Simons calls golf betting “the niche of the niche” and said there aren’t many other people in his profession who have such a specific-minded gambling pursuit.
“I don’t not only see a lot of actors into it, you don’t see a lot of people into it,” he said in a telephone interview this week. “It’s just a niche thing.”
Jeff Sealey, the originator of the Cut Maker podcast, is the director of an insurance consultant firm in Indianapolis. He also sells his golf picks via a text-message service that he said has been “a lot more successful than I ever would have imagined.” And one day, it slowly dawned on him that a prospective customer had a certain measure of fame.
“I had no idea who this guy is, and when I get this message, he’s like, ‘Hey, I want to sign up for your site, what do you charge, blah blah blah,’ ” Sealey said in a telephone interview. “So I tell him and then I see Tim Simons, blue check mark [as a verified Twitter user]. I knew who Jonah Ryan is. I had no idea who Tim Simons is. … I was like, ‘Hey, do you do a lot of golf betting?’ It turns out, he’s a pretty good golfer, plays in some pro-ams and stuff like that. … Somewhere between a 10 and 15 handicap, so he knows how to play. So I just thought, ‘This would be a lot of fun.’ ”
The two recorded their first episode in January ahead of the American Express tournament in California, which took place on a course that Simons had played. Since then, they’ve previewed a number of other tournaments, including this week’s Masters, the biggest of the season so far. And this week, the two will meet face-to-face for the first time in Las Vegas, where Sealey is participating in a fantasy golf draft and doing media appearances with Simons ahead of the tournament at Augusta National.
“So on a late Monday night, I’ll just drink beer and build a DraftKings lineup with this guy and record it. That’s the highly sophisticated model,” Sealey said with a laugh. “We don’t have the greatest audio quality in the world. It’s not meant to be super serious; it’s meant to be something fun. And maybe it will develop into something at some point, but right now it’s just kind of something fun to do.”
Said Simons: “This world is so small. I just wanted to reach out [to Sealey], ‘Hey, you’re somebody that does this weird thing, too.’ He’s a nice dude, he’s funny, and we’ve gotten along.”
“One of the great things about talking to Jeff is … I think about golf all the time, I play golf a lot, it’s the sport that I follow the closest. I feel like I know a lot more than most people about it,” Simons continued. “But Jeff is a handicapper. … So he works with numbers and has a mind for that sort of thing. He has a deep knowledge of the numbers behind it. And I feel like I can do what I usually do, which is add a little bit of levity. A little bit of knowledge but a lot of levity.”
On the course, Simons said he’s somewhere around a 12 handicap after getting down to around an 8 during the pandemic. Off the course, he has fond memories of turning a $50 bet on Joaquin Niemann at the 2019 Military Tribute at the Greenbrier into a nice score when the young Chilean won going away at 20-1 odds.
“It was great because I played golf while I was there and I left a wedge on the side of the green and never got it back, so I was able to buy a new wedge with it,” he said.
Simons said wagers of that size are pretty rare for him, as golf betting is still a pretty recreational pursuit. (“I like being degenerate-adjacent,” he joked.) He’s not going to lose his shirt betting on Jordan Spieth to win the Masters, in other words, though he did make a bet on Spieth to win the tournament at 25-1 odds earlier this year, before his victory at last weekend’s Texas Open made Spieth one of the Masters favorites.
“I love gambling, but my Midwestern parents and Northeast upbringing don’t allow me to go too far into it,” said Simons, a Maine native. “When we play skins when we play golf, it’s like $2 skins. The amount of money is not what attracts me to it; the juice of it is what attracts me to it. I never bet a lot of money because I don’t want to lose a lot of money, because I was a broke actor for so long. Any sort of adjacent thing that involves a hyper-specific knowledge like that, I just find those worlds interesting.”
