Welcome back guys. What a wild week in store for us here at Royal Birkdale. 

Course Summary

First thing to remember: throw out the mental picture of 2017. That year Spieth won on a soaked, soft golf course. This week it's the complete opposite. Birkdale is brown, baked, and running fast, and the forecast is warm and dry with basically no rain in sight and pretty tame wind early. So the ball is going to chase forever. You'll hear guys like Rahm or Rory say they can hit 6-iron 280 so it really is a different mindset and strategy T2G.

But even with variance at Birkdale, we know what conditions are typically seen at Open championships and our course comp correlations all point to other OPEN venues. So I am really not taking this week as an unknown, but I do think it will be more extreme variance than we would typically [like to] see. I tried looking through our numbers for firm condition fairways AND greens, and sample sizes were really small so I threw that out. TBH, which I didn't have time for, I bet I could make an argument that the best players at the OPEN Championship when it is really firm, are actually the best on super soft courses.... saving that project for the off-season.

Correlations in Course Summary still hold strong, the only tweak I made when reviewing all of the Open venues is Around the Green being quite a factor. So when I went through my betting card, ARG was a big factor for guys I was close to betting. Henley being one of them. So main takeaway, the skills the top players in the world have are diminished on a course like this. Now, the same happens to other players but their scoring variance doesn't move as much. For this reason I mostly bet mid-numbers and long-shots....even 500/1 that I could very easily see winning this week...even if by accident almost.

The course is fun though and I look forward to watching it.

One thing to actually keep in mind is that the course has had a real facelift since '17, so even the guys who've played it are relearning a few holes:

  • Brand new par-3 15th making its debut at a beefy 241 yards, elevated green with steep fall-offs.
  • The old 15th is now the 14th, a monster par-5 tipping out at 602.
  • The short par-4 5th got fully redesigned into a risk-reward hole, you can see the green off the tee now but long is dead.
  • The 18th tee moved way left, straightens it out and brings a nest of fairway bunkers into play for anyone taking driver.
  • Plays about 67 yards longer overall now, up to 7,223.