4 picks our gambling expert likes this week

Welcome to our weekly PGA Tour gambling tips column, featuring picks from GOLF.com expert prognosticator Brady Kannon. A seasoned golf bettor and commentator, Kannon is a regular guest on SportsGrid, a syndicated audio network dedicated to sports and sports betting. You can follow him on Twitter at @LasVegasGolferand you can read his picks below for The Sentry, which opens Thursday in Maui. Along with Kannon’s recommended shows, you’ll also see data from Chirp Golf, a mobile app featuring Free-To-Play and Daily Fantasy golf contests where you can win money and prizes with every round and tournament.

Well, it was quick. Did everyone enjoy the golf offseason – all barely three weeks of it?

I’m not even done spending my earnings to Scottie Scheffler at the Hero World Challenge, and yet here we are again, kicking off the 2025 PGA Tour season with The Sentry at the Plantation Course in Kapalua, Maui.

It’s always such a welcome sight though as we make our way through a cold winter season, feasting our eyes on those emerald green roads, clear blue skies and Pacific Ocean views featured this week in Northwest Maui. If the Masters is our way of kicking off the spring season, Kapalua is definitely a great indicator of the start of another golf season.

The Plantation Course is a massive Coore/Crenshaw designed estate perched high on the hillsides overlooking the resort community of Kapalua and the Pacific Ocean. It’s wall-to-wall Bermudagrass, a unique par 73, and is one of the longest courses these players play all year at nearly 7,600 yards. Wind is the main defense and we’ve seen it wreak havoc on these players in the past, but when it’s not blowing Sentry quickly becomes a bird party. This week’s forecast calls for strong winds on Thursday, but nothing more than a standard coastal breeze the rest of the week.

Sentry 2025 is a 36-hole no-cut signature event and the field is limited to just 60 players.

I’m lucky enough to have played the Plantation Course roughly half a dozen times. The fairways are incredibly wide, the greens are large and there are many uneven fairways as the course has a large change in slope and elevation. I think Driving Distance is a helpful skill set this week, but it’s not critical to success, and driving accuracy is essentially irrelevant given the width of the freeways. Approach is important as it always is, but Hole Proximity is also a high priority as you need to get the ball close to the hole on these large putting surfaces. A large proportion of approach shots will come from 125 yards and less and a number of approaches will be hit from 200 yards or more.

I also looked at the par 5 as the course has five such holes, one more than a typical layout. I looked at Scrambling, 3-Putt Avoidance, Birdies or Better Gained, and Strokes Gained: Putting (Bermudagrass).

It’s a star-studded line-up of interlocking courses this week and if you look at past winners across all these courses, there’s an incredible amount of crossover success. I used Augusta National (Masters), Riviera Country Club (Genesis Invitational), Monterey Peninsula Country Club (AT&T Pebble Beach), Torrey Pines North Course (Farmers Insurance Open) and the old course at St. Andrews in Scotland, which recently hosted the 2022 Open Championship – won by Cameron Smith, who also won here in Kapalua that same year.

I played the following four players for an outright win this week and also played each of them for a top-10 finish.

Hideki Matsuyama (22-1)

We successfully landed in Matsuyama in August at the FedEx St. Louis Championship. Jude in Memphis, another course that is wall-to-wall Bermudagrass. It’s also a past winner of the Sony Open, always played the week after The Sentry on the island of Oahu, and while the two golf courses are nothing alike, we see plenty of crossover success between Sony and Kapalua. Matsuyama is also a former Masters champion and won the Genesis Invitational at Riveria Country Club in February.

What I particularly like about Matsuyama here is his ability from 100 yards out. Over the past 24 rounds, he ranks second in the field for Scrambling and ranks in the top-4 in Hole Proximity from 75-125 yards. Matsuyama finished 58th out of 59 players here last year, but he has also finished in the top 4 twice and runner-up once here in his career.

Byeong Hun An (35-1)

An was a recent winner on the DP World Tour, winning the Genesis Championship in late October. He wrestled here at Kapalua last year, finishing fourth. Back on the mainland, An took 16th place at the Riviera and also finished 16th last season at The Masters. He’s long gone, ranking second in the field for Driving Distance over the past 24 rounds. He is also 17th in the field for Scrambling.

JT Poston (45-1)

Like An, Poston also recently won in October in Las Vegas at the Shriners Children’s Open at TPC Summerlin. Last year, here at The Sentry, Poston finished one shot against Ani in a tie for fifth place. It’s worth noting that he followed that up with a sixth-place finish at the Sony Open the following week – where An, by the way, finished second. Both of these players had great runs on the Isles last year. We’re doing it going forward in 2025.

Over the past 24 rounds, Poston ranks in the top 25 in the field for Birdies or Better Gained, Scrambling and Hole Proximity from 75-125 yards.

Eric Cole (80-1)

Cole is another player I really like in a bird party. In 2024, Cole was fourth on Tour for Total Birdies. He used that to finish 14th here last year and followed it up with a 13th-place finish at the Sony Open on Oahu. Cole has two top-16 finishes and a sixth-place finish in his last four Tour starts. His numbers across the board this week are fantastic. Over the past 24 rounds, he ranks fifth in the field for SG: Approach, Scrambling and Hole Proximity from 100-125 yards. He is third in Hole Proximity from 200 yards plus, and is the no. 1 in SG: Par 5’s.

Let’s also point out this interesting connection… Chris Kirk is the defending champion at The Sentry. It was Cole who lost to Kirk in a playoff at the Honda Classic in 2023. It may be here that Cole earns his first PGA Tour victory. That would certainly make for a Happy New Year.

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