American Express betting guide: 5 picks our betting expert loves this week

Welcome to our weekly PGA Tour betting tips column, featuring tips from GOLF.com’s expert prognosticator, Brady Kannon. A veteran golf bettor and commentator, Kannon is a host and regular on SportsGrid, a syndicated audio network dedicated to sports and sports betting, and is a golf betting analyst for CBS Sportsline. You can follow Brady on Twitter at @LasVegasGolferand you can read below his picks for the American Express 2026, which kicks off Thursday in La Quinta, California. In addition to Kannon’s featured plays, you will also see promos from Chirp Golf, a mobile app that offers both free-to-play and daily fantasy golf competitions where you can win money and prizes at every round and tournament.

After the Hawaiian debut, the 2026 PGA Tour campaign lands in La Quinta, California, in the United States for the American Express. Call this the calm before the storm, as it’s Torrey Pines, Phoenix, Pebble Beach and the Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club to follow and wrap up the West Coast Swing. The American Express is a Pro-Am contested over three courses. Each golfer plays the Nicklaus Tournament Course, La Quinta Country Club and the Pete Dye Stadium Course once before the top 65 players and ties make the cut, which is decided after 54 holes. The final round on Sunday will be played on the Stadium Course, the only of the three courses with ShotLink data.

Pro-Ams, three-course rotations, 54-hole cuts, generally lackluster fields and a dearth of data leave the American Express rankings quite low in my PGA Tour tournament power ratings. It is also a tournament, in all my years, where I have never been an outright winner. The results here are very random. Scottie Scheffler has been a regular here in recent years and while this is one of the weakest fields he has competed against all year, he has never won here and even missed the cut in 2021. Sepp Straka is your defending champion and he is very excited here. Jon Rahm is a former winner and was the betting favorite, but other than that, we’ve had four winners in the last seven years who started in triple figures, much higher than 100-1.

One piece of information that does seem to make some sense is the fact that 15 of the last 17 American Express winners played in at least one of the tournaments in Hawaii beforehand. All three courses in this week’s rotation are relatively short, around 7,100 meters. They are all Par 72 and all have Bermudagrass greens – which are dormant in this part of the country at this time of year – and are overseeded with Rye Grass and Poa Trivialis.

Let’s not forget that this is a Pro-Am, so the courses are relatively easy to set up for amateurs. There is very little rough and the greens run much slower than what the pros typically deal with. While neither distance nor accuracy off the tee have proven particularly important this week, I did watch Good Drives Gained. From there it’s all about hitting the greens in regulation and Strokes Gained: Approach. La Quinta Country Club and the Stadium Course have some of the smaller greens on Tour. Taking advantage of the Par 5s is a must. This is a birdie fest and making par or worse on the long holes will put you back in relation to the field. The par 4’s here are between 350 and 450 meters. This is another area that needs scoring – and it ties into another category I’ve been considering this week: Birdies or Better Gained.

It’s hard to make correlations with American Express golf courses. The Pete Dye Stadium Course can be compared to other Dye designs, but the connection is not as strong as between some of his other Tour venues. You can look at Phoenix and Las Vegas and use the desert angle, but not much has turned out there either. In terms of layout, Memorial Park in Houston and Corales Golf Club, home of the Corales Puntacana Championship, seem to me to have the most similarities with the Stadium Course, where half of this golf tournament will be played.

Since this week was more of a crapshoot and had a history of more expensive winners, I stayed away from anything too short and leaned toward longer shots. Four of my five squads played in Hawaii last week.

Pierceson Coody (80-1)

Coody finished 13th at the Sony Open last week and I like how he got there, shooting a 64 in the final round. He finished third on Tour last season in Total Driving, fourth in Greens in Regulation and fourth in Birdie Average. Through the final 24 rounds he ranked No. 1 in this field on the Par 5s and fourth on the 400-450 yard Par 4s. He also performed very well in Hawaii last week, placing 24th and gaining almost 2.5 strokes on the field.

Denny McCarthy (90-1)

We don’t have to worry about working with McCarthy, who is one of the very best in the world. He finished sixth here at the Amex, fourth in Corales and eleventh in Houston. He finished 16th in the field at Sony last week for SG: Off the Tee. Over the last 24 rounds he was in the top 25 in this area on approach and in the top 20 on the Par 4s from 350-450 yards.

Patrick Rodgers (92-1)

Will the Indiana man finally get his first PGA Tour victory after the Hoosiers win the College Football National Championship? The competition last week in Hawaii was sharp on all levels and resulted in a third place. He has had success here on the West Coast in the past and perhaps that has to do with his studies at Stanford University. Over the past 24 rounds, Rodgers has performed excellently, ranking 20th in this area for SG: Approach and 26th for Greens in Regulation Gained. The putter was normally his bugaboo, but last week at Waialae, Rodgers gained more than four strokes putting, which was 14th in the field.

JT Poston (100-1)

Here we enter the world of triple digits and we do so with another top putter. Poston didn’t play last week, but in his last start in mid-November, he finished seventh at the RSM Classic. He did very well here in La Quinta, finishing seventh, sixth and twelfth last year. He has also won a desert bird festival before, with a victory in Las Vegas in 2024.

Lee Hodges (150-1)

Hodges finished sixth in Hawaii last week and was ranked third here by American Express. Last season he also finished eleventh in Houston. That’s two consecutive top-10 finishes for Hodges, who capped 2025 with a fourth-place finish at the RSM Classic. Let’s hope his putter stays warm, because he was second in the field last week, making nearly eight shots on the field with the flatstick.

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