Should you bet on LIV golfers?

The 2023 Masters is going to be an interesting tournament to handicap for a number of reasons, but the elephant in the room will be how to handle the contenders who are currently plying their trade under the LIV Golf banner.

Three of the past six winners — Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia and Patrick Reed — are playing in the breakaway competition and several other contenders such as Abraham Ancer, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Cam Smith, Joaquin Niemann, Louis Oosthuizen and Paul Casey are set to play with PGA Tour golfers for the first time since jumping ship.

It should make for an awkward reunion and will be great drama for the golf-watching public, but it sets up quite the dilemma for handicappers: Do you completely fade the LIV players?

Or do you buy low?

For the most part, the LIV cohort will be undervalued at Augusta National next week.

Bookmakers know that most bettors are influenced by natural biases, like betting the players they like (Tiger Woods, for example) and staying away from the ones that they don’t.

Patrick Reed is a great example of this phenomenon.

Even before he left for LIV, Reed almost always went off at bigger numbers than you’d expect out of a golfer with his talent-level and résumé.

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Savvy bettors always had Reed circled in deep fields because he would not take much money, which would cause him to go under the radar.

You can probably apply that same logic to most of the LIV golfers that will tee it up next week.

In previous years, players such as Johnson, Koepka, Smith and DeChambeau would be among the more popular bets to win the Green Jacket, but this year it’s unlikely they’ll receive much betting support for the 2023 iteration of the game’s most prestigious tournament.

There are some valid reasons for staying away from the LIV players.

The renegade circuit doesn’t have the depth of the PGA Tour, so the quality of competition is lacking compared to what we see on the big stage.

Plus, they’re not playing as often and LIV events are just 54 holes, meaning we don’t have a great idea if the LIV players have their game in shape to compete in one of the toughest events of the season.

This is not just a betting conundrum, either.

The Masters is the biggest DFS golf event of the year and there will be a lot of casual money in the pools.

You can feel pretty certain that a lot of folks are just going to draw a line through the LIV players because they haven’t seen them play and/or they don’t like them for jumping ship.

That means there should be contrarian value on plenty of the defectors, with Cam Smith perhaps being the lone exception.

But even Smith, who is a major champion and has incredible course history at Augusta National, will likely go under-owned based on what you’d normally expect out of a player with his résumé.

It’s a tough call to make, but there is no question that backing the LIV golfers at Augusta is the strategy with the best upside.

It could blow up in your face if they are all out of form, but if they come to play you could be part of a small percentage of punters who put their money behind this set of players, meaning you’ll get a decent number in betting markets and would have a leg up on the competition in bar pools or DFS competitions.