Q&A: Oddsmaker Sam Cooney on Gauging Pro Golf Interest with Betting Data

Each passing week in the professional golf world, people excitedly react to the latest tournament television ratings. Surely TV ratings mean something, but as people are often quick to point out, ratings don’t fully capture streaming audiences. Perhaps other data sets could supplement and provide insight into the popularity of respective golf tournaments.

I reached out to Sam Cooney – Head Golf Oddsmaker at Circa Sports, a major sportsbook based in Las Vegas – to ask about betting demand for various tours. I sought out Circa because, in addition to its reputation for sharp golf tournament pricing, it doesn’t limit successful bettors. While many popular sportsbooks severely restrict the action a bettor can place as soon as the bettor demonstrates an ability to place intelligent bets, Circa maintains the same standard limits for every customer, a more ethical way to operate.

One note: Circa rarely offers odds on DP World Tour events, so the DPWT is not discussed.

Joseph LaMagna: Any words of caution or caveats for using betting data as a proxy for interest in golf? As in, comparing the handle (dollars wagered) at various golf tournaments to evaluate how popular each is among fans.

Sam Cooney: Well, not everybody bets. But generally I think that’s a good way to think about it. I can’t imagine it’s too different from reality. We have offered every LIV event and every PGA Tour event. With LIV, we never see any recreational betting activity, it’s all from people who are sharp and know what’s going on. So that may not be the best indicator of overall interest, but that also shows the difference in interest between the two tours.

Joseph: Can you give a breakdown of Circa betting volume broken out by the following categories of events: the Masters, a PGA Tour signature event (i.e. Arnold Palmer Invitational), a PGA Tour non-signature event (i.e. Valero Texas Open), and a LIV Golf event (i.e. LIV Doral)?

Sam: When I pulled these numbers, I looked at total handle aggregated from January 1st through (April 16). When I refer to handle for a golf event, I’m talking about everything: outright bets, head-to-head tournament matchups, etc. The Masters has the highest betting volume of those four. The Masters receives four times as much betting volume as the Arnold Palmer Invitational, six times as much as the Valero Texas Open, and 220 times as much betting volume as LIV Doral. There was 36 times as much action on the Valero as LIV Doral.

Year to date, the amount of handle we’ve taken for the PGA Tour versus LIV is 99.4% PGA Tour and 0.6% LIV … The amount of LIV handle would still represent less than 1% of betting volume after removing the Masters.

Joseph: Is some of that because the menu of betting options is narrower for LIV Golf than for the PGA Tour?

Sam: That could be a cautionary detail to include because we don’t offer the amount of markets for LIV as we do the PGA Tour. It’s just not worth the time. If we offered Top 5s and Top 10s and Top 20s every week for LIV, people would bet them. We just wouldn’t see much action.When LIV first came about, we tried to offer a little bit more and take it seriously. There’s just not much interest in it. If you take the average PGA Tour event versus the average LIV event across the board, we’re writing about 52 times as much per PGA Tour event versus LIV.

Joseph: On the PGA Tour side specifically, what does betting volume look like for the Players Championship? And the Tour Championship?

Sam: The Players Championship gets bet a little bit more than the standard signature event. We write about a third as much action on the Players as we do the Masters. I don’t have the exact Tour Championship numbers in front of me, but from doing this over the last couple of years, the Tour Championship is nowhere near even a regular event. We don’t get as much action on the Tour Championship as we do on, for example, the John Deere Classic.

The formatting of the event does not appeal to bettors and confuses people as to what they’re actually betting – starting strokes, without starting strokes, etc. – and the field is small. Do people bet on it? Yes. But it throws people off and I think that just disinterests people.

Joseph: In terms of the health of pro golf as a whole, are you seeing any trends in how much betting interest there is in 2025 compared to the last few years? Has the schism in professional golf led to less betting interest?

Sam: The overall golf handle at Circa has been increasing year over year. Now, is that a product of golf becoming more interesting to people or just Circa growing as a company and expanding to different states? I’m sure it’s a mixture of both.

Joseph: Has LIV Golf’s handle similarly increased each year since its inception?

Sam: No, it’s been pretty steady since the beginning. Nothing has changed much. It’s just written a small amount since it started and stayed relatively constant.

Joseph: How do you evaluate the strengths of LIV fields versus other categories like a PGA Tour signature event or a non-signature event?

Sam: It’s somewhat comparable with the guys at the top, but once you get outside of the top five LIV golfers, it drops off much quicker than it would at a PGA Tour signature event. There are many more guys in the middle of the pack at a PGA Tour signature event who would be in the upper tier of LIV golfers.

Joseph: The 30th best golfer on LIV: where would he stack up on the PGA Tour out of, let’s say, 210 PGA Tour players?

Sam: Below average. Off the top of my head, I would say somewhere in between 120 and 150.

Joseph: Is there anything else you found interesting when putting together this data?

Sam: Before I did this, I expected to see LIV with 3-5% of the total handle. To see less than 1% was a real eye-opener. It just doesn’t write any action. And I wish it did because it’s easy to price, easy to simulate, only 54 guys, etc. I want to actually write bets to it because we spend time doing all of this, but people just do not care. It’s wild.

The only other thing I wanted to bring up: I’m a pretty big non-believer in the team portion of LIV Golf. I can get interested in the individual aspect because of some of the players and I’m a big golf fan. Plus, obviously, I do the numbers every week, so I’m going to be interested in it. But since LIV Golf started, I have not once hung team odds, like which team is going to win the LIV event. And you know how many times people have asked for it or we’ve gotten a phone call from somebody at the betting counter wanting to bet on the Fireballs to win the team event? Zero.

Not a single person has ever asked for the team portion. We get people calling asking for stupid stuff all the time. The fact that nobody has called and asked for that is a bit of a shock to me.

Joseph: Including during the LIV team championship in Dallas, no one asked?

Sam: No.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.