Hole by hole props let you bet on a single hole instead of the whole tournament. Will this player make birdie on 16. Will he hit the green. How far will the drive finish. Each one settles in minutes rather than four days.
Almost every page explaining these markets is written by a sportsbook, and none of them tell you the one thing that decides whether a price is any good: how often the outcome actually happens. Here it is, from 3,276,424 tracked hole scores.
The base rate for every hole prop
| Hole | Birdie or better | Par | Bogey or worse | Hole scores tracked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Par 3 | 13.2% | 69.0% | 17.8% | 737,439 |
| Par 4 | 16.6% | 64.8% | 18.6% | 1,956,258 |
| Par 5 | 43.9% | 46.8% | 9.2% | 582,727 |
A birdie is about 3.3 times more likely on a par 5 than on a par 3. A bogey is about 1.9 times more likely on a par 3 than on a par 5. Those two facts do more work than any read on form.
Eagles are the other asymmetry worth knowing: 2.47% of par 5 scores, against effectively zero on a par 3 or 4. Any market that pays for two under only has a live path on a reachable par 5.
This is the reference point a price has to beat, and books are not far off it. A typical birdie or better price on a par 4 sits around +450, which implies about 18 percent. The field base rate is 16.6 percent. That gap is the margin, and it is thin.
Which tells you where an edge can and cannot come from. It is not in knowing that birdies are rare on par 3s, because that is already in the price. It is in knowing that this player, on this hole, in this wind, with the pin in this position, is meaningfully different from the field average. Everything else is already priced.
The markets that exist
Sportsbooks price far more than birdies. These are the hole level markets we track and settle:
| Market | What it settles on | Settled bets tracked |
|---|---|---|
| Hole score | Birdie or better, par, or bogey or worse | 48,139 |
| Hole winner | Lowest score in the group, ties push | 20,829 |
| Green in regulation | Whether the green is hit in regulation | 17,585 |
| Score across a span of holes | Combined score over a run of holes | 7,926 |
| Where the tee shot finishes | Green, bunker, rough, short or long, on a par 3 | 7,474 |
| Tee shot distance from the pin | Proximity of the tee shot to the pin | 5,147 |
| Group combined score | The group's scores added together | 4,188 |
| Drive result | Fairway over or under a yardage, rough, or bunker | 3,680 |
Across every market we have settled 125,108 hole props.
How a price becomes a probability
American odds convert directly. A +150 price implies 100 / (100 + 150), or 40 percent. A price of -120 implies 120 / (120 + 100), or about 55 percent.
Add up the implied probabilities of every outcome on a three way hole score market and the total comes to more than 100 percent. That excess is the book's margin. Divide each implied probability by the total and you get the fair probability, which is what you should actually compare against. Skipping that step is the most common error in prop betting: it makes every price look better than it is.
Why hole props are different from outright betting
An outright bet on a tournament winner resolves once, after four days, and almost always loses. Hole props resolve constantly, which changes the shape of the problem in two ways.
The first is sample size. Fifty or more decisions per round means results converge toward whatever your real edge is, instead of being decided by one outcome. The second is that conditions are observable. Pin position, wind, how the hole has played all morning, whether a player is in the fairway right now. None of that is knowable when an outright is priced on Tuesday.
The caveat worth stating
These are pooled averages across every tracked hole. A short par 4 with a front pin and no wind plays nothing like a 500 yard par 4 into the breeze, and the same player has very different numbers on each. Use the base rate as the anchor, then adjust for the hole and the conditions in front of you.
PropGolf prices all of these markets hole by hole from shot level data, live while play is happening, and publishes every settled result including the losses. See the live board.