Betfair Official Blog

Only the very best pull off a double, so get laying!

Click here to view market

Betfair blogger Craig Dutton returns with some thoughts on the chances of a repeat win...

In my last few blogs, I've spent the lion's share of my time deriding tournament form as an indicator of how to bet. The fields are just too competitive but more importantly it's a struggle to make money from it. It's too hard to keep hush-hush. Everybody knows when someone's playing well, especially if he's just won a tournament. And when Mr-Lay-Everything-At-Prices-You-Can't-Believe cottons on, you may as well give up there and then. Your hopes of mountains of profit evaporate into a tiny puddle, upon which nestles your hypothetical wallet.

To help me recover from such ludicrous metaphors, and also for my own sanity, I have taken a look at past results from the PGA Tour, going right back to the turn of the century. It's all very well saying form means nothing, but a look back at the results might prove me a disgusting liar. I've pinpointed the times when a player has won consecutive tournaments in which he's been involved. Unless blindness has already crept up on you, you'll notice a pattern start to develop.

2000 - Tiger Woods won the PGA Championship and the NEC Invitational consecutively.

Notah Begay III managed to notch a double, victorious in the St. Jude Classic and the Canon Open.

2001 - Woods won the Bay Hill Invitational and then the Player's Championship.

2002 - Nothing. Nada.

2003 - Els won his first two competitive outings in January. If you earned over $1.5 million in four weeks, would you bother with the other 48?

2004 - Vijay Singh completed a double in September, an unbelievable year in which he won another seven singles titles.

2005 - Mickelson achieved a double, winning the FBR Open and then the AT&T Pro-Am.

2006 - Phil Mickelson won the Bell South Classic, and then followed it with victory in the Masters during the months of March/April.

Tiger Woods won the Bridgestone Invitational, and then the PGA Championship.

2007 - Woods achieved the same double as '07, winning the Bridgestone and the PGA.

Later in the same year, Woods also won the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship back-to-back.

You see what I see? Three of the top five in the world - Mickelson, Els and Singh, managed to complete the double. Woods has demonstrated unbelievable class in managing six doubles in seven years, a crazy statistic. It shows just how superior he is.

But aside from the Notah Begay anomaly of 2000, and I'm not even going to attempt to explain that, it takes a player of world-class to pull off a double. A player of Els' immense stature has only managed back-to-back victories once in the last seven years. With over 300 tour events since 2000, backing last-time winners would have made you a profit only 10 times. So over 95 per cent of the time, in the last seven years, laying a previous winner would have made you a profit.

Statistics are just that - statistics. They're not prophecies, and I can't guarantee the same success rate over the next seven years. What is blatant is that achieving a double is extremely difficult, and as the talent pool fills deeper, will only get harder in years to come.