PGA Outrights and Best Bets for the 2025 Houston Open

From Sunshine to the Lone Star, the PGA Tour will head to Memorial Park this week for the Texas Children’s Houston Open. 

Covering the weather first, this one looks ugly before the weekend with storms in the forecast on Thursday and Friday. Hopefully the forecast improves before the first tee ball flies, but as of now I’d be surprised if they finalize the first two rounds before Saturday afternoon. 

Now let’s hop in and talk about the course and see what outright bets pop off the page. 

Course Fit

Memorial Park will host this event for the fifth year in a row. From looking at the past results and scorecard we can see right away this should suit a much different golfer than we’ve seen over the last month in Florida. 

A par 70, this public course stretches to nearly 7,500 yards from the tips. Similar to Copperhead last week, this course also has five par 3s which means there are three par 5s which is not the norm for a par-70 layout. 

In fact, it’s rather rare for a par-70 track to be considered a driver-heavy bomber layout but that’s what we see here in Houston. With trees removed due to renovation and Mother Nature, this course is more exposed off the tee and allows plenty of driver usage. 

Even with a lot of drivers hit, it’s still lengthy on approach. Looking at approach buckets, roughly 26% of shots will come from outside of 200 yards, 3 percentage points higher than the Tour average. 

With distance being a valuable skill off the tee and on approach it’s no surprise to see the scoring is tough here. The field averages just a 17% birdie rate while swallowing bogey on 19% of the holes. Both metrics are worse than the Tour average. 

For turf we have overseed again but past performance on bentgrass greens outperforms past performance on overseed here. When there is any conflict in correlation like that, I just avoid grass splits for the week. 

That leaves us with the split stats of driver-heavy courses, long courses and hard courses. 

For our split stat search, let’s look at top-heavy finish history on those split stats above and here are the names that outperform their baseline rates. 

• Isaiah Salinda
• Harris English
• Tony Finau
• Andrew Novak
• Thomas Detry
• Jake Knapp
• Sam Stevens
• Michael Kim
• Patrick Rodgers
• Sungjae Im

There is plenty of power and long-iron prowess on the list. 

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:

What a funny-looking betting board. Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are stealing all of the win equity and that pushes everyone else down into longshot territory. The books are implying that one of the Big Two wins this more than a third of the time while our PGA Betting Model has that number at 29%. It’s easy to see why they would shade the odds of those favorites in their favor, that makes it more appealing for us to hunt for some longer shots down the board. 

Houston Open Free Golf Bets

Keith Mitchell Top-20 Finish (+275)

When it comes to attacking a driver-heavy beefy layout, I want to target ball-strikers early and often. Keith is the definition of ball-striker. He’s gained off the tee in six of his last seven starts while gaining on approach in five of his last six. He doesn’t have a single top 20 over that stretch but the striking is too solid for that to stay that way for long.

Mav McNealy to Win (55-1, one-fourth each-way for 5 places)

I’ve talked about this frequently over the last few months, but McNealy’s rise in the striking stat categories can vault him into the top tier of golfers, just below the Rorys and Scotties of the world. Of course, he’s coming off a few stinkers in Florida, but water-heavy layouts have a way of skewing that stats quickly. Over the last six months he’s still top 10 in this field when it comes to strokes gained ball-striking (off the tee plus approach). After a poor showing in Florida, we are getting some good value again for this year’s potential breakout star. 

Taylor Pendrith Top-20 Finish (+250)

He’s inside of the top 10th percentile on Tour when it comes to driving distance and long-iron performance. That’s the ideal package for Memorial Park. I have his baseline top-20 expectation at 29%, which is without any course fit included. Add in a great fit from tee-to-green and we are looking at some good value. 

Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays.