Our pick of 4 gambling expert favorites this week

Welcome to our weekly PGA Tour gambling tips column, featuring picks from GOLF.com expert forecaster Brady Kannon. Kannon is an experienced golf bettor and commentator and a frequent contributor to SportsGrid, a syndicated news network dedicated to sports and sports betting. You can follow on Twitter @LasVegasGolferyou can read below about his choices for “The Sentinel,” which opens Thursday in Maui. In addition to Kannon’s recommended tournaments, you can also see data from Chirp Golf, a mobile app that offers free tournaments and daily fantasy golf tournaments where you can win cash and prizes during every round and tournament.

Well, that was quick. Is everyone enjoying the golf offseason – only three short weeks away?

I haven’t even spent my Hero World Challenge winnings on Scotty Scheffler, but here we are again, opening the PGA with the Sentinel at the Plantation Course in Kapalua, Maui Tour 2025 season.

Still, it’s always a welcome sight as we move through the cold winter months, and northwest Maui has been a treat to our eyes this week with emerald green fairways, clear blue skies, and views of the Pacific Ocean. If the Masters is how we welcome the spring season, then Kapalua is certainly a gorgeous marker for the start of another golf season.

Plantation Course is a large Kuhl/Crenshaw-designed estate perched high on a hillside overlooking the resort community of Kapalua and the Pacific Ocean. A long stretch of bermudagrass, this is a unique par-73 course and one of the longer courses these players play year-round, measuring nearly 7,600 yards. Wind is the primary defense, and we’ve seen it wreak havoc on these players in the past, but when the wind doesn’t blow, the Sentinels can quickly turn into a birdie fest. The weather forecast this week calls for strong winds on Thursday, but nothing more than a standard seaside breeze the rest of the week.

The 2025 Sentinel Tournament is a signature event with no 36-hole elimination tournament and limited to 60 players.

I’ve been lucky enough to have played the Plantation Course about six times. The fairways are very wide, the greens are large, and there are a lot of uneven holes on the fairways because of the course’s dramatic slope and elevation changes. I feel like driving distance is a useful skill this week, but it’s not critical to success and given the width of the fairways, driving accuracy is basically irrelevant. Getting strokes close to the ball is as important as ever, but hole proximity is also a high priority because on these large putting surfaces, getting the ball close to the hole is a must. A lot of close shots will come from distances of 125 yards and under, and many close shots will come from distances of 200 yards or more.

I also looked at the par 5 scores because the course has five of these holes, one more than the typical setup. I looked at scrambles, three-putt avoidance, birdie or better, and strokes gained: Putts (Bermuda grass).

This week’s relevant courses are star-studded, and if you look at the past winners of all these courses you’ll see there’s plenty of crossover success. I have used Augusta National (Masters), Riviera Country Club (Genesis Invitational), Monterey Peninsula Country Club (AT&T Pebble Beach), Torrey Pines North (Farmers Insurance Open) and most recently the Host The 2022 Open Champion at the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland—Cameron Smith won the championship. He also won the championship at Kapalua in the same year.

I competed against the following four players this week, achieving outright wins, and also competed against each of them, achieving a top-10 finish.

Hideki Matsuyama(22-1)

In August, we made it to Pine Mountain at the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, another course filled with Bermuda grass. He is also a past winner of the Sony Open, always playing the week after Sentinel Course on Oahu, and while the two golf courses are certainly different from each other, we do see a lot of success between the Sony and Kapalua golf courses cross. Matsuyama is also a former Masters champion and won the Genesis Invitational at Rivera Country Club in February.

What I also particularly like about Matsuyama is his ability to start from 100 yards. . Matsuyama ranked 58th out of 59 players here last year, but he has also finished in the top four twice in his career and finished runner-up once.

An Byung-hun (35-1)

An recently won on the DP World Tour and won the Genesis Championship at the end of October. He competed at Kapalua last year and finished fourth. After returning to the mainland, An finished 16th at Riviera and also finished 16th at the Masters last season. He has great distance off the tee, ranking second in the field in driving distance over his past 24 rounds. He also placed 17th in the scramble.

JT Boston(45-1)

Like Ann, Poston recently won the Shriners Children’s Open at TPC Summerlin in Las Vegas in October. Last year, Boston finished tied for fifth at Sentinel, one shot behind An. Remarkably, he finished sixth at the Sony Open the following week – where Ahn, by the way, finished runner-up. Both players had strong performances on the island last year. We expect this to continue in 2025.

Over the past 24 rounds, Poston ranks in the top 25 in the field in birdie or better shots, contested shots and proximity to the hole from 75-125 yards.

Eric Cole(80-1)

Cole is another player I really liked on Birdie Day. In 2024, Cole finished fourth in total birdies on tour. He used that finish to finish 14th here last year and then finished 13th at the Sony Open in Oahu. Cole has two top-16 finishes and a sixth-place finish in his last four Tour starts. All of his numbers this week have been outstanding. Over the past 24 rounds, he ranks fifth in SG: Approach, Crawl and Hole Approach 100-125 yards. He ranks third in hole approach over 200 yards and first in SG: Par 5s.

Let’s also note this interesting connection… Chris Kirk is the defending champion of the Sentinels. Cole lost to Kirk in a playoff at the 2023 Honda Classic. This will definitely bring a happy new year.