2025 Sony Open Picks, Bets, Preview

One and Done Starts THURSDAY!!!!

Early Sony Open Quick Bets

• Keegan +2800

• Clanton +4500

• Dunlap +7500 (With 8 Places)

• Lipsky +27500 (With 8 Places) & Top 20 +550

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2025 Sony Open Picks, Research, Preview, Odds Guesses

2025 ONE AND DONE STRATEGY & HOW TO PLAY

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NFL Playoff drafts are happening as we speak. “The Gauntlet” is $25 per entry and $200,000 to first place. I’ll have a full strategy show Monday evening with an example draft and team review in case you want to tackle those.

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2025 Sony Open

Field/Tournament Notes

• Field: 144 Players

• Cut: Top 65 and Ties

• Lineup Lock: Thursday, January 9

• Defending Champ: Grayson Murray

There are 33 golfers in the field played last week at Kapalua. For more than a decade, the winner of the Sony Open was one of the lucky few who had played the week previous at Kapalua. The last two winners — Si Woo Kim & Grayson Murray — did not.

Luke Clanton, Aldrich Potgieter, Yuta Sugiura, Kensei Hirata, Takumi Kanaya, and Mao Matsuyama are playing on a sponsors exemptions.

In case you’re not familiar, Clanton has been one of the best amateurs to play on tour this millennium. Clanton has four Top 10s in seven PGA TOUR starts.

NOTE: amateurs do not earn any money for their finishes, so do not use them in the One and Done contest.

Potgieter, 20-year-old South African, won on KFT in January of 2024, and finished the year with consecutive Top 10s in Australia and South Africa in December. He’s also 9 feet tall.

Yuta Sugiura won the Japan PGA Championship in 2024 and was T6 at the Zozo in October.

Kensei Hirata currently sits 112 in the OWGR, winning four times in Japan a year ago. The now 22-year-old played in the Sony a year ago and missed the cut.

Mao Matsuyama is only 15. Think about what you were doing at 15.

Takumi Kanaya has played in 23 PGA Tour events/Majors and has never made a cut at a tournament that has featured a cut line.

This is also the first PGA TOUR start for Jesper Svensson, who qualified through the DP World Tour last year. Svensson won in Singapore last March and finished T7 at the DP World Tour Championship in November.

Key Stats

• Strokes Gained: Approach

• Par 4s Gained

• Eagles Gained

• Good Drives Gained

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Course

• Course: Waialae CC

• Par: 70

• Yardage: 7,044

• Greens: Bermuda

• Average Green Size: 7,100 sq. ft

• Number of Sand Bunkers: 83

• Number of Holes with Water in Play: 5

Par 3's (4): Average length - 192 yards

- Grayson Murray par'd Holes 7-11-17 all four days (two birdies and a bogey on #4)

• Six holes on the course are par'd at least 69% of time and all four of the Par 3's are included in that range (72.2% par rate on #11 is the highest on property)

• Seven holes have a bogey rate north of 16% and three of them are Par 3’s

Par 4's (12): Average length - 435 yards

- Holes 1-2-6 (all Par 4's) are three of the four most difficult holes on this course, all posting a double-or-worse rate over 2%

• Five holes have a bogey rate north of 18% and four of them are within the first six on the front 9

- Grayson Murray bogey'd holes 2 and 5 in Round 1 -- he only had one Par 4 bogey in the rest of the tournament (Hole 16 on Friday)

Par 5's (2): Average length - 529 yards

- The two easiest holes on the course, both with a birdie rate north of 50%

- Hole #9 carries an eagle rate (6.6%) that is more than double the bogey rate (3.2%)

2023 Stats vs Other Courses

Past Winners

• 2024: Grayson Murray -17 (playoff over Keegan Bradley & Ben An)

• 2023: Si Woo Kim -18 (one shot over Hayden Buckley)

• 2022: Hideki Matsuyama -23 (playoff over Russell Henley)

• 2021: Kevin Na -21 (one shot over Chris Kirk)

• 2020: Cam Smith -11 (playoff over Brandon Steele)

2024: Grayson Murray (+40000)

• Seven off the pace after Thursday but fired the third best round of Friday (63) to close the gap (four birdies on both the front and back)

