Course Preview for the 2024 Open Championship

It’s been a long season, but we have reached the top of Everest fellow golf degenerates. After surviving The Scottish Open – where we got a nice return from a Romain Langasque Top Five finish – this week we’ll get treated to the final major of 2024, the Open Championship.

As always, the Open is being held over in the British Isles and for 2024 it takes us on a trip over to the West Coast of Scotland where the players will visit Royal Troon.

As of writing, there are no major field announcements to note. The field did add Aaron Rai, Alex Noren and Richard Mansell to the mix after they gained qualifying spots at the Scottish Open. Mansell was a shock qualifier but Rai and Noren are Tour vets who have been playing great most of the year, and potentially players to note this week for betting.

I’ll go over the course, relevant stats and some trends for betting today and will also highlight one golfer I like targeting this week (an early week bet). Then, on Wednesday, I’ll go through my full betting card with outrights, placements, and whatever else sticks out for the week. 

Let’s dive in and get our Open Championship week started!

Open Championship 2024 Course Preview

Troon is located just off the Firth of Clyde and, like most Open Championship venues, is a true coastal links venue that ranks up with the best of the best on the Open Championship rota.

The course was last seen in 2016 when Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson went scorched earth in one of the best head-to-head duels in major championship history. That year one of Stenson or Mickelson led the event after every round and, in the end, both men finished 11 shots in front of third-place finisher JB Holmes. 

The course has been lengthened somewhat for this year’s event but many of the same elements we saw from 2016 will be present. Troon is swarming with tough fairway and greenside pot bunkers and is well known for how penalizing it can be to players who get a little too off-center on approaches and tee shots. 

Additionally, if you were a little disappointed in the weather last week, and how benign it was, don’t worry, because Friday and Saturday at Troon looks like it will have some of the normal, chaotic Scottish weather we all know and love.

So, let's dive into Royal Troon:

• Royal Troon — Troon, Scotland
• Par 71, 7385 yards
• Greens: Fescue
• Defending Champion (event): Brian Harman 
• Defending Champion (course): Henrik Stenson (2016) 

I think the best way to describe Royal Troon is treacherous.

As a course, it’s not overly tricky nor does it need gimmicks like super high rough or even high winds to play tough. But it’s a longer, technical Par 71, and while the players can see what they are up against for the most part while trekking around it, what they are up against requires great precision and shotmaking to overcome. 

The first nine holes of Troon go out almost exclusively along the sea with the opening nine being the far easier of the two. That doesn’t make the opening simple by any means and players are asked to hit multiple straight drives right off the bat, or risk getting suffocated by a pot bunker or the sea.

If players can find the fairway, and avoid the around the green traps, the first few holes can also produce birdies, and you’ll almost certainly see any winner get their rounds off to a good start on these holes.

In many ways, the opening three short par 4s almost seem like they are luring the players into a false sense of calm, because after those first three holes, Troon swarms them with difficult par 4s (and Par 3s), many of which are located on the backside and will stretch over 450 yards in length.

The greens at Troon are also somewhat smaller than we’d see at a regular Open venue and their presence will place ample emphasis on precision iron play.

Jul 23, 2023; Hoylake, England, GBR; Brian Harman poses with the Claret Jug after winning The Open Championship golf tournament. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

In terms of setup, Troon is a traditional par 71 with three par 5s, which will likely play as the easiest three holes on the course. As mentioned previously, there are no gimmicky scoring holes (like a driveable par 4, or a short par 5), and even the postage stamp, the short par 3 8th hole – that can play as short as 99 yards – is likely to play close to even par (or harder).

Troon is already somewhat tight for a links venue, and it runs along the sea, a rail line, and thick gorse bushes at various points on its 18-hole circuit. However, what pushes the difficulty up a level is the numerous deep pot bunkers and tough greenside runoffs which will make this a much harder around the green test, and a more penalizing course, than we saw last week at the Renaissance Club.

In terms of comparables, a few things stuck out to me when looking at past Open leaderboards from Troon.

TPC Sawgrass, another tighter venue where you can pay dearly for off-center shots, has some connection. 2016 champion Henrik Stenson has won big events at Troon and Sawgrass, and we also saw three players that season finish in the top 10 – Sergio Garcia, Rory McIlory and Tyrrell Hatton – who have all regularly competed well at Sawgrass.

Additionally, if you go back a little further to 2004 and 1997, we see names like Davis Love III and Jim Furyk pop up as top-five finishers at Troon – two players who also had a ton of success at Sawgrass, but rarely challenged at the Open.

A tighter links venue with a lot of technical aspects, Troon should provide a very fair test. While links experts will still maintain a solid advantage, no amount of experience will help players who are missing fairways and greens this week making this a true ball-strikers venue, that figures to reward someone with a best-in-class long game with a Claret Jug.    

Weather Outlook for the 2024 Open Championship

The wind this week looks like it wants to come out and play! Gusts of 15+ mph are expected on each of the first three days, with Friday looking like a very hard test, where winds could get up to 25 mph. 

It should only make this already demanding course even more technical and put more pressure on short games. 

(Courtesy of Windfinder.com)

2024 Open Championship Betting Trends

Trends aren’t a great thing to follow blindly in handicapping, but they can be useful for tie-breaking scenarios and tend to carry more weight in golf betting at events where course history plays a bigger role.

Here are a few of the most relevant and interesting trends I found in research for the Open. 

• Seven of the past 12 winners of The Open Championship have been age 35 or older; eight of the past 12 have been age 32 or older.
   
