4 tips our gambling expert loves this week

Welcome to our weekly PGA Tour gambling tips column, featuring tips from GOLF.com’s expert forecaster Brady Kannon. An experienced golf bettor and commentator, Kannon is a regular guest on SportsGrid, a syndicated audio network dedicated to sports and sports betting. You can follow on Twitter at @LasVegasGolferand below you can read his tips for The Sentry, which opens Thursday in Maui. In addition to Kannon’s recommended plays, you’ll also see data from Chirp Golf, a mobile app that offers both free-to-play and daily fantasy golf competitions where you can win cash and prizes at every round and tournament.

Well, that happened quickly. Did everyone enjoy the golf off-season – the almost three weeks of it?

I haven’t even spent my winnings on Scottie Scheffler at the Hero World Challenge, and yet here we are again, starting the 2025 PGA Tour season with The Sentry at the Plantation Course in Kapalua, Maui.

However, it is always a welcome sight as we move through the cold winter season and feast our eyes on the emerald green fairways, clear blue skies and Pacific Ocean views on display this week in northwest Maui. If the Masters is our way of kicking off the spring season, Kapalua is certainly a great indicator of the start of another golf season.

The Plantation Course is a massive Coore/Crenshaw-designed property set high on the hills overlooking the resort community of Kapalua and the Pacific Ocean. It’s wall-to-wall Bermudagrass, a unique par 73 and one of the longer courses these players play all year, at nearly 7,600 yards. The wind is the primary defense and we’ve seen it wreak havoc on these players in the past, but when it doesn’t blow, The Sentry quickly becomes a birdfest. The forecast for this week calls for strong winds on Thursday, but just normal sea breezes for the rest of the week.

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

I’ve been fortunate enough to have played the Plantation Course about half a dozen times. The fairways are incredibly wide, the greens are huge and there are many uneven areas on the fairways as the course has a lot of slope and elevation changes. In my opinion, driving distance is a useful skill this week, but it is not critical to success, and driving accuracy is fundamentally irrelevant given the width of the fairways. The Strokes Gained Approach is important as always, but proximity to the hole is also a high priority as you have to get the ball close to the hole on these large putting surfaces. Many approach shots are made from 125 yards or less, and a number of approach shots are made from 200 yards or more.

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

It’s a star-studded lineup of correlated courses this week, and when you look at the previous winners of all of these courses, there’s tremendous 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 recent host Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland the 2022 Open Championship – won by Cameron Smith, who also won here in Kapalua the same year.

This week I played against the following four players for an overall win and also against each of them for a top 10 finish.

Hideki Matsuyama (22-1)

In August, we successfully landed on Matsuyama at the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, another course that features wall-to-wall Bermudagrass. He is also a previous winner of the Sony Open, which is always played the week after The Sentry on the island of Oahu, and while the two courses really aren’t similar, we see a lot of crossover success between Sony and Kapalua. Matsuyama is also a former Masters champion and won the Genesis Invitational at Riveria Country Club back in February.

What I also particularly like about Matsuyama here is his ability from 100 yards away. Over the last 24 rounds, he ranked second in the field in scrambling and was tied for first in hole proximity from 75-125 yards, 4th. Matsuyama ranked 58th out of 59 players here last year, but he finished in his career best also twice in the top 4 and came second here once.

Byeong Hun An (35-1)

An was a recent DP World Tour winner, winning the Genesis Championship in late October. He competed here in Kapalua last year and came fourth. On his return to the mainland, An finished 16th at Riviera and also finished 16th at the Masters last season. He’s well off the tee and has ranked second in this field in driving distance over the last 24 rounds. He also ranks 17th in the field in scrambling.

JT Poston (45-1)

Like An, Poston recently won the Shriners Children’s Open at TPC Summerlin in Las Vegas in October. Last year, here at The Sentry, Poston finished one stroke behind An to secure fifth place. It’s worth noting that the following week he placed sixth at the Sony Open – where An incidentally finished second. Both players had great runs in the Isles last year. We assume that this will remain the case in 2025.

Over the last 24 rounds, Poston has ranked 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 birdie fest. In 2024, Cole finished fourth on tour for total birdies. He used that to finish 14th here last year and then finished 13th at the Sony Open on Oahu. Cole has two top-16 finishes and a sixth-place finish in his last four starts on Tour. His numbers this week are consistently fantastic. Over the last 24 rounds, he ranked fifth in this area for SG: Approach, Scrambling and Hole Proximity from 100-125 yards. He is third in hole proximity from over 200 yards and No. 1 in SG: Par 5s.

Let’s also note this interesting connection… Chris Kirk is the defending champion of The Sentry. It was Cole who lost to Kirk in a playoff at the Honda Classic in 2023. Maybe Cole will get his first ever PGA Tour victory here. That would certainly lead to a happy new year.

Who Chirp Golf players are picking this week

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