Golf betting tips: Round one preview and best bets for the BMW PGA Championship

Golf betting tips: BMW PGA first round

2pts Perez and Sharma to win their three-balls at 15/4 (Sky Bet)

2pts Syme to beat Otaegui and Baldwin at 6/4 (General)

1pt treble Perez, Sharma and Syme at 10/1 (General)

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Thursday's forecast for round one of the BMW PGA Championship is glorious, and with everyone teeing off the first tee, it's hard to find a potential advantage to put to use in the first-round leader market. If anything, what's expected to be a moderate breeze might pick up as the afternoon wears on, but there's not enough there to conclude that the morning starters hold a definitive edge.

Rory McIlroy is a fair price at 18/1 as he has a whopping 38 first-round leads from around 400 career starts. Eighteen of them have been solo, too, albeit he's typically taken a while to find his stride here at Wentworth and hasn't yet hit the front here on a Thursday. Even when we're talking about the best player in the field and an in-form past champion, I'd want to feel like I have a potentially significant draw bias in my favour before playing.

McIlroy is part of a marquee three-ball along with Ryan Fox and Justin Rose, but the best bet comes 15 minutes earlier when VICTOR PEREZ, Thorbjorn Olesen and Peter Malnati head to the tee (0830 BST).

Perez has outperformed Olesen on the PGA Tour this year and heads their head-to-head 4-1 since June. He's about 50 places ahead in strokes-gained total and almost a hundred in FedEx Cup points, so it would seem reasonable to give him an edge just about anywhere at the moment.

The key, though, is Wentworth. Olesen has played here a dozen times and managed nothing better than 27th. Only twice in 32 rounds has he broken 70, never more than by a single stroke, and while a bit better lately, it's a course that plainly makes him uncomfortable. That's probably because he can be unreliable off the tee.

Perez has broken 70 eight times in 13 rounds at the West Course and while we'll need to dodge the kind of disastrous starts he made in 2021 and 2023, in the first of them he was playing for a Ryder Cup place, and in the second he was grouped with Nicolai Hojgaard and Padraig Harrington having again narrowly missed out on the side.

Without that hanging over him, and having enjoyed a good summer, Perez looks set for a decent week and should account for Olesen, while course debutant Malnati hasn't even been able to rely on his trusty putter of late. I couldn't go as far as ruling him out of something competitive, but Perez looks excellent value at odds-against regardless.

SHUBHANKAR SHARMA, like Perez, is a course-proven, in-form player who has contended for Rolex Series titles before and looks a good each-way option in the outright market.

He's grouped with Julien Guerrier and Hurly Long (0955 BST) and the latter is in a real mess at the moment. Long is currently one of the very worst iron players on the DP World Tour and that's the one thing you simply must do well to feature in this tournament. Three of his last nine rounds have been 77-plus and another score in that region is on the cards.

Guerrier has a terrible record here and withdrew after an opening 81 a year ago. He's become a solid player but his long-game was poor in Northern Ireland and he's nowhere near as accurate or as comfortable as Sharma is at Wentworth. That ought to show and it's worth saying he'd arrived in good shape before that nine-over round, too.

Into the afternoon there's a decent case for Angel Hidalgo as the outsider of three, based on the fact that both Gavin Green and Andrea Pavan have historically struggled here. But Pavan's three rounds of 80-plus all came when he was at rock bottom and he's out of that now, while both he and Green have the potential to make everything they look at. On balance, taking on two deadly putters over 18 holes doesn't really appeal.

By contrast, there's a good chance Adrian Otaegui shoots himself in the foot in that regard and CONNOR SYME ought to be shorter than 6/4 to outscore both him and Matthew Baldwin in a match beginning just before lunchtime (1130 BST).

The latter gave us a good run at 275/1 last week, finishing 30th in the end, but his overall record at Wentworth is modest. Otaegui's is better, but while 17th place at Royal County Down was more like it, his putting woes continued and he'd missed five cuts in a row previously.

Syme hasn't been holing much but has still been competitive and his long-game was excellent when sharing 17th alongside Otaegui. He has much more scope to light up the greens and, like the Spaniard, has always been a better parkland golfer, so it's easy to see why both of these were on the radar of each-way punters earlier in the week.

Syme though opened up half the price of Otaegui, he's a hundred places ahead in the DataGolf rankings, his contending 10th last year is better than anything Otaegui has ever mustered in the event, and I can't see why they're joint-favourites at 6/4. Syme has to be the bet.

The only other tempting option from the more high-profile groups was former Wentworth champion Alex Noren. He's in with the two latest DP World Tour winners, Rasmus Hojgaard and Matt Wallace, both of whom needed their share of luck in holing out from all over the place, enough to make up for some modest ball-striking at times.

In general, both Hojgaard and Wallace have struggled to back up wins in the immediate aftermath but drawing conclusions as to their ability to do so from such small sample sizes might prove to be a mistake. Ultimately, these are two genuine Ryder Cup hopefuls who arrive here with big wins to their names, so it wouldn't be a surprise should either or both feature. Noren can be left alone.

(An earlier version of this preview named Jeff Winther as part of Sharma's three-ball in error. Sharma would have been removed from the recommended bets had this been a mistake in the research, but it was in the writing only. BC)

Posted at 1025 BST on 18/09/24

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