How using the World Golf Rankings could help with 2022 Masters bets

It’s possible that there’s a way to use the Official World Golf Rankings to improve guesses on who will win the 2022 Masters.

One of my pals showed me this system, which has some merit.   Like a lot of people, I have always had concerns about the way the World Golf Rankings are done.  But looking at them a different way might benefit someone who wants to make the occasional bet.

Now, only one or two people actually know how the OWGR computations are made, and they aren’t giving classes on it.  Whether it’s that they just like having that kind of power, we don’t know. It’s obviously some kind of average based on the number of tournaments played and the value of each tournament.  And that’s one of my three gripes with the OWGRs for short.

My biggest gripe with the rankings is that intangible that’s called the value of the field each week. Since 95% of the time, the best golfers are actually playing golf on the PGA Tour, it is hard to imagine many weeks when any other tour counts for much. (Sorry, other tours, but we all know it’s true.)

An exception would be a tournament like the British Open because all the best players show up for it, despite the travel hassle and the cost.

My second biggest gripe with OWGRs is that it’s over a two-year span.  When they started it, it was over three years, which was always ridiculous.  Particularly if you are placing a bet on someone, which I’m not, in case anyone asks.

A heck of a lot changes in a golfer’s ability to play over a span of two or three years. Jordan Spieth, for instance, went from winning the British Open in 2017 to 50th place finishes and missed cuts in the space of two seasons. He dropped as far as 82nd in the world rankings, but now, he’s back to 17th.  It took some not-Jordan-Spieth-like play to do it.  Unfortunately, that kind of thing can happen to any golfer.

It’s possible that he’s now up too far for what he has done lately.  Don’t get me wrong.  Jordan Spieth is one of the best things to happen to golf in the last 10 years. But since 2018, he’s not played as well as he did for that magic two-year span from 2015 to 2017.  Maybe that’s all he will ever do. We don’t know. The current question is since Spieth hasn’t won for a year, should he be ranked ahead of someone like Joaquin Niemann who won the Genesis less than two months ago?  Right now, he is.

Bryson DeChambeau, one of the most exciting players ever in the game, won the U.S. Open in the fall of 2020 and the Arnold Palmer Invitational a year ago. He had a 2nd at last summer’s BMW Championship.  Up until last week he hadn’t played since the Farmers Insurance Open, and yet he’s still listed as 14th in the world.  Shouldn’t Brooks Koepka – not to start another Twitter war here – be ranked ahead of him since Koepka at least nearly won the WM Phoenix Open?

These are the kinds of things that bother me about the current world ranking system. But that’s not all.

When a flawed ranking system is used to determine, for instance, who gets into the Masters, it seems that the ranking system needs to be fixed. If I were a member at ANGC, and believe me that’s never going to happen, I’d want the best available system to identify the best golfers at my tournament.  Right now, they don’t have that.  I’m just saying.  The lag in the points and oddities in the computation are a real problem for the credibility of the Official World Golf Rankings.

Using the World Golf Rankings to help predict the Masters?

Now, back to the way to use the flawed World Golf Rankings to improve guesses as to who will win the Masters, or any golf tournament for that matter.  My pal showed me the all-important 9th column in the rankings, which nobody ever pays any attention to because we are all focused on the current No. 1 and what it takes to get there.

That 9th column could be the key to who will win any week, but you might have to click on it twice to get the real result.  Sometimes I do it, and it gives me the wrong data and if I click twice, it gives me the right data.  Another way to obscure it, I figure. However, the 9th column has 2022 world golf ranking points,  or the what have you done for me lately results.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, here are the top 20 in 2022 points through the Dell Match Play:

Scottie Scheffler, Cameron Smith, Viktor Hovland, Kevin Kisner, Joaquin Niemann, Jon Rahm, Patrick Cantlay, Tom Hoge, Harold Varner III, Hideki Matsuyama, Sam Burns, Will Zalatoris, Sepp Straka, Tyrrell Hatton, Luke List, Justin Thomas, Billy Horschel, Collin Morikawa, Thomas Pieters, and Cameron Young.

You’ll find Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Xander Schauffele, and Rory McIlroy much farther down the list because they haven’t played well yet this season, except for Rory’s third place in Dubai.  That does not mean one of them won’t win the Masters. It just means they haven’t had great mojo this year to date,

What is interesting is that with either column No. 1 or No. 9, Scottie Scheffler is No. 1.  So maybe the players who appear in both top 20s should be under consideration for your betting choices.  As for me, I’ll be saving up for a stock split, not making bets on golf.  Same thing, really, just different choices.

So, just remember, before you bet the house on a specific player to win the Masters, it might be a good idea to check out the 9th column on the Official World Golf Rankings page. And you might have to click twice to get the list of who has done what lately.

Here are the current top 10 in the OWGRs:

Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland, Patrick Cantlay, Cameron Smith, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele.