2024 PLAYERS Championship Round 2 Data-Driven Pick: Bet Hubbard Over Power
(Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images). Pictured: Mark Hubbard.
We are still waiting for round one to conclude Friday morning, but it was an incredibly soft opening day at TPC Sawgrass because of all the rain that has hit the area over the last few weeks.
While not all players were able to take advantage of that soft-scoring opportunity, 21 players will enter Friday at four-under par or better, including the three names at the top — Xander Schauffele, Rory McIlroy and Wyndham Clark — all of whom went into the clubhouse at seven-under par.
I anticipate that the course will dry out a little because of the top-notch system TPC Sawgrass has in place to control some of the outside factors. We will see if that becomes more of a weekend answer for those on Saturday and Sunday, but let's dive into this board for round two and see if we can't find a matchup to attack for the day.
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 PLAYERS Championship Round 2 Predictions
Mark Hubbard -110 over Seamus Power (FanDuel)
My model viewed this matchup as a significant enough edge to discuss the wager in the article since it delivered over a 3% advantage.
That 3% threshold when recommending a play in my written work is important because the typical movement around some of these wagers can be extreme. There is no point in cutting the corner and suggesting a matchup that won't be useful for the reader after an article has been out for 10 minutes when something has shifted too far in the other direction.
Betting, in general, is all about finding value and attacking those spots. So while I didn't personally land as bullish as my model on this cap for a handful of reasons that I will get to in a second, the 55.56% anticipated win rate that it did project surpassed the 52.38% expected total FanDuel released on this wager when it opened Thursday night.
The good from this head-to-head is very easy to explain. My model thought this -110 price on Hubbard was closer to where everything should have stood pre-event (-114) after diving into Hubbard's 62nd-place grade in my matchup column versus Seamus landing 87th.
In my opinion, there was a slow move that occurred from pre-to-post round one after Hubbard gained 11 points of value in just one day inside of my sheet, skyrocketing him into a 41st-first place head-to-head rating compared to the field because of his top-five expected 'Baseline Putting + Around-The-Green Score.'
All of that is great and still makes this worth a shot because of the lack of correction we saw on FanDuel's part heading into round two, but it is not as if Power didn't see a slight boost himself after underachieving on the day by 0.88 strokes.
I would recommend approaching this play cautiously since I typically don't love buying into an outlier round, especially when it takes on an underachiever in my sheet. However, value shouldn't be ignored when we can grab over a 3% implied win probability advantage against a book.
Let's bet this to win one unit.
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