5 picks our gambling expert loves

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 host and regular guest on SportsGrid, a syndicated audio network devoted to sports and sports betting, and is a golf betting analyst for CBS Sportsline. You can follow Brady on Twitter at @LasVegasGolfer, and you can read his picks below for the 2026 Texas Children’s Houston Open, which gets underway Thursday.

There are currently 93 players in the field for next week’s Masters Tournament, golf’s first major championship of the year. The winner of this week’s Valero Texas Open will join that lucky bunch next week in Augusta, Ga. if he is not already qualified.

There are 132 players scheduled to tee it up beginning on Thursday at the Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio, the host course for this tournament since 2010. The golf course is one of the more difficult tests on the PGA Tour circuit. It is a Greg Norman design with Sergio Garcia acting as Player Consultant. It is a fairly meaty 18 holes, stretching to nearly 7,500 yards and playing to par 72. The four par 5s typically measure as the toughest collection of such holes on Tour.

Certainly, one thing we have to negotiate in this part of the country and during this time of year, are the prevailing Texas winds. What the forecast is calling for in San Antonio this week is interesting: With a projected 20-degree dip in temperature from Thursday to Sunday, winds anywhere from 10-25 mph are expected throughout the four days, and some occasional thunderstorms to boot.

The fairways at the Oaks Course are narrow. The rough is penal but not crazy and the fairways are tree-lined and heavily wooded in some spots. The greens are of average size and are a Bermudagrass base. They are overseeded with Poa Trivialis but as I noted last week with similar surfaces in Houston, with the temperatures we have been experiencing in the Southwest, it is likely that the Bermudagrass is coming out of its winter dormancy and is playing more of a factor in these putting surfaces than maybe it normally would in late March or early April.

Strokes Gained: Approach, Greens in Regulation, Good Drives Gained, Driving Accuracy, Scrambling, and Par 5 Scoring are probably the main areas of emphasis around TPC San Antonio. I also looked at Bogey Avoidance and Strokes Gained: Putting.

Tying courses together with TPC San Antonio is difficult as there are not many obvious connections. TPC Summerlin — the former home of the Shriners Children’s Open in Las Vegas makes sense to me as does Silverado, home to the Fortinet Championship in Napa. I also used Port Royal Golf Club (Bermuda Championship), Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas (Charles Schwab Challenge), and TPC Southwind (FedEx St. Jude).

Two weeks ago, we landed correctly on Matt Fitzpatrick and last week, we got the runner-up in Nicolai Hojgaard. Let’s see if we can continue the good fortune this week and get a few more of our guys into contention.

Sepp Straka (27-1)

The University of Georgia product has been playing tremendous golf as of late. In three of his last four starts, he’s finished runner-up (Pebble Beach), 13th (Riviera), and eighth three weeks ago at TPC Sawgrass. His greatest areas of strength are Par 5 Scoring, Driving Accuracy, Greens in Regulation, and Bogey Avoidance. He was 22nd here in San Antonio in 2023 and was fifth at Colonial in 2024. Straka has been as high as 14th in Napa and finished runner-up at TPC Southwind in 2022. I like his current form and his skill set this week. He ought to be well-rested and ready to contend.

Alex Noren (36-1)

Attending Oklahoma State and being a long-time DP World Tour player, Noren definitely knows how to play in the wind. He’s finished top 15 both times in two prior trips to San Antonio and has been as high as runner-up in Bermuda and third at TPC Summerlin. His Driving Accuracy, approach play, and short game have been excellent so far this season and he ranks 32nd in this field over the last 24 rounds on the Par 5s. It is hard to gauge how the big boys (Aberg, Fleetwood, Henley, etc.) will treat this week with Georgia on their mind, but I like Noren as a top player in the world, a little further down the board, and still very much looking for his first-ever win on American soil — no matter what is happening next week.

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Thorbjorn Olesen (55-1)

It has been a shaky start to the 2026 season for the Dane, missing the cut in four of his six starts but it was his sixth start, last week, that he finished 14th in Houston. In that field, Olesen ranked fifth for SG: Approach and was 19th in Greens in Regulation. He was ninth in that field for SG: Tee to Green and gained in just about every category except putting — where he only lost .15 strokes to the field. A repeat performance this week would likely be very good. A slight improvement could put him in contention. Olesen finished fifth here last year and was 14th in 2024.

Jordan Smith (84-1)

I am not opposed to going back to the well on the Englishman even though he dipped a bit last week in Houston, finishing 44th. The ball striking remains excellent, as he ranked 13th in that field last week for SG: Off the Tee, 22nd on approach, 19th in Greens in Regulation and was 29th in Driving Accuracy — all pointers for me this week a few hours west in San Antonio. While Smith is a veteran on the DP World Tour, this is his first full go on the PGA Tour — so any history on our correlated courses doesn’t exist. It is interesting to note however, that he’s never missed a cut on a Greg Norman-designed golf course.

Vince Whaley (150-1)

We mentioned earlier the thought of the Masters coming up next week and how that plays into this week’s handicap. I don’t believe it is a bad week to try some long shots as it is more often than not that someone other than the favorites wins here. The last two winners, Brian Harman and Akshay Bhatia, have both been at better than 60-1 odds and since 2010, we’ve had at least half a dozen winners with triple-digit prices — so let’s try one here. Whaley had a solid top-30 finish last week in Houston, where he ranked 25th in that field for SG: Approach and was 19th for SG: Putting. He has really shown an ability to play in windy conditions, taking 11th last season at Colonial, twice finishing in the top 16 at TPC Summerlin, and notching three straight top-10 finishes at Bermuda. If the approach play holds up again this week, he has a hot enough putter to make something happen.