The 154th Open starts Thursday morning at Royal Birkdale, and most of what you’ll read this week leans on a crutch: course history. Who played well here in 2017, who has the links pedigree, who handles Birkdale?

I want to make a case that almost all of it is noise this year, and that the noise is exactly where the value is when it comes to making golf picks.

Royal Birkdale in 2026 is not the golf course Jordan Spieth won on nine years ago. Five greens are new. Every bunker on the property has been rebuilt. Two holes were redesigned from scratch, one par 3 was deleted outright, and a par 3 that didn’t exist in 2017 now sits in the middle of the closing stretch. When a model or a magazine tells you a player “fits Birkdale,” ask which Birkdale they mean.

📈 The board: Open Championship odds and lines, updating as the market moves. It has moved more in twelve days than most majors move all week.

🏗️ Five new greens, 110 rebuilt bunkers, and a par 3 that didn’t exist

Royal Birkdale commissioned Tom Mackenzie of Mackenzie & Ebert in 2021, and the work was finished in phases ahead of this championship. The short list of what changed: the 5th and the 7th were rebuilt as essentially new holes, the old par-3 14th was eliminated, the old par-5 15th slid down the card to become a 553-yard par-5 14th, and a brand-new par-3 was dropped in at 15. That new 15th is 241 yards on the card, into a crosswind, with the green angled front-right to back-left and raised above bunkers. The R&A can move it up, but the back tee is the one players are talking about. The 18th tee moved to make the last drive nastier, and the 7th shrank to a 151-yard precision hole with a green rebuilt three feet higher, above the deepest sand on the property.

Here’s the part that actually matters for a bettor. Mackenzie removed 14 bunkers and replaced them with closely-mown runoffs, and he has been explicit about the reasoning. Elite players are too good out of sand for bunkers to function as a real hazard. Short grass around a green makes them think. So the skill being taxed at Birkdale has shifted. It is less about escaping pot bunkers and more about chipping off tight lies to raised, running greens.

If you are evaluating this field based on the 2017 Birkdale performance, you are pricing a course that has been meaningfully rebuilt to test something different. That’s a data gap, and data gaps are where soft numbers live.

💸 What Scheffler’s drift is actually telling you

Scottie Scheffler opened around +500 twelve days ago. He drifted toward +590 over the weekend. He’s been trading around +680 to +750 as of Wednesday, depending on your book. That is his longest pre-tournament price in a major in four years, and the entire move traces back to one missed cut at the Genesis Scottish Open, which ended a streak of 78 consecutive made cuts.

One missed cut. That’s the input.

Now hold that against the rest of his season. Scheffler has one win in 2026, the American Express back in January, which sounds thin until you see that he also has 9 top-five finishes, three more than anyone else on Tour. He’s the defending Champion Golfer of the Year after winning at Royal Portrush by 4 over Harris English. Nobody has gone back-to-back at The Open since Padraig Harrington in 2007 and 2008, and Harrington’s second one came right here at Birkdale.

I’m not telling you Scheffler is a buy. I’m telling you the market moved the world’s best player from +500 to +680 off a single 36-hole sample, and the size of that move relative to the size of that evidence is the question worth sitting with. If you think one bad week at the Renaissance Club broke him, the number still isn’t long enough. If you don’t, the market just handed you a discount it wouldn’t have offered ten days ago.

🌬️ The draw evens out. The first-round markets don’t.

The sharpest edge on the board has nothing to do with picking a winner.

The forecast disagrees with itself. Some outlets have Thursday winds at 8 to 14 mph with gusts to 20; others have 15 to 20 sustained with gusts near 25 by the afternoon; and one has it at 4 mph. That spread usually means nobody has a firm read.

Direction is the more stable and more interesting variable. The wind is forecast out of the east in the mornings, the opposite of Birkdale’s prevailing direction, and that flips the character of the golf course. The opening tee shot normally plays with a left-to-right wind pushing toward the out-of-bounds area; in the morning, it comes from the other side. The 13th, 15th, 17th, and 18th normally play downwind and would instead play into it. The wind then freshens in the afternoon and swings north.

Practically, the mornings look more scorable than the afternoons on both Thursday and Friday. And because the R&A splits the draw, everyone gets one of each: Scheffler, DeChambeau, and Hatton go out Thursday morning and come back Friday afternoon. McIlroy, Schauffele, and Fitzpatrick get the reverse. Fleetwood, Spieth, and Rahm are with Scheffler’s half of the draw.

