250/1 (General 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6)
Vegetables, different points of view, breaks between seasons on professional golf tours: three things in life that you may not actually like, but know deep down are good for you.
Yet the new DP World Tour season begins not even four days after the last one finished and it makes you wonder: what really is the point of vegetables? As Iron Mike and Viktor Hovland have both so eloquently noted, we're all doomed anyway. Shouldn't we just eat chocolate, surround ourselves with people who see the world as we do, and have a golf tournament every single week of the year?
No! We should have a break, I should listen more, and maybe a bit of broccoli would be a good idea. But we don't have a break. The Australian PGA Championship will be under way before you know it. And while no, there aren't many players in this field who were in Dubai, there are some, just as there are half-a-dozen Q-School graduates plus a full dozen from the Challenge Tour, itself completed just three weeks ago.
They of course join the locals and lots of them, most of whom are hoping to follow the path which leads from here to Europe and possibly all the way to the United States after that. Never before has the world of golf been better connected in terms of pathways; the issue, for some, is that they all lead to one place and once there, players sometimes forget where they came from.
Yes, that's a bit of a drive-by on Jason Day who returns to Australia for just the second time in the last decade, joining Cam Smith, Lucas Herbert, Min Woo Lee, Cam Davis, Marc Leishman and a few more genuine home hopes at Royal Queensland, which has hosted this event for the last couple of years, just as it did at the turn of the century (different layout) when roguish Robert Allenby won back-to-back titles.
Smith won the first co-sanctioned edition post-Covid, Lee after him, and it's usually true that the winner of these Australian events can be found among a small pool of players who typically populate the top of the betting, just as Allenby would have done back in the day.
What Smith and Lee have in common, besides being Australian, is that they're dynamite around the greens. That's almost always important on courses like this one, designed by Michael Clayton and featuring a broad collection of holes and not much in the way of long grass. Such conditions demand creativity and not just greenside: players will have all kinds of options around a fabulous Championship layout.
It's always tempting to scratch below the surface and try to find an edge among the emerging stars from Australia, among whom Phoenix Campbell and Elvis Smylie clearly have big potential, but typically these leaderboards are dominated by more established players. The top six last year was made up of five Korn Ferry, DP World or PGA Tour winners plus Rikuya Hoshino, who has since become one and now has a PGA Tour card.
There is a big gulf in class and most will simply never bridge it.
I was staggered to see 9/1 available about CAMERON SMITH when betting opened on Monday and more so when some firms later offered 10s, which has been revised again to 9/1 at the time of publication.
Playing the 'last year's prices' game is not without danger but can be illustrative and here's one such instance. Smith, who was the defending champion 12 months ago, was a 4/1-9/2 shot, his Ripper GC teammate Marc Leishman at 22/1. Smith has now doubled in price, while Leishman has halved in price.
Undoubtedly, Smith had to drift a fraction. He missed the cut, after all, and his form on the LIV Golf circuit this year has dipped slightly. That said, he was the best of the Aussies who won the team final when last that tour was in operation and while Leishman has since had his feet up, Smith has played, finishing third and second here in Australia.
This competitive golf surely has to give him some kind of edge and while he probably should've won last week, having led by two into the final round, he's been right up there throughout both tournaments. Smith could easily be arriving here in search of a hat-trick and he would have been priced much shorter in that scenario, you can be sure of that.
Fundamentally he seems to be playing well, something which we can trace back to the third-last event of the LIV Golf individual season where he finished second, and his best form is the best in this field bar that of Day's way back in 2015.
Smith may not have won since the Open but he's remained close to the top of the sport and his B-game is enough to contend in and even win tournaments like these, and as for that comparison with last year, there's no Adam Scott this time, no Joaquin Niemann, no Robert MacIntyre, no Adrian Meronk.
