Betting: Taking underdogs at WGC Match Play this week could make you money

Minty Bets is joined by Jay Busbee to give his top picks for the upcoming WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play event this week.

Video Transcript

MINTY BETS: The WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play is this weekend in Austin, Texas. I'm joined by Jay Busbee here to give us his best bets for the tournament. Jay, who are some of your top tier picks for the tournament?

JAY BUSBEE: Well, the fun thing about this is that it's golf's version of March Madness, but it's not quite a one and done. I know a few seeds would like to have the opportunity the golfers will have this weekend where they played three round-robin matches before they actually get eliminated. And that sets up a lot of opportunities for some of the big names to not get bounced immediately.

Your top four seeds-- your top number one seeds, if you will-- are Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa. All three of them-- or all four of them, I should say-- have a lot of positives and a lot of negatives. They're all guys that you would take absolutely in a heartbeat if this were stroke play, but match play brings in something very different.

For example, Dustin Johnson, he won back in 2017. He's struggled a lot of late, but his match play record is very good. He's 20, 16, and 1.

On the other hand, I like a guy who's not in that-- not-- not a number one seed, if you will-- Bryson DeChambeau. The guy's gone 1-3 in his last two tournaments, and that's about as good as it gets. It's kind of like Alabama. You keep riding him till he proves that he can't handle it anymore.

At the moment, though, he's got a career match play singles record of just 1, 3, and 1. Not a whole lot of professional experience. So you're going to wonder how he's going to do.

And then my third-- I don't know if I would call him a pick, just kind of a cautionary tale-- is Kevin Kisner. He's completely out of the mix. He's 66 to 1 odds.

He hasn't been playing very well of late, but he's 14, 5, and 2 in match play. He won this event two years ago, obviously it wasn't around last year, and he was runner-up two years before that. So he's an outstanding player in the sense that he can come up big for match play, but you never know quite how it's going to stack up right now.

MINTY BETS: All right. And other than Kevin Kisner, are there any other long shots that you like?

JAY BUSBEE: There are. The cool thing about match play is that it's very similar to the Ryder Cup, and so you see some big names from the Ryder Cup step up. On the American side, you could look at Patrick Reed or Jordan Spieth, the old buddies from a few years back.

But I'm going to look across the pond. I'm gonna look at Sergio Garcia. Played very, very well. Semifinals and quarterfinals the last two years. He's coming off a strong run at the PLAYERS. He's at 40 to 1, and he's won 38 match play events. He knows his way around match play. He knows how to handle that kind of pressure.

Another guy? Paul Casey won 37 match play events across Ryder Cup and the previous Dell events and so forth. The tricky thing about Casey is he plays really, really well right up to the point that it comes time to actually hoist a trophy. He's got three top 10s, two top fives in his last three events. And then here at the Dell Match Play, he's got-- he's reached the quarterfinals or better 7 of 10 times, but he's got zero wins in that time. So if you're looking for a guy for-- that's a solid top five pick, he's probably your guy. But for a winner, you might want to look a little bit elsewhere.

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