2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational Round 3 Data-Driven Pick
(Photo by Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images) Pictured: Si Woo Kim
For as slow as the week started, there are a lot of positives heading into the weekend. You can see my entire card below.
Bay Hill has been brutal for those who haven't delivered their top-notch performance through the opening two rounds. It will likely get worse on the weekend when this course starts to firm out and get quicker, making in-tournament bets much more enticing if you can find an advantage when running numbers.
I will stay where I'm at in the outright market because I feel good about things heading into round three with my Scottie Scheffler ticket, but let's talk about one head-to-head wager that might have an advantage for Saturday in the section below.
If you haven't already, you can find me on Twitter (@TeeOffSports). There, I provide a link to my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user input to create custom golf rankings. That sheet is released every Monday, so be sure to check it out and construct your own numbers from my database of information.
2024 Arnold Palmer Round 3 Predictions
Si Woo Kim -120 over Erik van Rooyen (DraftKings)
I sometimes like to start these articles by examining the cons of a wager versus the noticeable returns on the opposite end of the spectrum.
It is easy to look into my model at Erik Van Rooyen and notice all the negative retrievals when it comes to his failure to crack the top 50 for me pre-event and the continued downturn when diving into his current grade of 57th in my sheet for his head-to-head rank compared to the field. However, I do want to mention the one thing that concerns me about Si Woo Kim before further discussing why I decided to punch this ticket.
Kim's -8.11 strokes gained through two rounds with his putter delivered this head-scratching answer of a golfer that my model believed should have been in second place if it weren't for his 7.56-shot differential in expected performance when adding in his around-the-green data. Typically, that would yield an all-systems-go response inside my model, but how convinced should we be that Kim ever figures out the flat stick on these greens?
My model ranked him an alarming 64th (out of 69 players) when extrapolating the projection pre-event for him. I could get around that answer easily if that provided the only concern, but it is not as if his history at the venue has been any different than what we have seen early in the week.
I do like that the past three iterations generated a neutral putter, which is one of the reasons I decided to overlook the bad. However, the 2016-2019 version of Kim wasn't exactly stout when he averaged -1.875 shots per round with the flat stick.
My math had this closer to -165, which I don't believe is correct. But even a regressed run of my data could only get this down to around -141 because of Kim's 7.29 shot advantage over Van Rooyen in projected score after two days.
I will be playing this wager to win one unit.
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