The Sentry betting guide: 4 picks our gambling expert loves this week

Welcome to our weekly 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. You can follow on Twitter at @LasVegasGolfer, and you can read his picks below for The Sentry, which gets underway Thursday in Maui. Along with Kannon’s recommended plays, you’ll also see data from Chirp Golf, a mobile app that features both Free-To-Play and Daily Fantasy golf contests where you can win cash and prizes with each round and tournament.

Well, that was fast. Did everyone enjoy the golf off-season — all barely three weeks of it?

I haven’t even finished spending my winnings on Scottie Scheffler at the Hero World Challenge, and yet here we are again, kicking off the 2025 season on the PGA Tour with The Sentry at the Plantation Course in Kapalua, Maui.

It is always such a welcome sight though as we make our way through a cold, winter season, feasting our eyes on those emerald-green fairways, clear-blue skies, and Pacific Ocean views featured this week in Northwest Maui. If the Masters is our way of ushering in the spring season, Kapalua is certainly a gorgeous indicator of another golf season beginning.

The Plantation Course is a massive, Coore/Crenshaw designed property, perched high atop the hillsides that overlook the resort community of Kapalua and the Pacific Ocean. It’s wall-to-wall Bermudagrass, a unique par 73 and is one of the longer courses these players play all year at nearly 7,600 yards. The wind is the primary defense and we’ve seen it wreak havoc on these players in the past but when it does not blow, The Sentry quickly becomes a birdie-fest. The forecast this week is calling for high winds on Thursday but nothing much more than a standard seaside breeze the rest of the week.

The 2025 Sentry is a Signature Event with no 36-hole cut and the field is limited to just 60 players.

I am lucky enough to have played the Plantation Course roughly half a dozen times. The fairways are incredibly wide, the greens are huge, and there are plenty of uneven lies in the fairways as the course features a great deal of slope and elevation change. I feel that Driving Distance is a helpful skill set this week but it is not crucial to success, and Driving Accuracy is basically irrelevant given the width of the fairways. Strokes Gained Approach is important as it always is but Hole Proximity is a high priority too as one must get the ball close to the hole on these big putting surfaces. A great deal of approach shots will come from 125 yards out and less and a number of approaches will be struck from 200 yards out or more.

I also looked at Par 5 Scoring as the course has five such holes, one more than a typical setup. I looked at Scrambling, 3-Putt Avoidance, Birdies or Better Gained, and Strokes Gained: Putting (Bermudagrass).

It is a star-studded lineup of correlated courses this week and if you look at the past winners on all of these courses, there is a tremendous amount of crossover success. I used Augusta National (Masters), Riviera Country Club (Genesis Invitational), Monterey Peninsula Country Club (AT&T Pebble Beach), Torrey Pines North Course (Farmers Insurance Open), and the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, which recently hosted the 2022 Open Championship — won by Cameron Smith, who also won here at Kapalua that same year.

I played the following four players for an outright win this week and also played each of them for a top-10 finish.

Hideki Matsuyama (22-1)

We landed successfully on Matsuyama back in August at the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, another course that is wall-to-wall Bermudagrass. He’s also a past winner at the Sony Open, always played the week after The Sentry on the island of Oahu, and while the two golf courses are really nothing like each another, we do see a lot of crossover success between the Sony and Kapalua. Matsuyama is also a former Masters champion and won the Genesis Invitational at Riveria Country Club back in February. 

What I also especially like about Matsuyama here is his ability from 100 yards on in. Over the last 24 rounds, he ranks second in this field for Scrambling and ranks top-4 in Hole Proximity from 75-125 yards out. Matsuyama finished 58th out of 59 players here last year, but he has also finished in the top 4 twice and runner-up once here in his career.

Byeong Hun An (35-1)

An was a winner recently on the DP World Tour, winning the Genesis Championship in late October. He contended here at Kapalua last year, finishing fourth. Returning to the mainland, An took 16th at Riviera and also finished 16th last season at The Masters. He is long off the tee, ranking second in this field for Driving Distance over the last 24 rounds. He is also 17th in the field for Scrambling.

J.T. Poston (45-1)

Like An, Poston also won recently in October, in Las Vegas at the Shriners Children’s Open at TPC Summerlin. Last year, here at The Sentry, Poston finished one shot back of An, in a tie for fifth place. It’s worth noting that he followed that up with a sixth place finish at the Sony Open the following week — where An, by the way, finished runner-up. Both of these players had great runs on the islands last year. We’re banking on that continuing in 2025.

Over the last 24 rounds, Poston ranks in the top 25 in this field for Birdies or Better Gained, Scrambling, and Hole Proximity from 75-125 yards out.

Eric Cole (80-1)

Cole is another player I really like at a birdie-fest. In 2024, Cole was fourth on Tour for Total Birdies. He used that to finish 14th here last year and followed that up with a 13th-place finish at the Sony Open on Oahu. Cole has two top-16 finishes and a sixth-place finish in his last four starts on Tour. His numbers across the board this week are fantastic. Over the last 24 rounds, he ranks fifth in this field for SG: Approach, Scrambling, and Hole Proximity from 100-125 yards. He is third in Hole Proximity from 200 yards-plus, and is No. 1 in SG: Par 5’s.

Let’s also note this interesting connection… Chris Kirk is the defending champion at The Sentry. It was Cole who lost to Kirk in a playoff at the Honda Classic in 2023. Maybe it is here where Cole earns his first-ever PGA Tour victory. That would certainly make for a Happy New Year.