NHL Best Bets for Tuesday (11/19)
Kenneth Le
The PGA Tour heads to Sea Island this week for the RSM Classic. It’s the final event of the FedEx Fall portion of the schedule. The last chance for journeymen to cement their status for the 2025 campaign.
It also marks the return of an injured star, Ludvig Aberg. He is the defending champ at Sea Islands, but we haven’t seen him in action since August as he underwent knee surgery after the playoffs.
Let’s shift our attention to the course now to see what golfers can do what Aberg did last year.
Course Fit
Sea Island Golf Club is the host venue this week. There is a full field of 156 golfers lined up this week which means we’ll see two courses used before the 36-hole cut is made.
Golfers will get one round at the Plantation Course, and the other three will be at the Seaside Course. Let’s focus on that host course.
Looking at the scorecard we see a par 70 that plays to just 7,005 yards. Even the par-72 Plantation Course is under 7,100 yards so both tracks are extremely short by Tour standards.
Add in 45-yard landing areas and driving becomes somewhat muted relative to a normal week out on Tour. This is a real second-shot and short game test.
Looking at past results we see the field average over 70% of fairways hit and also land greens in regulation at more than 70%. That means that even the golfers who usually struggle to keep up from tee-to-green are going to find themselves looking at plenty of birdie putts when taking on Sea Island.
Situated right along the Atlantic Ocean shoreline, we can never rule out Mother Nature bringing in gusts of wind from time to time. Overall, the wind forecast looks pretty calm, but gusts will be present throughout.
The turf is primarily bermudagrass, but the courses get a splash of overseed in early October and there is also paspalum on the fairways over at the Plantation Course. That makes it somewhat murky as to which grass splits to use so I shift my focus to other splits on a week like this.
Looking at the last two years of results, here are the names who show the biggest increase in performance when playing courses with similar splits (short courses, easy courses with small penalty for missing fairways, and coastal courses), relative to their baseline.
- Brandon Wu
- Luke List
- Jake Knapp
- Alex Smalley
- Stewart Cink
- Garrick Higgo
- Taylor Moore
- Brandon Wu
- Brendon Todd
- Ryo Hisatsune
- Ben Kohles
There is a big shift in golfers playing this week, but we see some overlap with last week’s list, which makes sense given the courses share a lot of the same qualities.
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:
Aberg is soaking up all of the win equity at the top of the board, but does he deserve that price when factoring in his injury status and lack of competitive reps in the fall? I would lean to no.
RSM Classic Free Golf Bets
Ben Kohles Top 20 Finish (+500)
The straight shooter arrives with a cold putter, but he ranked just outside of the top 20 in putting last year at Sea Island so that could give him some confidence as he tries to repeat that week (finished T5).
Kohles ranks fourth in the entire field in T20 rate on courses with a small penalty for missing off the tee. This is the type of course where Kohles should miss just one or two fairways per round, and it’s much easier to course when you’re attacking from the short grass all week.
Patton Kizzire Top 10 Finish (+900)
His two PGA Tour wins have come at Waialae and Mayakoba. Both short courses that put an emphasis on wedges and short game. His driver is the worst part of his game, so Sea Island also does a nice job of theoretically masking some of that weakness since the landing areas are so wide.
Kizzire ranks fourth in the entire field in event-to-event deviation over the last year. He’s a roller coaster, but his good weeks are quite good and at +900 I like taking a nibble on the home-game and short course narratives.
Eric Cole to Win (35-1, one-fourth each-way for 5 places)
Cole shows a lot of upside when looking at courses with similar splits. His market odds sit around 11% when it comes to top-five expectations yet he eclipses the 20% mark in three of the top four splits I’m looking at this week.
He finished T3 here last year and arrives with a T6 finish in his most recent start. Driving is the only real weakness in his game and Sea Island’s second-shot nature helps mask some of that weakness.
Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.