Over 36 holes, that mostly cancels. Which is why you’ll read that there’s no meaningful wave advantage this week, and for outright purposes, that’s roughly right.

One more historical comparison is worth questioning. You’ll see Branden Grace’s 62 here in 2017, offered as proof that Birkdale can be had, and it’s still the lowest round ever shot at The Open. Look at the Saturday it came on. Heavy rain had softened the greens; there was no wind; the rough was light; and the R&A had shortened the course to 7,027 yards, cutting the 5th by 36 yards to make it drivable. Grace said par that day was about 67. This week, Birkdale is baked out, breezy, and 7,223 on the card, nearly 200 yards longer than the setup that produced that number.

For first-round markets, it is not right at all. First-round leader, Thursday matchups, round props, and 18-hole three-balls all resolve inside a single wave. If Thursday afternoon really is the windiest window of the week, then half the field is playing a materially harder golf course than the other half in the only round those bets care about. That asymmetry doesn’t wash out, because there’s no second round to wash it out with.

🏴 Has the home-soil money already moved?

Tommy Fleetwood grew up in Southport and used to sneak onto this golf course. He owns 7 top-five finishes in majors over the last decade without winning one, the most of anyone. Justin Rose, with 6, has played Birkdale in three previous Opens, going back to his fourth-place finish here as a 17-year-old amateur in 1998. Both are good stories, and both have drawn real money because of it. That’s how narrative gets priced. The story is true, the number shortens, and by the time you’re reading about it, the edge is gone.

The one that interests me more is Tyrrell Hatton, who is English, plays in the same group as Scheffler and DeChambeau, beat Jon Rahm to win LIV Golf Andalucia in June, has a T3 at Augusta this year, and has sat essentially flat around +3700 all week. Same nationality, same home crowd, similar recent form, no move. When a narrative lifts three names and skips the fourth, the skip is usually the one worth pricing yourself.

The same logic applies to Tom Kim, running the other way. He won the Scottish Open on Sunday with a bogey-free 64, his first victory in 1,001 days, after a T3 at the U.S. Open last month. His Open number went from around 100-1 to roughly 59-1 in 48 hours, which is a fair account of a real change in form rather than an opportunity created by one.

One filter worth keeping in your pocket is that eight of the last nine Champion Golfers of the Year had already won earlier in the same calendar year, with Brian Harman in 2023 as the only exception. It won’t hand you a winner. It will thin a 156-man field fast.

🎯 Better rooms than the outright market

If you only bet outrights at The Open, you’re playing the hardest market on the board in the one week the field is deepest, and the course is least understood. Majors reward a wider card than that, and there are better rooms in this house.

Place markets are the obvious ones. Scheffler and McIlroy both price at plus money or better to crack a top five, and a top-20 line on an elite ball-striker at a course that has stopped rewarding raw distance is a different proposition than the same line at a bomber’s track. Birkdale’s fairways are baked and running, and long irons are going back in bags. Approach play and short game decide this, which widens the range of players who can contend and compresses the favorites’ real edge. That’s an argument for playing them to place rather than to win.

For Parlay Club types, top-20 doubles on two ball-strikers are correlated in the right direction here: the same firm conditions and the same short-grass green surrounds either reward that skill set or don’t, and they’ll tend to reward it for both legs at once. That correlation is doing work the book doesn’t fully charge you for on a two-leg ticket.

🎲 How I’d play the week

Course-history pricing is closer to superstition than analysis at a venue rebuilt this heavily, so the players being docked for a bad 2017 week deserve a second look, and the ones credited for a good one deserve a harder question. The Scheffler number moved further than his evidence did, and you only have to decide which way. Everything settling Thursday night is priced off a draw; split the outright market is right to ignore, and the first-round market is not.

I don’t post outright picks here, and I’m not going to start. What I post is a documented head-to-head card, every result public, win or lose, for 25 years. If you want my golf calls for Birkdale, they’re here, and the full record is there to check before you spend a dollar.

Good luck this week.

Odds cited are a snapshot from Wednesday, July 15, and this market is moving fast. Confirm the current number at your book before you bet anything.