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 Tour Championship, which gets underway on Thursday in Atlanta.
It all comes down to East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
The top 30 players in the FedEx Cup standings have advanced to the final PGA Tour event, the Tour Championship, where the FedEx Cup and $10 million await this week’s winner.
Two Player of the Year candidates, Scottie Scheffler and Wyndham Clark, won the first two playoff events, the FedEx St. Jude Championship and the BMW Championship. It was nearly another one of our selections faltering on the back nine on Sunday but Clark battled down the stretch and landed us both in the winner’s circle last week in St. Louis. While we have had a crazy number of close calls this season, that is our first outright winner since Matt Fitzpatrick came through at the Valspar Championship in March.
Players that began last week on the outside looking in that played themselves into this week’s field were Patrick Cantlay, Gary Woodland and Robert MacIntyre. There were also three players that played their way out of the top 30 last week: Kurt Kitayama, Rickie Fowler and Bud Cauley.
For the second straight season, there are no “starting strokes” at the Tour Championship. It is a normal, limited field, no-cut tournament in which everyone begins at even par. Tommy Fleetwood is your defending champion.
East Lake Golf Club was designed by Donald Ross back in the early 1900s. It has gone through extensive redesigns performed by Rees Jones and, most recently in 2023, a massive overhaul by Andrew Green. The weather looks conducive to scoring with possible thundershowers creating a soft track. High temperatures are supposed to be in the mid-to-high 80s with little wind expected and relatively light humidity. The golf oddsmaker duo at Circa Sports in Las Vegas, Jeff Sherman and Sam Cooney, have set this week’s winning score at Under/Over 261.5, which means 18.5 under par. Fleetwood won last year with a score of 18 under.
The golf course measures out exactly as Bellerive did last week – a par 70 at 7,440 yards. The fairways are also Zoysiagrass, just like the past two weeks. They are on the narrower side and bordered by penal, Bermudagrass rough. This puts a heavier emphasis on driving accuracy than we saw last week. The greens are of average size. They are Bermudagrass surfaces and they run fast. I believe the formula will be similar to last week’s but again, with more emphasis on accuracy off the tee versus the pure bomber mentality that we saw from Clark, Rory McIlroy, Gary Woodland and Chris Gotterup. Long iron play, hole proximity from 200-plus yards, scrambling, and par-4 scoring will once again be crucial.
I used three Donald Ross designs as correlated courses: Pinehurst No. 2, where they played the 2024 U.S. Open; Sedgefield Country Club, where they play the Wyndham Championship; and Detroit Golf Club, the home of the Rocket Classic. I also used Bay Hill, where they play the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and TPC Scottsdale, home to the WM Phoenix Open. Finally, I looked at Bellerive from last week as well.
Let’s see if we can make it two in a row to close out the 2026 season.
Collin Morikawa (20-1)
It looked like it was going to be a massive year for my fellow resident of Las Vegas, but the injury prior to the Players Championship turned what may have been magical into another simply excellent season for Morikawa, who after finishing fourth last week now has seven top-10 finishes this year. Morikawa was solid statistically last week in St. Louis, ranking seventh in that field for SG: Off the Tee, 12th in SG: Approach, and 14th in SG: Putting. He was runner-up here at East Lake in 2024 and has finished sixth on two other occasions. He has also been runner-up at Bay Hill and in Detroit. Over the last 24 rounds, Morikawa ranks fourth in this field for SG: Approach and ninth for SG: Par 4s. Scrambling and putting will likely be the deciding factors for him – and us – this week in Atlanta.
Cameron Young (22-1)
His form hasn’t been what it was earlier in the season when he won twice but I believe this golf course is an excellent fit for him and it was not that long ago that Young finished runner-up at the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. He finished fourth here last season and that came just a few weeks after his win at the Wyndham Championship. He’s been as high as runner-up at the Rocket Classic, eighth in Scottsdale and was third earlier this year at Bay Hill. Over the last 24 rounds, Young is No. 1 in this field for hole proximity from 200-plus yards and is fourth in scrambling.
Hideki Matsuyama (31-1)
Matsuyama came off the boil just a bit last week after four straight top-10 finishes. But I like what I saw and that was ranking eighth in last week’s field for SG: Approach, 10th in greens in regulation and third for driving accuracy. It was the putter that let him down, ranking 46th out of 50 players. If he turns that around this week, he ought to find himself at or near the top of the leaderboard once again. Because of a shaky putter last week, I think we’re getting Matsuyama in a bit of a buy-low spot. Had he recorded another top-10 finish he might be less than 25-1 this week. Instead, we are better than 30-1 on a guy who has finished top 10 here at East Lake four times. He has twice finished top 10 at the Wyndham, once in Detroit and has won twice and finished runner-up twice in Phoenix. He was sixth at Pinehurst in 2024. I think we get a bounce back here this week.
Russell Henley (33-1)
Like Cam Young, here’s another player that was hot earlier in the year, finishing sixth at Bay Hill (after winning there last season), 13th at the Players, third at the Masters and then won at Colonial at the end of May. Also like Young, Henley turned it back on at the Open Championship, finishing ninth, and he was 12th last week at Bellerive. Here at East Lake, he has been runner-up and fourth the last two years. Between 2020 and 2023, he finished 2-5-7-9 at the Wyndham Championship. He’s been as high as 10th in Detroit and Henley took seventh at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst in 2024. There is nobody better in the business when it comes to accuracy off the tee. Over the last 24 rounds, he ranks eighth in this field for SG: Par 4s.
