First TD Bets — Wild Card Monday Slate
Alex Christenson
The PGA Tour returns this week with the lid-lifting Sentry, hosted by Kapalua Resort on Maui.
Historically, this was an event reserved exclusively for only PGA Tour winners from the previous calendar year. However, they made a great change in recent years to now invite a wider group of players, still based on last year’s performance. The result is a field of 60 golfers this week, kicking off the 2025 PGA Tour season.
Let’s jump right in to see what stands out about the course and then dive into the betting board.
Course Fit
The Plantation Course at Kapalua is the star of the show this week. It’s a unique Coore and Crenshaw design that is best known for its extreme elevation changes. That includes a lot of humps and bumps along the routing, adding a touch of difficulty to many of the approach shots.
Let’s put an emphasis on “touch of difficulty,” because this is still one of the easiest scoring environments players see all season. It starts with the course being a Par 73 layout. There are just three Par 3s, which immediately raises the scoring bar because those are typically the toughest holes to birdie on a standard track.
From there, you see some of the widest fairways on Tour and also the largest green complexes on Tour. With fewer Par 3s, more approach shots from the fairway and less scrambling around the greens, the end result is birdies – and lots of them. The last four winners of the event have eclipsed the 25-under mark for the week.
The year prior to that, we saw Justin Thomas win at just 14-under, so weather can certainly spruce things up, but it has to be the perfect storm of wind speed and wind direction to really impact scoring here. In 2020, we saw rain and wind gusts over 30 mph for three of the four days. Being situated right on the coast, they often play in windy conditions here, so it takes that extreme level of wind to really impact scoring at Kapalua.
So, which golfers fit the course profile of success at Kapalua? Let’s dig into the split stats to find out which golfers like exposed off the tee, coastal tracks with bermudagrass greens and easy scoring conditions.
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 relative to their baseline.
- Sepp Straka
- Max Homa
- J.T. Poston
- Eric Cole
- Brian Harman
- Chris Kirk
- Matt Fitzpatrick
- Jason Day
- Akshay Bhatia
- Robert Macintyre
Homa was completely lost off the tee in 2024 but showed glimmers of hope as the season was winding down. It will be interesting to see if he’s found his driver again ahead of 2025, but that is a wait-and-see for me right now.
Overall, this list is loaded with crafty, creative short-game standouts. That’s exactly who we should be targeting at Kapalua – just look at the past winners list that includes Cam Smith, Spieth, Patrick Reed, English, ZJ and Stricker types.
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:
It’s a small field this week, so I was a little surprised to find just one name in single-digits. I think it’s very possible we see JT and Morikaw both drift into single-digits before the first tee ball flies.
The Sentry Free Golf Bets
J.T. Poston Top-20 Finish (+125)
As a Sea Island Mafia member, it would make sense for him to shine on coastal courses. That is exactly what we see with Poston, who has the 10th-most adjusted strokes gained on coastal courses over the last two years. That is global, not just in this field.
Then we dig into his stat profile and see that he’s elite from inside of 100 yards and Kapalua overindexes on approach shots from that short range. We also see that his putting improves as the length gets longer, another positive sign for a course with the largest greens on Tour.
Eric Cole Top-20 Finish (+185)
Even though I’ve been vocal about Cole being overrated for best ball (as a top-5 pick), I can’t help but like the way he sets up for this opening event.
Cole had a sophomore slump in 2024 but ended strong with top 20s in seven of his last 12 starts. Prior to that he went 12 straight starts without a top-30 finish (the aforementioned slump).
When I look at his split-stat performance on similar courses, I see him popping with the eighth-best top-20 rate on similar courses over the last two years.
Justin Thomas to Win (11-1, one-fourth each-way for 5 places)
He’s a 12-time Tour winner but hasn’t won since 2022. Two of his wins came at this week’s course (2017, 2020).
Thomas is the leader on Tour in total adjusted strokes gained on easy courses in the last two years. Combine that with a plus-6 course monster score and his pedigree for winning, and I like him to start the season strong in Hawaii.
Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.
