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GOLF – May 22-25 – Wentworth – BMW PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

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HISTORY
The BMW PGA Championship is an annual men’s professional golf tournament on the European Tour. The event is been played each May over the West Course at Wentworth Club , Virginia Water, Surrey. It was founded in 1955 and was originally the British PGA Championship. Since then it has had several sponsored names, but the phrase “PGA Championship” has usually been included in the tournament’s title. The European Tour’s “flagship” event used to rotate between several of Britain’s finest courses, Wentworth being among them. In 1984, it returned to Wentworth’s West Course and hasn’t left. Every spring the BMW PGA Championship is European golf’s main attraction.

The BMW PGA Championship has been won by players from twelve different countries including Major Championship winners Severiano Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Tony Jacklin, Bernhard Langer, Jose Maria Olazabal, Arnold Palmer and Ian Woosnam and eight times European Tour Order of Merit Number One Colin Montgomerie, who won three times successively from 1998 to 2000.

THE BMW PGA CHAMPIONSHIP TODAY
The PGA European Tour is headquartered at Wentworth, and the PGA Championship is the tour’s “home” event. It is the European tour event with the highest prize money (€4,350,000 in 2007). It is also the European Tour’s premier event for the purposes of the Official World Golf Rankings, with a minimum of 64 ranking points available to the winner. The BMW PGA Championship will continue in to be held at Wentworth until at least 2010. The 2008 BMW PGA Championship, which will take place on May 22-25, will be the 25th successive time that The European Tour’s flagship event has been played on the West Course (and the 28th time in all since Tony Jacklin, Peter Oosterhuis and Maurice Bembridge won on the course in 1972, 1973 and 1974 respectively).Denmark’s Anders Hansen won the 53rd edition in May 2007, when he beat England’s Justin Rose in a play-off.

BETTING ON THE BMW PGA CHAMPIONSHIP
The current prices are now available from William Hill. Soon other online bookmakers will follow suit with a wide range of fixed-odds markets on the BMW PGA Championship.

SPREAD BETTING
As well as fixed-odds bets, a number of online betting firms of various “spread” bets.
On a Sunday evening, with a single fixed-odds bet running on, say, Padraig Harrington in the BMW PGA Championship, the Irishman is 10 shots off the lead with 5 holes to play.
The bet is dead. However, a “spread” bet on his finishing position would be well and truly alive. Imagine that prior to the event you sold Harrington at 38. If he finishes 50th, you lose 12 times your stake. Should he make some birdies in the closing stages, and improve to 37th place or better, your bet becomes a winner.

Spread betting is perfect for those who like to bet using the laws of probability. It facilitates “buy” and “sell” bets depending how well or badly you think a player will do. Unlike fixed-odds betting, wins or losses are unknown when the bet is struck, since they depend on how well / badly a player fares. BEWARE!

One angle that you can use to win on the spreads at golf is to not follow the masses. Some golfers become extremely popular at certain events because of previous performances and the expectation that the well-known tipsters. The spread firms know that no matter what price they put up, people will want to back that player. They won’t offer 17-20 on finishing positions when experience tells them that if they offer 14-17 it will still be taken. For every ten punters that take the 14 to support, there will probably be only one that will take the 17 to oppose. It is hardly in the firm’s best interests for those ten punters to win more often than the guy who dared to be different. Look for situations where everyone seems to be backing the same player and “swim against the tide.” If a firm starts to change a price through weight of money in one direction then was the spread wrong to start with or is the money wrong? If you decide the original price was right and now you can get on in the opposite direction at lower, do so. Specialise on a few players. Find out what events they like, gathering any information that might give you the edge on a forthcoming event. The firms must price up over 30 players; you can specialise on one. If you do that, you have always got a chance of making money.

There are a range of spread betting options on golf, so be clear how each market operates before you start placing bets.

Finishing Positions
On this market, the firms put a ceiling of 50 on the highest position the player can finish so it doesn’t become too volatile. If a player misses the cut he automatically makes up (finishes) at 50. This also applies to withdrawn players.

Index Bets
Only 10 players are quoted and the winner is the player who shoots the lowest score of those quoted. Fifty points are given to the winner, followed by 30, 20 and 10. The last six score zero.

72-hole match bets
The firms give a price on how many strokes one player is expected to finish above another in a head-to-head contest. There is a ceiling of 25 strokes here, with the only other important rule being that if one (or both) players miss the cut, scores are doubled to give a four-round total.

Leaderboard Index
This is a market similar to the index bets above, but includes the whole field. At the start, only well-known players will be quoted, but as lesser-known players progress up the leaderboard they will be quoted between rounds. Usually 80 points is allocated to the winner with 40 to second place, 30 to third and so on.

With the European Tour having expanded to new international horizons, the schedule is such that the BMW PGA Championship now signals the arrival every year of championship golf in mainland Britain, and with it comes that buzz of anticipation and excitement. Wentworth in the spring is indeed a splendid place to be