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About Olympia Fields
Olympia Fields will play as the longest par 70 on the tour this year at a whopping 7,343 yards, which is not too dissimilar to the length played at Southwind in the St Jude at the beginning of the month (7,244 yard par 70).
As there hasn’t been a male professional competition at this course since the US Open in 2003, only the likes of Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia and Justin Rose (to name a few) have any kind of course pedigree, though with it being 17 years since that competition, we’d prefer to call on two more recent tournaments.
Southwind, due to its length, and more particularly Harding Park, which played host to the PGA Championships just a couple of weeks ago. The talk coming out of Chicago this week is that the roughs could be hazardously long, as they were in San Francisco for the first major of the year.
Driving accuracy will be more important than ever, and we’d expect nothing close to the kind of score that DJ tossed up at last week.
BMW Championship Betting Tips
Daniel Berger
It’s on that basis that our first pick goes to Daniel Berger at 18/1. The American has been in outstanding form in 2020, making seven top 10s from his last nine events since January.
That includes a second at the St Jude Invitational finishing only behind Justin Thomas, while one of the exceptions still came in impressive style with a 13th at Harding Park.
Despite this course playing very long, Berger can navigate the course well and has the sixth best driving accuracy on tour over the last year, and can excel in the scoring holes as he has the lowest combined Par 4 and 5 average on the tour in the same time span.
His form speaks for itself as he now sits fourth in the FedEx cup standings, and while he doesn’t need to win this to qualify for next week’s Tour Championship, he’ll certainly be up near the top of the leaderboard and is well worth an each way shout.
Xander Schauffele
Our second shout goes to another extremely consistent player in Xander Schauffele at a shorter price of 14/1. The 26-year-old has finished outside the top 25 just twice from 14 events this year, with one coming as he was CUT at the Farmers all the way back in January.
He even managed 25th last week in Boston on a course which couldn’t have suited his game less, and this should be much more his cup of tea.
A course this long with a par of just 70 means the winner will struggle to post a low under par score. Jim Furyk won on this course back in ’03 with just eight under par, winning by a comfortable three shot margin and it’s playing much harder in Chicago than it did back then.
This highlights the importance of bogey avoidance as opposed to birdie scoring this week, and Schauffele is right up there for that. He’s third on tour for bogey avoidance and scored just one during his 72 holes at the long par 70 Southwind for the St Jude Invitational, including one double bogey too.
Even more impressively, he scored just four last weekend and one double bogey where he wasn’t expected to be in the mix, and if he can carry that game over into this week, he’ll likely be toward the top of the leaderboard.
Despite not hosting any professional men’s golf for 17 years, Olympia Fields hosts the Fighting Illini Invitational on an annual basis which features some of the best amateurs on the circuit.
Theoretically this puts some of the younger players this weekend on a level playing field with the more experienced, and it’s on this basis that we make our final pick.
Matt Wolf
Cameron Champ, Collin Morikawa and Viktor Hovland are among the biggest names to have featured on this course over the last three years, though it’s another that takes our fancy. Matt Wolff won at this course last year with a score of six under, one shot clear of Morikawa.
Wolff’s sole PGA win came at the 3M Open, which again is a relatively new course to the circuit, finishing ahead of Morikawa and DeChambeau and proving that on the courses that are a relatively unknown quantity, the players new to the circuit have just as big of a chance as anybody.
Six under will likely not be enough to win this with such a strong field, though Wolff has improved drastically from a year ago and will be looking to better that score. Statistically, he’s the fifth biggest driver on tour this year and his knowledge of the course (with this being the third successive year he’s played it competitively) gives him an advantage off the tee.
He currently sits marginally outside the top 30, and knows he has to go well this week in order to make it to the Tour Champs next weekend, and we’re happy to get behind him at an extremely good price at 40/1.
Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson
Markets have been extremely reactionary since the return of golf, and understandably so with the strength of the fields and a few courses that haven’t seen a lot of action in recent years.
Big drivers such as Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson should go well, though at such a short price for both and on a course that neither have had any time on recently (with the exception of Bryson in 2015 as an amateur), it’s extremely difficult to get behind them.
Justin Thomas should head into the majority of US competitions as favourite, though at Southwind he struggled to find the fairways and greens in regulation with any kind of consistency, and he was saved by his scrambling to win that tournament.
If the rough is to be as hazardous as is being claimed this week, this round could be as difficult for him as Harding Park was, where he cold only manage a tie for 37th so again, looks slightly too short for us, and it’s our three picks who seem to hold the most value for each way shouts.
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