Florida Swing Offers Golfers (And Bettors) a Chance to Switch Tables

When we’re sitting at a cold table in a casino, we can always get up, stretch our legs for a few minutes, then find a new spot to try our luck.

We aren’t afforded that luxury in golf betting.

If we don’t have a great read on a specific tournament, the only options are to either sit out and wait for the next one or put our proverbial chips on the table and hope for the best.

That said, this week offers the closest thing we have to changing up the cards.

The PGA Tour has crossed the country, concluding the West Coast Swing and commencing the Florida Swing at PGA National for the Cognizant Classic – and our collective mindset should switch, as well.

While we shouldn’t expect the golfers who have played well in the season’s first six weeks to start stinking up the joint and those who haven’t done much to suddenly start contending for titles, I see this as a great opportunity to find some players at bigger prices who tend to fare better in the Sunshine State.

This isn’t just some far-fetched idea. There’s a historical analysis behind the rationale for seeing different leaderboards, beginning with this one.

Last year’s winner of the Cognizant was Joe Highsmith, a West Coaster himself, though one who hadn’t exactly been tearing it up beforehand. In five starts prior to the victory, he had three missed cuts and only one result inside the top-65 – and that was at the previous week’s Mexico Open, which on the former PGA Tour schedule essentially started the new table, if we’re going to keep the casino analogy alive.

Two years ago, Austin Eckroat came into PGA National playing decent golf – four finishes between 25^th and 42^nd in five starts – but certainly nothing that would have suggested he was on the verge of victory.

Chris Kirk in 2023 admittedly doesn’t fit the narrative, as he’d already compiled a pair of top-three results before winning here, but he’s easily more of an outlier than the norm. The year before that, though, Sepp Straka won after just a pair of top-40 results in his first five starts.

If we go back further, the Cognizant – then referred to as the Honda Classic – was deeper into the Florida Swing than it is now, so we’d already gotten a chance to see how the cross-country move had affected some players.

If you’re still skeptical, it’s fair to counter this information with a simple, “But why?” I think the answer can be found in the grass – literally.

Putting on the poa annua greens of the West Coast and putting on the Bermuda surfaces of Florida can be wildly different experiences. There are some who thrive on one and not the other, suggesting all it takes is a change of scenery to perhaps change their fortune.

For this week in particular, I’m targeting those who have performed well with the driver and irons so far this season, but struggled on the greens — players for whom a move to Bermuda putting surfaces should offer a serious uptick in those numbers.

Because the odds are, in part, a reflection of recent performance, backing those who haven’t yet played their best golf should also result in better-than-expected prices in the betting markets.

It’ll take a leap of faith in some circumstances, but here’s hoping that moving tables will result in the heater that a new spot can sometimes generate.