Given that this is Smith's hometown event, one he won in 2017, 2018 and 2022, I would have to make him clear favourite whereas that mantle still generally belongs to Min Woo Lee, who has 10 top-five finishes from his last 11 starts in Australia, a run dating back more than six years. That's an impressive return for a golfer who is still improving, but he is going to need to putt better to win this. Not since the beginning of August has he been better than the field average.
Lee dropped down in grade for his Macau Open title defence in October and finished ninth, that after a good final round, so you have to go back to June's Rocket Mortgage Classic for his last taste of contention. With Smith having been battling it out for silverware twice in recent weeks, everything points to the Brisbane man being the one they all have to beat and 6/1 and bigger is well worth taking.
Day is ranked highest by DataGolf but he's been absent since August and has seldom come back to Australia at this time of year. Why he's chosen to now I'm not sure, and not staying for next week's Australian Open is curious to say the least. Regardless, he's pretty easy to oppose along with Leishman, who has improved since last year but not enough to be backing at as short as 10/1 in places.
The two biggest threats to Smith and Lee might instead be Lucas Herbert and CAM DAVIS and my narrow preference is for the latter.
Last week, Herbert produced a storming final round to win in front of family and friends in the New South Wales Open, denying Smith, and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that his dynamite short-game helps him to a quick-fire double. He's played well after a win before, too.
Still, for a player of his calibre a best of seventh in six Australian PGA appearances along with a best of sixth in the Open isn't a particularly taking return and I prefer the classy, two-time PGA Tour winner Davis, who of course won that Australian Open in 2017 and is searching for the big home double.
Some might be put off by the fact that he produced a shocking performance on his only recent start in the US, but let's not forget that torrid weather which caused a big draw bias across the first two days of the Shriners. Davis was on the wrong side of it and I'm happy to write it off altogether.
That means we're talking about a player with four top-10 tee-to-green displays in his previous six starts, more than one at a very high level (Scottish Open, BMW Championship), and while he's down in most statistical categories if you take this season as a whole, it's clear that things have changed for the better since the middle of summer. During this time he's climbed 50 places in the tee-to-green rankings.
Improvement to his mental approach is something he spoke about when winning in Detroit for the second time and I thought he was very unfortunate to be overlooked for the Presidents Cup, an example of where being wedded to data can perhaps be costly. Whether that motivates him now, a couple of months on, I don't know, but at 51st in the world rankings he has plenty to play for regardless.
Remember, Davis has been first alternate on Thursday at each of the last two Open Championships, sat on the sidelines waiting for a withdrawal that never came. He's also been fourth in the PGA Championship and 12th at Augusta and knows he can compete at the highest level, so this fortnight could be instrumental in getting him into three more majors next year, with his Masters spot already assured.
Motivation at this time of year can be huge and having been seventh on his last two starts here, playing the best golf in the field over the final two rounds in 2022 and then producing four more sub-60s a year later, he's worth the benefit of the doubt which comes from that Shriners display.
On the golf he'd played over the three months prior to it, he's overpriced at double figures. Again, the 20s quoted in places took me by surprise.
Alright Dave?
Classy overseas raiders are of course respected but Jordan Smith has to overcome the heartache of missing out on a PGA Tour card by effectively one single stroke, plus the travel from Dubai, and isn't a frequent winner.
Victor Perez is a more likely danger but the biggest one among the DP World Tour members in an Aussie, DAVE MICHELUZZI, who should see this as a big opportunity.
It's no exaggeration to suggest that Micheluzzi might have taken over from Min Woo when it comes to boasting the best short-game on the DP World Tour, now that Lee has started to struggle with the putter.
Not so Micheluzzi, who ranked fourth in strokes-gained putting during a rookie season which saw him make it to the Abu Dhabi Championship, where four more solid rounds extended a run of good golf which dates back to September.
During summer he was 10th in both Italy and Denmark and lost out narrowly in Germany, while at the beginning of the year he was seventh in Singapore following 16th in Bahrain, so all across Europe and Asia this talented youngster, once a brilliant amateur back home in Australia, has demonstrated the ability to win at this kind of level.
