🏄 Bet Your Spyglass

📢 Fore, Please:

It’s finally here. We’ve been waiting all month for this. It’s not a coincidence that Scottie Scheffler has planned his return to golf around the RickRunGood One & Done World Championships!

That’s right — we are officially starting this week and, as of writing this, there is a massive overlay to the tune of $182,000. That means Splash Sports is going to be paying out money that is not covered by entries (good for us, bad for them).

As much as I love free money, I’d love even more to fill the contest. We are kicking off Thursday morning and I want you to be involved. Details below.

Best of luck this week
Rick

🏅 One & Done Details

💰 $150/entry, $500,000 guaranteed purse
🤑 $50,000 First Place, $300 minimum payout
6️⃣ Six Segmented Payouts ($5,000 for first of each)
🏠 Available in 40+ states plus Canada (except Quebec)
🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/3UXm4ha

🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/3UXm4ha

💸 Full Payouts

As I was working with Splash on this contest, I wanted a few things to be included with the payout structure. I wanted 1) a big first place prize 2) doubling your money for the first payout position and 3) a guaranteed purse.

They agreed to all three — got ‘em!

There are six different segments amongst the 28 total tournaments on the schedule. That means if you struggle during the course of the entire year, it’s still possible for you to make some serious coin if you get hot over just a few tournaments.

🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/3UXm4ha

This is already the biggest OAD that the RickRunGood community has ever done. A few years ago we would have been lucky to get 200 entries. Now someone is going to win $50,000 — that’s crazy to me.

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Harris English: $7,300 | 99.5 PTS
Andrew Novak: $7,000 | 95.5 PTS
Sam Stevens: $7,300 | 90.5 PTS
Sungjae Im: $10,000 | 82.5 PTS
Hayden Springer: $6,600 | 81.0 PTS
Kris Ventura: $6,300 | 81.0 PTS
TOTAL: $44,500 | 530.0 PTS 

👾 Drive For Show, Scramble For Dough

Watching the final round of the Farmers Insurance Open was like watching Groundhog Day. I kept seeing the same thing over and over again. Here’s what I saw —

Harris English missing the green but getting up and down for par. This was happening while Andrew Novak and others would miss the green and fail to get up and down for par. English mostly missed in the correct spots which provided him easier situations but these pars felt mostly stress-free.

English’s victory wasn’t highlighted by anything special.

He didn’t lead the field off-the-tee, in fact, he finished T49 in SG OTT and T60 in driving accuracy.

He didn’t lead the field approach play, hitting 45/72 greens and finishing T31 in proximity.

There were only two categories that English led the field in last week — scrambling (22/27) and fewest bogeys (7). Great grinding, Harry!

🥈 Im Having A Hard Time With This

Does Sungjae Im have a winning problem? There, I said it. One of my favorite golfers on the planet and an unbelievable talent … who doesn’t have many (enough?) trophies on the mantle.

Im made his full-time PGA TOUR debut in October 2018. Since then, he has played 188 events which is the second most of anyone on TOUR — shoutout Adam Schenk (189).

He’s piled up a Top10% of 11.2% which is 4x that of Schenk’s and double of anyone who has played nearly as many events of Sungjae. His Top 10 rate is in-line with Sam Burns (11.3%), Akshay Bhatia (11.0%) and Sahith Theegala (12.1%).

However, Im is only winning at a 1.06% clip. That’s nearly identical to KH Lee (1.09%) and worse than Chez Reavie (1.18%).

If Sungjae had the win rate of Max Homa (3.9%) — who he beats in Top5%, Top10% and Top20% — he would have somewhere between 7-8 wins. Instead he has two. Problem? I don’t know. But it’s definitely not not a problem.

⏰ Let’s Talk Timing

When I first started doing Live Chats, I picked 3PM ET for the “timeslot”. I don’t know why. I don’t remember making that a conscious decision. I don’t remember doing any research or analysis. I just picked it. Now I’m considering moving it around to see where you would like it. Here are a few options, let your voice be heard.

By the way, don’t forget this week’s Live Chat is Wednesday at 3PM ET.

🏀 Dinking & Dunking

You’ve probably heard it all week — Pebble Beach is short and has tiny greens. Yep, I’m not breaking any news here. At roughly 6,970 yards, Pebble Beach is one of the shortest courses that these professionals will play. Though, what I’m most interested in, is how they play it.

Last year, Pebble Beach featured an average drive length of just 268 yards. That was, by far, the shortest on the schedule. It was a full eight yards shorter than Harbour Town and put it in a tier of its own.

The statistical combination of hitting less than driver as Pebble Beach looks something like this — big penalty for missing the fairway (0.26 strokes) and medium reward for hitting a long drive (0.16 strokes).

There are nine regular courses on the schedule that have a driving distance of 281 or shorter. I ran a query for all those courses since 2020 and the results are in the table above.

No surprise to see the big names there but the ones that stick out to me — Russell Henley, Matt Fitzpatrick and Eric Cole.

🫖 The Euros Are Coming

If you tuned out golf at the TOUR Championship and have consumed nothing but football since — welcome back! And shame on you! Lots of golf has been played since then and much of it has come overseas.

Here are the 14 players in this field who played at least three times on the DP World Tour since the conclusion of the PGA TOUR season.

First off — Rasmus played ten (!!) times! What an animal.

He’s one of five different golfers to average at least 1.5 strokes gained to the field which is an impressive number anywhere in the globe. Tommy’s worst finish was a T21 at the Dubai Desert Classic and yes, this is all available on RickRunGood.com (shameless plug).

🛑 Momentum To Zero

Remember that great start I was off to in OAD? I was banging my chest and changing my name to “He Hate Me”. Well, thanks to Max Homa, Will Zalatoris and others — I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks. Time to regroup.

Additionally, with the start of our OAD this week I feel a sense of calm. A blank slate, if you will. The opportunities are endless!

If you haven’t seen this before, the OAD tool from Pool Genius makes custom recommendations for you depending on your league size, entries, prize distribution, etc. It’s a very well thought out tool that I recommend everyone sign up for — it’s worth way more than they are charging.

💰 Plus we get a discount, so sign up here: bit.ly/3PjawS7

My recommendations LOVE Patrick Cantlay this week. His score (95) is significantly higher than everyone else. We know he’s going to be popular, but based on my position, it doesn’t care. I’m still towards the top of the board and we don’t need to do anything crazy.

Note: When I ran the numbers for an entry that wasn’t doing as well, Justin Thomas was preferred over Patrick Cantlay.

For leagues starting this week, it’s a clean slate. I still think Cantlay and Justin Thomas are top options, but I could really make a case for lots of golfers. I’m likely to save Ludvig for Torrey Pines (Genesis) and will wait and see on Scheffler.

My likely picks are a combination of Cantlay, Thomas and Hideki. Remember, Deki has been stellar in 2025 and he has some of the shortest odds to win this and is going completely overlooked.