4 picks for our favorite gambling expert this week

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

However, that was too soon. Did everyone enjoy the golf off-season – all three weeks of it?

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

It’s always a welcome sight as we move through the cold, winter season, enjoying those emerald-green roads, blue skies, and Pacific Ocean views featured this week in Northwest Maui. If the Masters is our way to usher in the spring season, Kapalua is the perfect starting point for another golf season.

The Plantation Course is a large, Coore/Crenshaw designed course, perched high in the hills overlooking the community of Kapalua and the Pacific Ocean. Wall-to-wall Bermudagrass, the unique par 73 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 if you don’t, The Sentry quickly becomes a birdie-fest. This week’s forecast calls for strong winds on Thursday but nothing more than an onshore breeze for the rest of the week.

The 2025 Sentry is a Signature Event with no cut 36 holes and the field is limited to 60 players.

I am lucky enough to have played the Plantation Course about a dozen times. The fairways are incredibly wide, the greens are huge, and there are many uneven lies on the fairways as the course has significant changes in slope and elevation. I feel that Driving Range is a useful skill set this week but is not critical to success, and Driving Accuracy is essentially irrelevant given the width of the roads. Strokes Gained Approach is as important as ever but Hole Proximity is even more important as one has to get the ball closer to the hole on these great putts. Most shots will come from 125 yards out and a few approaches will be scored from 200 yards out or more.

I also checked the Par 5 Scoring as the course has five such holes, one more than the standard setting. I looked at Strokes, 3-Putt Avoidance, Birdie or Better, and Strokes Gained: Putting (Bermudagrass).

It’s a star-studded list of crossover courses this week and if you look at the past winners in all of these courses, there is a huge amount of crossover success. I played 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 event. 2022 Open Championship – won by Cameron Smith, who also won here at Kapalua that same year.

I played the following four players to win outright this week and played each of them to finish in the top ten.

Hideki Matsuyama (22-1)

We successfully arrived in Matsuyama back in August on FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, another course that is wall-to-wall Bermudagrass. He is also a past winner of the Sony Open, which always plays the week after The Sentry on the island of Oahu, and although the two golf courses are not exactly the same, we see a lot of success between Sony and Kapalua. Matsuyama is also a Masters champion and won the Genesis Invitational at Riveria Country Club in February.

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

Byeong Hun An (35-1)

He has recently won on the DP World Tour, winning the Genesis tournament in late October. He competed here in Kapalua last year, finishing in fourth place. Back on the mainland, An took 16th place at Riviera and also finished 16th last season at The Masters. He has been out of the lead for a long time, ranking second in the Driving Distance category over the last 24 rounds. He is also 17th in the Scrambling category.

JT Poston (45-1)

Like An, Poston won again as recently as October, in Las Vegas at the Shriners Children’s Open at TPC Summerlin. Last year, here at The Sentry, Poston finished one shot behind An, tied for fifth. Notably, he followed that up with a sixth-place finish at the Sony Open the following week – where An, by the way, finished second. Both players had good runs in the islands last year. We expect that to continue in 2025.

Over the last 24 rounds, Poston ranks in the top 25 in the field in birdies or better, scrambling, and Hole Proximity from 75-125 yards out.

Eric Cole (80-1)

Cole is one of my favorite birdie-fest players. 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 appearances on Tour. His numbers throughout this week are very good. Over the past 24 rounds, he ranks fifth in the field in SG: Approach, Scrambling, and Hole Proximity from 100-125 yards. He is third in Hole Proximity from 200-plus yards, and is No. 1 in SG: Par 5’s.

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 2023 Honda Classic. Perhaps it was here that Cole earned his first PGA Tour victory. That will certainly make for a happy new year.