March 2023 – With brackets at the forefront this time of year, we want to show you how to set up head-to-head match up betting opportunities for match play tourneys at your club! Homestretch Golf’s pari-mutuel system is perfect for prop bets, given the payout philosophy that losing predictions fund winning payouts. Each match serves as its own pool of money, and our proprietary odds are generated based on the dispersion of bets across the options within a match. A simple ‘pick the winner’ match up doesn’t work well with pari-mutuels as you need sufficient losing wagers to fund the winning payouts, so having only two options to bet on doesn’t work. However, we have creative Homestretch Golf admins now letting participants bet on the winner with an added wrinkle of margin of victory, which creates five or six different options and therefore, plenty of losing wagers to fund the winning payouts!
Click here to view the scrolling odds page for a 16-match (32 player) match play bracket, so you can see how this works beautifully and now makes it easy to bring a pari-mutuel concept to life with your match play tournaments. If the club likes it you could potentially offer new rounds of wagering with each match play round, pending the timing of round completion.
Smith wins before 18th hole
Smith wins on the 18th hole
Smith wins in extra holes
Robinson wins before 18th hole
Robinson wins on the 18th hole
Robinson wins in extra holes
or if you don’t play extra holes for your tournament:
Smith wins before 18th hole
Smith wins on the 18th hole
Robinson wins before 18th hole
Robinson wins on the 18th hole
Match is halved
As you can see, by offering options for different margins of victory, it becomes a fun and easy way to provide 5-6 unique outcomes to ensure an ample volume of losing wagers. Admins turn off place and show wagering, just like with any prop bet, so participants are only saving Win wagers within each match.
Another great overall offering for match play tournaments is a ‘weighted Place only’ bet, allowing participants to wager on who makes the final championship match with a Place (Top 2) wager. This would be a 1-flight tournament with all participants in that flight, and only Place wagers activated. The place bet is ‘Championship Match’ and then the admin can weight the payouts so more of the pool is set aside for those that wagered on the eventual champion and less for those that wagered on the runner up (ex. 60% / 40%). As long as your pick makes the championship match you are in the money! Fun stuff!
If you don’t already have your free admin account with Homestretch Golf, click here to sign up. Email us with any support questions to get dialed in so you can enhance your match play tournament offerings at your club!