Four longshot bets worth making ahead of 2023 John Deere Classic

The 2023 John Deere Classic may be in the toughest spot on the PGA Tour calendar. Not only is it just a couple weeks removed from a busy few weeks that saw the game’s elite players travel from the U.S. Open in California to the Travelers in Connecticut, but it’s also the last tournament before the Scottish Open -- which is the a very popular warm-up event for the Open Championship.

In other words, all of the game’s truly elite players will be skipping the John Deere and instead gearing up for the upcoming fortnight in the United Kingdom.

Just how weak is this field? Well, your betting favorite is currently Russell Henley at +1400 and the only two other golfers under +2000 are Denny McCarthy and Ludvig Aberg at +1600. Those guys are not exactly Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm and Rory McIlroy.

But just because a tournament is low on starpower doesn’t mean it’s low on betting value. In fact, the absence of any elite players in this field completely opens the door for basically anybody to lift the trophy at TPC Deere Run in Silvis, Ill.

It’s rinse and repeat with Akshay Bhatia in these kind of fields. The 21-year-old is way too talented to be overlooked in a field like this and at a course as easy as TPC Deere Run.

Bhatia missed the cut at the Rocket Mortgage last week, but he’s got a runner-up and a fourth-place finish at two tournaments (Puerto Rico Open and Mexico Championship) that had a similar competitive set-up.

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Don’t be surprised if Carl Yuan ends up as a bit of a trendy sleeper in both the betting and DFS markets this week. The 26-year-old from China may be best known for his unusual swing, but his form is starting to turn some heads right now.

Yuan has missed the cut in two of his last four tournaments on the PGA Tour, but he’s finished inside the top-20 in the other two and is coming off a strong showing at the Rocket Mortgage. Yuan was in contention going into Sunday before fading to T14 at the end of the weekend.

As 600/1 longshot Peter Kuest showed us last week, it absolutely behooves you to find a couple of absolute missiles down the board at a tournament like this and I’ve landed on Adam Long and Matthias Schwab. Neither player is in good form at all, but this is an easy enough course and a wide-open field so if they were going to find something somewhere, it would be here.

Long finished T23 at TPC Deere Run in 2021 and improved to T13 last year and Schwab was right behind him in 16th-place. It’s not much to go off of, but there’s very little difference between these guys at gigantic numbers and a lot of the players in the +8000 to +15000 range.

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