• 15 of the past 18 winners of The Open Championship had achieved a T9 or better finish at this major in a previous year.
   
• Five of the past six winners had played in The Open Championship at least four times before winning.
   
• Nine of the past 11 winners of The Open Championship had recorded a T20 or better in one of the year’s first two major championships, in the year of their victory (including years before PGA moved to August).
   
• Four of the past six winners had recorded a T11 or better in one of the year’s first three majors.

By the way, if you are looking for a list of players who fit most/all of these trends, here you go.

How should we approach Royal Troon for betting?

Last year’s winner Brian Harman finished T12 the week prior in Scotland and had a solid run in finishing top 12 in each of his three lead-in starts. He also gained over 4.0 strokes on approach in at least two of those three starts.

The lead-in for the 2022 Cameron Smith also included a good performance in Scotland where he finished T10 the week prior. Smith had been hitting his irons well most of the season gaining a personal best 9.7 strokes on approach at the PGA Championship just two months prior.

2021 Open winner Collin Morikawa played in Scotland the week before his Open win, but didn’t finish well. Morikawa had shown some serious upside with his irons in previous starts, however, as he gained 8.3 strokes on approach at the US Open in a T4 finish the month prior.

While I wouldn’t look solely at approach play as the only deciding factor, it’s clear winners at the Open, regardless of the venue, have been flushing it with their irons in their lead-up. Rarely have we seen a winner come into this event without that portion of their game not already functioning at a very capacity. 

Here are Some of the areas of focus for choosing players this week include: 

• Great recent form on approach stats and GIR%
• A high degree of confidence or form on slower putting surfaces
• Solid driving stats; mainly fairways gained
• Links and Open Championship experience (see trends), plus a decent record of playing in windy conditions 
• Some course history, or a good history of play on links or similar seaside venues

Combining and weighing these stats (among others) into a model that targeted the last 24/50 rounds this week (again, heavier on approach, ball striking, windy conditions, GIR%, and Fairways Gained) gave me the following players as my top 10:

1. Scottie Scheffler
2. Collin Morikawa
3. Corey Conners
4. Rory McIlroy
5. Xander Schauffele
6. Tom Hoge
7. Sepp Straka
8. Ludvig Åberg
9. Tommy Fleetwood
10. Tom Kim

With the green structure having pot bonkers and tough run-offs this week, missing greens will be penal. Here are the top 10 players, over the last 24 rounds in GIR%

1. Scottie Scheffler
2. Ludvig Åberg
3. Byeong Hun An
4. Xander Schauffele
5. Davis Thompson
6. Corey Conners
7. Rory McIlroy
8. Sepp Straka
9. Bryson DeChambeau
10. Viktor Hovland

Finally, The Open has been an event dominated by experienced golfers. Here are the top 10 players in strokes gained total stats at The Open over the past five years. 

1. Tommy Fleetwood 
2. Jordan Spieth 
3. Rory McIlroy 
4. Brian Harman 
5. Xander Schauffele 
6. Jon Rahm 
7. Tony Finau 
8. Shane Lowry 
9. Louis Oosthuizen 
10. Viktor Hovland

Betting Facts and Stats for the 2024 Open Championship

Below are the previous odds (week of) of the past five Scottish Open winners. A couple of notes about these odds below:

• This has been a great event for longshots, as each of the past five winners of The Open had odds north of +2500.
• Brian Harman was 36 years old last year when he won, but the two winners before him (Smith and Morikawa) were still in their 20’s.

Below are the previous 5 winners of the Scottish Open and their pre-event odds from the beginning of the week of the event.

(Odds courtesy of SportsOddsHistory.)

Early Bet for the 2024 Open Championship

Tyrrell Hatton Each Way 1/5 Top 8 (+2800; bet365)

Hatton is not a player I have bet on much over the years. If I’m being honest, I almost always go out of my way to avoid him in majors.

He’s temperamental, extremely hard on himself and often finds some reason (on or off the course) to take his foot off the gas and bleed his way out of contention at the big events. 

However, there is little doubt that the Englishman has found his groove over on LIV. He’s managed four top-five finishes (and one win) over his last six starts on the alternate Tour and is also coming off a solid weekend at the extremely tough Valderrama, host of LIV Andalucia, where he shot 68-69 to close in solo 3rd.

His major results this season have also been sneaky good. The T9 he posted at Augusta in April was a personal best, and the fact he was finally able to achieve a small triumph at a course that has given him nightmares in the past, is a potential sign that he’s finally developed the mettle needed to achieve some greatness on Sunday in a major. 

From a tee-to-green perspective, Hatton was right up with the leaders at the US Open, where he gained 3.4 strokes Off the Tee and 3.6 strokes Around the Green, but faltered on Pinehurst’s slick greens. The slower fescue at the Open venues has always appealed more to him and it’s no shock that his best results in major championships have come in the British Isles where he’s landed four top-20 finishes over his last seven Open starts. 

At his best, Hatton is a full-fleshed striper of the golf ball, who managed a T5 at Troon during the 2016 Open. While he never threatened the lead in ‘16, he shot four rounds of par or better that year, a result that will breed confidence this week on a course that is set to play 150-200 yards longer than it did eight years ago. 

I can’t foresee Hatton’s opening odds dipping much this week, just given his course history and recent form, so he’s also a player I’m happy to jump on early. Taking him as an each-way at +2800, with a top 8 place, seems reasonable and gives us a couple of different ways to profit off a player who enters this year’s Open with as much confidence as he’s ever had heading into a major.