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Mike Randle
Staying in Hawaii for another week, the PGA Tour heads to Honolulu for the Sony Open at Waialae Country Club. The big names got a chance to shake off the rust last week at the Sentry and now the rest of the Tour gets a chance to get their season started.
Let’s jump right in to see what stands out about the course and then dive into the betting board.
Course Fit
Waialae is the longtime host of this event, and they’ll do the honors again this week. This Seth Raynor design is a par 70 that plays to just 7,044 yards on the card. That’s much shorter than last week’s Kapalua but there are actually fewer wedges hit at Waialae.
This week’s track is treelined and features a handful of doglegs that force golfers to lay back and turn this into a positional, second-shot course. So, for our course-fit hunt the first split stats we’ll focus on is less-than-driver performance and performance on tree-lined tracks.
Fron there we can note that Waialae is right on the coast so analyzing coastal course performance is another one to consider highly. The reason I like this is because coastal courses generally brings in wind performance but also factors in things like slower greens and such.
Next let’s look at the scoring environment and right away we see this is another extremely easy course. Because it’s a par 70, the raw strokes under par won’t look as extreme as last week at Kapalua. Still, over the years we’ve seen the field average a 22 percent birdie rate while swallowing bogeys on just 14 percent of the holes played. That definitely puts it into the easy course bucket.
For grass talk, we see wall-to-wall bermudagrass.
So now, let’s combine all those split stats and look for golfers that overperform on similar setups. Here are the names who show the biggest increase in performance when playing courses with similar splits relative to their baseline.
- Michael Kim
- Ryo Hisatsune
- Adam Svensson
- Ben Silverman
- Jacob Bridgeman
- Emiliano Grillo
- Mark Hubbard
- Cam Davis
- Eric Cole
- Taylor Moore
Cam Davis has always fascinated me in that he’s longer than average off the tee, but throughout the course of his career, a large percentage of his big finishes have come on shorter, fiddly courses.
Head over to the Split Stats page to see who the top performers are in these split stat categories.
Outright Odds
Here’s what the top of the board looks like on DraftKings Sportsbook:
Hideki just won on a course that historically gave him fits, and now he heads to a course where he’s a course horse. Could we see back-to-back wins for the Japanese star? It’s definitely possible, but there are a couple other names that catch my eye as well. Let’s talk about those now.
Sony Open Free Golf Bets
J.T. Poston Top-20 Finish (+200)
His putter was cold last week but it usually doesn’t stay quiet for too long. He lost strokes putting in back-to-back weeks just once last year. So right away we have a good bounceback spot.
What stands out to me, though, is his elite performance on courses with easy scoring. He ranks top 20 in the world over the last two years when I look at adjusted strokes gained on easy courses. Of the names ahead of him on that list only Luke Clanton is in the field this week.
Byeong Hun An to Win (28-1, one-fifth each-way for 10 places)
Benny An is similar to Cam Davis from the note above in the sense that he’s a masher off the tee but does his best work on second-shot tracks. Just look at his career top-10 DataGolf results, and you’ll see Sedgefield twice, Waialae, Muirfeld Village and Wentworth. These are not bomb-and-gouge venues.
I initially wanted to target the +350 top-10 price for An as it graded out as good value in my model. However, Bet365 also has an each-way offering that extends to 10 places and the top-10 portion of that pays +560.
I thought he was decent value in the outright market and great value in the top-10 market, so this extended each-way offering was a perfect match.
Luke Clanton to Win (40-1, one-fourth each-way for 5 places)
The youngster has some serious pop and grades out to be one of the next superstars on Tour, if he can maintain or improve his level of play from 2024. He’s still an amateur, so we won’t see him too often, barring a win, but I want to strike while the irons still hot.
Does this week’s course match up with his skillset? When you look at his top true strokes gained performance so far you see they came at TPC Deere Run, Sea Island, and Sedgefield. Those are exactly the type of comp tracks I’d want to see big finishes at since Waialae is also a positional course with easy scoring.
Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.