Also 32nd in strokes-gained around-the-green and 29th in scrambling, his skills are only going to be accentuated by a return to Royal Queensland and he has barely put a foot wrong here so far. In January 2022 he contended on his first start of the year to finish ninth, in December that year he was sixth, and 12 months later he finished 18th.
Micheluzzi has improved since and while yes, he does rely more on his short-game than I'd like, that really is a big chunk of the challenge this week. Providing he continues to dazzle on and around the greens, it's quite difficult to see him finishing outside the top 20, with sights set much higher than that at 28/1 and upwards.
While generally keen to avoid taking chances on unproven players in these events I will make an exception for New Zealand's KAZUMA KOBORI, who effectively begins his rookie campaign on the DP World Tour this week.
Kobori earned that status by winning the PGA of Australia's Order of Merit last season and he did so in style, capturing back-to-back events in January, another in February, and confirming the impression he'd made as a classy amateur who ranked as high as 23rd in the world.
Smylie and Jackson Buchanan have been the pace-setters in the early stages of this new season Down Under and both are respected, but it's Kobori who has been off travelling the world, learning all the time, and who was 11th on his latest DP World Tour start in the Dunhill Links.
That's really strong form and came after a summer which saw him appear briefly on the Open leaderboard before a poor finish to his second round meant a missed cut. A recent Golf Australia feature painted the picture of someone who feels like he's getting better all the time and is now ready to establish himself in Europe.
Known for his impeccable short-game, Kobori has come a long way since a pair of narrow missed cuts in this and the Australian Open last year and more recently, I regard a brace of top-20 finishes on the Asian Tour as proof of that. These were good tournaments and he wasn't far off in either of them, hanging around close to the top 10 all week, again under unfamiliar conditions.
Back where he starred at the beginning of the year, more improvement is anticipated and anything upwards of 66/1 is worth taking about a clear talent whose skills would appear to stack up well with this test.
Modest bet on Barron
Kobori's experienced compatriot Josh Geary is approaching his 40th birthday but might just be in the form of his life thanks to a new fitness regime which he says has improved his game.
Form figures of 1-1-2 on the Charles Tour back home in New Zealand, the latter a play-off defeat in an event he should've won, preceded sixth place in the NSW Open, so he really is red hot. The question is, can he bring that with him up in class, and if so where does it put him?
I suspect the answer is 20th rather than in the mix so will let him go along with Harrison Crowe, who has form from that 2020 Australian Amateur and has improved since returning from a difficult spell on the Asian Tour. At 600/1 you'll find worse loose-change bets and he was in my staking plan at 150s last year, for whatever that's worth.
But it's HAYDN BARRON who interests me more and he is the one real flier I'm willing to include.
Barron has just completed a largely miserable year on the DP World Tour but it did feature a top-10 finish in Qatar during an encouraging first two months, before a run of missed cuts which so often were by a shot here or there.
The 28-year-old then headed off to Qualifying School and finished T1 in a particularly strong Second Stage, before a remarkable performance at Final Stage ultimately saw him miss out by just two shots. Barron had been last but one after an opening 77, fully 15 strokes behind the leader, but was 21-under for the final five rounds. When you consider that 18-under secured membership, his golf over those closing 90 holes was superb.
Hopefully he can build on it back on home soil, with encouragement taken from 12th place at this course in 2022 and fourth place in the Australian Open later that same year, a result which earned him an invite to the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool.
I tend to think we should make allowances for players like him, those who face an entirely new challenge on the DP World Tour, and suspect we could see further improvement now back home in Australia where he'll be with his family again after a year spent travelling Europe and Asia.
However Barron performs, though, the next fortnight will surely remind us that these events are top heavy in the extreme, a factor hopefully demonstrated by somebody named Cameron. Crunchies all round if so.
Posted at 0800 GMT on 19/11/24
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