Welcome to our PGA Tour gambling-tips column, featuring picks from GOLF.com’s expert prognosticator Brady Kannon. A seasoned golf bettor and commentator, Kannon is a regular guest on SportsGrid, a syndicated audio network devoted to sports and sport betting. You can follow on Twitter at @LasVegasGolfer, and you can read his early picks below for the Masters, which gets underway on April 10th in Augusta, Ga.
With the odds to win the 2025 Masters having been posted shortly after the conclusion of the 2024 Masters, these numbers have been staring sports bettors in the face for nearly a year.
I always find myself glancing from time to time, every year, to see if anything juicy stands out. It wasn’t until this past January, however, that I did take action for the first time for this particular Masters tournament.
It was our first column of the new season, kicking off 2025 with The Sentry at Kapalua’s Plantation Course in Maui, that I landed correctly on Hideki Matsuyama at 22-1. Over that weekend, the man chasing him was Collin Morikawa. Matsuyama of course, already has a green jacket and I was well aware of Morikawa’s success at Augusta National (5-10-3 in his last three trips). Knowing that whomever won the Sentry would see their Masters odds dip, I played Matsuyama to win the Masters at 25-1 and Morikawa at 22-1 on the Saturday night prior to the final round in Maui.
I did this same exact thing in 2022 with Cam Smith. He ended up winning in Hawaii and found himself in the final pairing on Sunday at Augusta with Scottie Scheffler, only to end up finishing tied for fifth.
The connection between success at the Plantation Course in Maui and success at the Masters is a very strong one. The PGA Tour has played the event in Maui to kick off the season 27 times. Ten of those 27 tournaments have been won by a Masters champion (37 percent).
The crossover success between Augusta National and Riviera Country Club is also incredibly strong. Matsuyama won the Genesis Invitational in 2024. Morikawa’s last three trips have resulted in 19th, sixth, and runner-up finishes.
Since 1990, Riviera Country Club has hosted the L.A. Open (Genesis Invitational) 35 times. During that stretch, the tournament been won 16 times by a Masters champion (46 percent).
The final piece of this bizarre love triangle is the Old Course at St. Andrews. The connection here to the Masters is astonishingly strong as well — and this one may make the most sense, because Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie drew a lot of influence from St. Andrews when designing Augusta National.
Since 1970, the Open Championship has been held 10 times at St. Andrews. Six of those 10 have been won by a Masters champion and in 2022 it was won by the aforementioned Cam Smith. In 2015, Louis Oosthuizen won the Open at St. Andrews after losing in a playoff to Bubba Watson at the Masters in 2012. That’s 60 percent, plus two more guys that got about as close as one can get to slipping on a green jacket.
In 2015, 2007 Masters champion, Zach Johnson won the Open at St. Andrews. Let’s take a look at the top 10 on that year’s leaderboard: Johnson, Oosthuizen, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Sergio Garcia, Justin Rose, Danny Willett, Adam Scott, and Brooks Koepka. What you have assembled there is five Masters victories, 19 top-10 finishes (including 10 Masters runner-up finishes), three Kapalua champions, and two wins at Riviera.
How about that leaderboard from 2022? Smith, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, Viktor Hovland, Cameron Young, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Cantlay, Spieth, and Dustin Johnson. That’s two Masters winners, 15 top-10 finishes (including two Masters runner-up finishes), three wins at Kapalua, and one win at Riviera.
The connection for Morikawa and Matsuyama is not as sticky at St. Andrews as it is at Kapalua and Riviera. Morikawa missed the cut at the Open Championship in 2022 after having won at Royal St. George’s the year prior. Matsuyama has finished 18th and 68th in two Opens at the Old Course.
Fast-forward to mid-February and I was ready to make my third futures bet “To Win The Masters.” This time I landed on the Englishman, Tommy Fleetwood at 50-1. He doesn’t have quite the correlated course history of Matsuyama and Morikawa but his resume is building in the right direction. Fleetwood was fourth at St. Andrew’s in 2022, he’s finished 20th and 10th at Riviera, and his Masters record continues to get progressively better. He’s played in the tournament eight times. He missed the cut in his debut back in 2017. He is yet to miss a cut since and has top-20 finishes of 17-19-and-14 along the way. Last year was his very best effort at Augusta when he finished third. He’s off to an excellent start this season with finishes of 22-5-11-14-16.
It was also around this time that I began to handicap the 2025 LIV golf events. I started in Australia and then landed correctly on Sergio Garcia three weeks later in Hong Kong. I took notice of Brooks Koepka finishing runner-up in Singapore and I made another run to the window, backing the five-time major champion and two-time Masters runner-up, to this time around, get the win at 35-1. Koepka has finished as high as third at Kapalua and was 10th at St. Andrew’s in 2015. In four attempts, he never had a great deal of success at Riviera, twice missing the cut. Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus never won at Riviera either.
The final play that I currently have in-pocket is a long shot. A triple-digit price at 100-1, and that might not be high enough. I’ve seen as high as 150-1, and that is on Cameron Young. He’s missed the cut in four of his last five starts this season. That is not a good look for the seven-time runner-up to somehow finally get his first PGA Tour victory. But he has been exceptional at our correlated courses. Like Fleetwood, Young missed the cut at the Masters in his debut in 2022. He has since finished seventh and ninth. He finished runner-up to Cam Smith at St. Andrews in 2022, he was eighth back in January at The Sentry, and at Riviera, Young has finished 20th, 16th, and runner-up.
Five plays in total so far as we sit two weeks away from the first tee ball being struck at what will be the 89th edition of the Masters Tournament. I feel very good about four of the five. The play on Young is a shot in the dark. I will probably add one or two more plays before the start — we’ll see.
When putting your Masters futures plays together, keep in mind that this tournament tends to be won by the favorites and the contenders and not the longshots. We haven’t had anyone win at triple-digit odds since Charl Schwartzel in 2011.