• Murray was the best player in the field off the tee (+5.1)

• Chris Kirk was the only player to finish Top 23 who lost strokes putting

2023: Si Woo Kim (+4000)

• Six strokes better over the weekend than pre-cut (his 64 on Sunday was tied for the best on the course that day)

• Si WOO gained 8.2 strokes on approach (1.1 strokes better than anyone else). He wasn't special off the tee (+1.1) and that was common at the top of the board (five of the top-6 finishes failed to clear that number with three of them actually losing ground from the tee box)

2022: Hideki Matsuyama (+1800)

• Five back after Thursday and seven behind Henley heading into the weekend (matching 63's to finish, both were good for the best on the course that day)

• Matsuyama's putting stroke was strong all week, especially from 10-15 feet (+2.7, fourth best)

• The top-3 finishers on the final leaderboard were all top-5 putters for the week

2021: Kevin Na (+6000)

• Five back after Round 1 but made his move on moving day (61 after firing 67-66 to open the event)

• Na was top-10 in both approach and around-the-green to offset ordinary OTT and P numbers

• Nine of the top-10 finishers gained proximity on approach from 200+ yards (Webb Simpson was the exception and the only reason he was able to survive struggling from distance was the hottest putter in the field, +9 strokes)

• Short putting -- Of the top 13 finishers, 12 gained from 0-5 feet, 12 gained from 5-10 feet, 8 gained from 10-15 feet and 6 gained 15-20 feet

2020: Cam Smith (+4000)

• Five back after Thursday, but he was five shots better on Friday (his 65 was the best on the course) ... six of the top-11 finishers had their worst round of the week on Thursday (windy AF conditions prior to the cut, moderate wind over the weekend)

• Smith was the only top-11 finisher to lose ground on approach (-0.8) thanks to being the best putter in the field (+8.2).

• Three of the top-5 in Prox: 175-200 finished with at least a share of fourth place on the final leaderboard

2024 First Round Leader Notes

1. Cam Davis (62): has finished 27-32 in each of the past four Sony's (30th last season)

2. Taylor Montgomery (64): Finished 13th last season and 12th in 2023 (tied for the first round lead in 2023 with a 64)

T3. Stephan Jaeger ( 65): MC at this event in 2022, 28th in 2023, and 18th in 2024

T3. Austin Eckroat ( 65): Previous finishes at event: 42nd last season after finishing 12th in 2023 (his best round in both instances came on Thursday)

T3. Aaron Rai (65): Finished 57th last year, his best showing in three appearances at this event (69 or worse in all three days after the strong start last year)

T3. Webb Simpson (65): 4th in this event in 2021, but hasn't finished top-60 since

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$1M PGA ONE AND DONE

The RACE FOR THE MAYO CUP $1,000,000 Season Long Golf One and Done league STARTS THURSDAY with the Sony Open. As of this writing it is 76% FULL and tracking to be filled by Tuesday evening. Maybe before.

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Here’s the breakdown of the Top 50 places. Top 690 of 4500 pay this year.

If you're wondering who to pick or some strategy, I have you covered...

READ: 2025 ONE AND DONE STRATEGY & HOW TO PLAY

Event Notes

Waialae CC is the fourth longest-serving host venue on TOUR. The Honolulu course has been played every year since 1965, except for 1970 when there was no event. That trails only Augusta National (1934), Colonial CC (1946) and Pebble Beach (1947).

Ernie Els (2003) and Justin Thomas (2017) are the only two players to complete the Hawaii Slam in the same year and now past Sony Open winner Hideki Maysuyama will have an opportunity to join that club this season.

Smith’s -11 winning score was the highest since Vijay Singh won in 2005 also at -11. A coastal course, Waialae experienced massive wind gusts and rain during the first few rounds in 2020. Those winds were a massive outlier, however. Extreme wind that tends to be commonplace at Kapalua rarely emerges at Waialae to that extent. Generally, conditions are benign, and the winning score will linger around -20.

The current forecast shows more wind than a standard year at Waialae with some scattered showers.

