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, and is a golf betting analyst for CBS Sportsline. You can follow him on X at @LasVegasGolfer, and you can read his early picks below for the PGA Championship, which gets underway on May 14 in Newtown Square, Penn.
“I intended to make this course my masterpiece, but not until today did I realize I built it better than I knew.”
Legendary golf course designer, Donald Ross, said that about Aronimink in 1948, the site of this year’s 108th PGA Championship, 20 years after opening the golf course. Legendary golf historian and master of design restoration, Gil Hanse, was brought to Newtown Square, Penn., along with his partner, Jim Wagner, in 2016 to work their magic and transform Aronimink back into major championship caliber as Ross originally intended.
More than 150 players, including 20 PGA club professionals, will make their way to the Philadelphia area next week for the second major championship of 2026. What a better place to hold one of golf’s crown jewel events than in the Birthplace of America in the year of the nation’s 250th birthday? Hot dogs, apple pie, and likely some fireworks if we can correctly land on the champion and this year’s recipient of the Wanamaker Trophy.
Stretching to nearly 7,400 yards, Aronimink will play to a par 70 for this year’s championship. The fairways have been made a bit wider by Hanse, who also did some tree removal, and added 100 sand bunkers to what is now a total of 174 that pepper this layout. The fairways feature quite a bit of slope, making for uneven lies when negotiating primarily long-iron approach shots into classic Ross-style greens, full of humps and bumps and shaved run-off areas.
The modern-day PGA Championship has been a bomber’s paradise. Brooks Koepka has won three in the last 10 years. Bryson DeChambeau has been runner-up in each of the last two. Driver-heavy courses like Quail Hollow, Valhalla, and Oak Hill have been the norm for this test in recent years. I believe however, that Aronimink may actually favor accuracy over distance off the tee. Total Driving (distance plus accuracy) is certainly a skill set that makes sense as I believe finding the proper positioning in the fairways trumps simply raw length. Long iron play from uneven lies, hitting greens not only in regulation, but also in the best particular areas of the greens, and incredible short-game skills, all figure into my initial profile on how to best solve Aronimink.
We saw this golf course a couple of times prior to the restoration when it hosted the AT&T National. The last time we saw it was after the remodel at the 2018 BMW Championship when Keegan Bradley beat Justin Rose in a playoff. As far as courses that figure to have some crossover characteristics, look no further than to other Ross designs we see regularly. Pinehurst No. 2 hosted the U.S. Open in 2014 and in 2024. Sedgefield Country Club is the annual host of the Wyndham Championship and Detroit Golf Club has been hosting the Rocket Mortgage Classic now for seven seasons. Oak Hill hosted the PGA Championship in 2013 and in 2023, another Ross design, and then of course, East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta where for a couple of decades now, they have played the Tour Championship.
