It was a profitable week for me to begin the season at the Sony Open. 2-2-1 on pre-tournament matchups, 4-3-0 on in-tournament selections and a (+230) top 40 and (-125) made cut on Brice Garnett.
While that may seem like it doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of the year, every few units you can add to the bankroll throughout the season will always go a long way toward churning out a positive return, and better yet will help to recover the losses during the less advantageous events.
I don't want any of that to feel like self-promotion. Trust me, this is not Wyndham Clark winning the 2023 U.S. Open and me touting him at (+10000) in every piece and podcast here at Action Network. I am more than capable of the full-blown highlight recap when things go well.
Honestly, I could have found myself going down that route had Harry Hall gotten over the finish line at (+5000), but the reason I mention those results comes down to one sole premise that I would like to express for anyone new to golf betting.
I faded Chris Gotterup last week inside the head-to-head market. Those aren't the pretty answers of a betting card that you want to blast inside of an article during a recap, but they are real and will happen throughout the year. My model thought the recent approach-play and historical data on comp courses left a lot to be desired, andI honestly would have needed 50+ names to even consider him, which is never going to end well when trying to pick a winner for an outright tournament.
Funny enough, though, betting is not about being perfect. Nobody in this space is going to deliver 70% head-to-head winners. You won't see all your takes or bets come up sunshine and rainbows. Some iterations of a card might even look as bad as my Gotterup take was on the surface.
However, the ultimate goal is to trust your numbers from a larger outlook and not let one single wager decide your entire week. If you start keeping that idea in mind and control your exposure to fit within your bankroll, there are always routes to turn negatives into positives. Even if that comes from fading the eventual winner.
2026 American Express Picks: Data-Driven Model Likes 4 Outright Winner Bets
Players I Am Looking To Back In The Outright Market
Russell Henley +2800
I talked a lot last week in my article about how Russell Henley had a nearly a 3% win equity edge over anyone else in the field. That didn't necessarily come to fruition after a disastrous Friday took him out of contention, but I do think markets have overcorrected to his lackluster start to the season.
Henley is not a prolific birdie maker. That is one of the downsides the public is beginning to grasp, given that winning scores always approach 25 to 30 under par. However, his 30th-place rank in this field jumps to second when we condense the birdie or better percentage to feature a player's percentage of converting from under 125 yards and remove everything else. That is a distance that will deliver nearly 30% of iron shots this week and did render a 32.72% birdie rate from the American last year.
In general, I am OK with removing any major takeaways from Hawaii. I don't believe Henley has nearly the same projected returns as we may have seen from him last week (Ben Griffin/Russell Henley are almost identical with their proper price in my sheet (23.5/1), but if the market wants to present this price hike of someone who can't thrive by finding a lot of fairways and converting birdies from the short grass, I am OK hoping that his neutral par-five expectations might be able to see an increase at courses that are not overly punishing in finding birdies.
Daniel Brown +40000 | Kensei Hirata +150000
Every single golfer who has entered the tournament this week and has only one or two events to track for stats in my model has the potential to be much higher than anticipated because of the poor returns that sometimes come from limited data.
The fact that Daniel Brown was the only golfer of all of those names who forced me to go in and regress his statistics out — just so I didn't have an astronomically funky return from him — makes me think that Brown might actually be an extremely good course fit here who is going widely under-the-radar in his second PGA Tour start.
I don't want to use a lot of data to prove a point because a top-25 finish in your first start of the year will skew the projections when my model doesn't realize he isn't a perennial top-25 stalwart weekly. However, Brown is quietly the 67th-ranked golfer in the world and enters the week having posted six made cuts in a row, four of those landing him inside the top-21.
If you want to get even more care-free than a 400/1 wager, Kensei Hirata did make my card at 1500/1. The problem with Hirata is that most of the events on the PGA Tour that I am using for tracking send him back to Waialae Country Club for the Sony Open.
For what it is worth, he does have back-to-back top-25 finishes there in the past two years, including gaining nearly nine shots to the field with his driver and irons. Maybe that is more of a "horse for that course" than someone who is going to pop elsewhere, but I would be remiss if I didn't throw a few darts on what my model deemed to be a value.
Some of these wagers are probably better top-20 bets than the swing-for-the-fence, hit the lottery sort of ones. I will personally be using Hirata/Brown across the board and trying to take cheap shots at big paydays.
Harry Hall +5000
If we remove Harry Hall's typical Sunday letdown while in contention at the Sony Open, the space might be more bullish on backing the UNLV product on a prototypical desert-style course that rewards spike scoring and putting than we are seeing this week.
Hall dominated with his overall game through three days in Hawaii, posting +0.50 strokes per round across all four critical strokes-gained metrics. The other two were Chris Gotterup and Adam Svensson.
Hall also ranked first in my model this week for miscellaneous course factors, including scoring from within 125 yards. That is something I have already discussed with Henley, and it shows even more fruitful for the Englishman, who led the tour in 2025 by delivering a birdie or better 33.62% of the time when faced with that position.
Hall's floor is higher than most of the outright wagers in this tier, but I am going to continue to beat the drum that the 28-year-old is this year's Henley: A golfer who is much better than the public perceives him to be until he wins.
2026 American Express Outright Winner Picks
- Russell Henley +2800
- Harry Hall +5000
- Sepp Straka +5000
- Si Woo Kim +5000
- Chris Kirk +20000
- Daniel Brown +40000
- Kensei Hirata +150000