Tracking the historic Strokes Gained data, Around the Green means less and less the more you rise on the leaderboard. While that’s true at many course that dish out so many birdies, it’s far more pronounced at Waialae CC. Since Waialae is one of the most generous courses for GIR (67%), the more the field utilizes their short game, the fewer birdies they make. Not great in a birdie fest unless all those chips are going in.

Adding to that, Waialae typically ends up being among the courses with the most difficult fairways to hit at just a shade over 53% compared to the TOUR average of 62%. Don’t worry, however, as the USGA isn’t involved in rough control this week with the typical rough length sitting historically sitting between 2”-2.5”. Players are more concerned with setting up proper angles than landing in the fairway. Despite almost half the approaches coming from the rough, that GIR percentage is well above the average event, and Waialae sports a higher scrambling percentage and an almost identical average proximity from the pin on GIRs. So, the Good Drives Gained stat will outweigh Strokes Gained: Off The Tee this week:

Good Drives Gained (Good Drives are drives where the player either hits the fairway off the tee OR the player misses the fairway but still hits the green or fringe in regulation.)

There’s also an angle of the short courses on TOUR to play this week. The Sony Open has shown a direct correlation with Colonial, Sedgefield, and Harbour Town, both in course layout and field strength. Port Royal (Bermuda) and Pebble Beach are others worth adding to the list too. Maybe PGA National if you want some more numbers to tack on. Just remember it’s more difficult to contextualize stats from PGA National since the ubiquitous water across the course can skew stats drastically. Something that isn’t present to such an extent as the rest of the crossover courses.

Additionally, since the inception (BWONGGGGGG) of the signature events on the PGA TOUR, Harbour Town and Pebble Beach have only hosted the very top end players, which does us no good since

In previous years, the obvious one was El Camaleon, the former host of the Mayaboka Classic. In 2018 and 2019, Patton Kizzire and Matt Kuchar won both events in succession. It’s helpful the fields had similar strength as well. There was a lot of crossover between them, outside of the very high end. If you’re wondering what happened in 2022 at El Camaleon, wonder no longer. You’ll notice, Sony Open 2022 Runner Up Russell Henely took home the title. Problem is, the PGA moved on from Mayaboka when it became a LIV course two years ago.

Here are the SG: TOTAL/Round leaders from those five courses (Colonial, Sedgefield, Harbour Town, Port Royal, Pebble Beach) along with Waialae, in the field this week from the last three seasons:

DraftKings Single Round Showdown Strategy

Playing this course in order is the optimal way to go. Both 9's conclude with a layup Par 5, but the surrounding holes around #9 are much more advantageous. Hole 8 plays easier than Hole 17, Hole 10 plays easier than Hole 1, and Hole 11, while difficult, plays easier than Hole 18. Grayson Murray won this tournament last season and he played Holes 1-2-17 at even par over the course of those four rounds (he played Holes 8-10-11 at four-under).

Callaway Equipment Change

Something looks off with the Callaway-sponsored players using the new ELYTE Callaway driver for the current tournament in Maui. Of the 59 players in the field, only 5 Callaway-sponsored players were in the top 30 after two rounds: Thomas Detry, Harry Hall, Adam Hadwin, Max Greyserman and Sam Burns. Also, Xander hit three tee balls into the penalty area with driver this week… three… in 36 holes.

Sony Open Picks, Bets

Keegan Bradley

Out to avenge his playoff loss from a year ago, Keegan T2G at Waialae over the years has been spectacular, gaining five or more strokes versus the field in five of the past six seasons. That same T2G excellence was on display at Kapalua over the weekend too. It seems to all just hinge on his flat stick. The Ryder Cup captain an annual pass for the struggle bus on the greens, yet some years, like 2024, he finishes Top 10 in the field. Pray it’s one of the good years and Keegan will be firmly in the Sunday mix.

David Lipsky

Lipsky’s not flying under the radar. The Radar isn't even trying to detect him at this point. Sure, he loves a missed cut, hence why his odds are so long, but he generally has Top 10 upside when he’s not immediately out of a tournament. He’s finished Top 10 in three of his last six starts, picked up his two best finishes in the 23/24 season at comp courses in Bermuda and Colonial, and did have a T4 on this site in 2023.