2024 American Express Picks: Best Bets for Sunday

As volatile as this week has been when diving into the split-course rotation, it will be a profitable showing for us in La Quinta.

Wagers of Keith Mitchell inside the top-20 market at +350 and Si Woo Kim at +5000 for his pre-tournament outright do feel like long-shot wagers that will need everything to go right to make this an extremely robust event. Nonetheless, it is hard to do too much complaining over a little spilled milk when we enter Sunday 4-0 in the head-to-head market.

As I always say, those wagers are where most of your exposure should be since it is a much lower-hold area of the industry that can deliver sustainable bankroll growth. Hitting an outright is lucrative when it happens, but I will continue to take my 3%+ edge from all the wagers we talk about here and try to turn that into a maturing fund. It doesn't mean every matchup play is going to win — far from that. However, grabbing that projected edge enough times eventually leads to results and a systematic bankroll increase when you are willing to stay the course.

Let's see if we can find any soft spots in the market for Sunday.

If you haven't already, you can find me on Twitter (@TeeOffSports). There, I provide a link to my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user input to create custom golf rankings. That sheet is released every Monday, so be sure to check it out and construct your own numbers from my database of information.

2024 American Express

Fade Michael Kim, Play Ben Griffin

When I built my model pre-tournament, I put a decent percentage of my weight into the PGA West Stadium Course. I thought it was essential to take a stand somewhere since we were dealing with two venues that didn't have 'Stat Tracker' present. Maybe that presented too simplistic of a return in some areas, although I liked going that route because we could quickly alter the ease when players took on La Quinta or the Nicklaus Tournament course for head-to-head matchups.

That is something I thought we did an excellent job of this week. Not only did we go an undefeated 3-0 for the in-tournament bets heading into Sunday, we also grabbed one of those wins on each of the different tracks.

Obviously, all of that is great. I am happy to see the minor deviations worked. However, the crux of my model always stemmed from how things should be on the PGA West Stadium Course — something my math thought gave Griffin his most significant edge over Kim.

We saw that play out Saturday when Griffin closed the gap by shooting an eight-under 64 versus Kim's two-under 70 to match Kim on the leaderboard through three rounds of golf. It was the one round this week in which Kim didn't exceed the scoring average of all golfers playing the same course as him. It also presented the only round that saw Griffin outscore his fellow American on the leaderboard.

I don't want to get too carried away with that one answer since a lot of Kim's struggles did occur on the par-four seventh when he found the water off the tee. That said, his erratic nature was always the concern my model had for him when facing a course with a plethora of hazards looming.

In fairness, this is not a perfect fade/play spot since Griffin has his own concerns with accuracy and an added proximity issue that could prove dangerous. We're talking about barely over a 3% edge when finding this matchup in random spots throughout the industry. I just think when you add Kim's struggles with accuracy and extremely poor round-four scoring, you get a golfer who has lost strokes to the field in eight of his last 13 attempts Sunday. Add a little pressure to the mix of this being near the top of the leaderboard, and I will fade Kim's early scoring onslaught and do it with a player my model has been higher than consensus on all tournament long.