Ben Coley's golf betting tips: Farmers Insurance Open preview and best bets

Golf betting tips: Farmers Insurance Open

2pts e.w. Tony Finau at 25/1 (Sky Bet, William Hill 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

2pts e.w. Sahith Theegala at 33/1 (William Hill, 888sport 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

1.5pts e.w. Will Zalatoris at 50/1 (Sky Bet, 888sport 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

1pt e.w. Beau Hossler at 66/1 (General 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

1pt e.w. Taylor Montgomery at 90/1 (Sky Bet, 888sport 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

0.5pt e.w. Norman Xiong at 500/1 (Sky Bet, William Hill 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

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It's a Wednesday start for the Farmers Insurance Open, where four Ryder Cup players tee it up in their home state of California. Collectively, the quartet are about 7/4 to produce the champion and end a sensational start to the new PGA Tour season, with three winners all having gone off at three-figure prices.

Splitting Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay, Max Homa and Collin Morikawa is far from easy. Homa is the defending champion and the most prolific of these lately, but a case can be made for any of them being favourite. Yes, it would take a brave man to back Schauffele at single-figure odds, but a braver one to anticipate anything other than a very good week.

Torrey Pines, whose South Course will stage 54 holes, tends to produce high-class champions with course experience. Jon Rahm is the only recent exception when it comes to the latter, which tells you how tall an order this is for Ludvig Aberg on his tournament debut, and this is a tough place for a new class of rookies to be hunting FedEx Cup points.

As for what you have to do well, there's no denying that length off the tee is a big help. The South Course has fairways that are particularly hard to hit and it's straightforwardly long at almost 7,800 yards. With small greens that can get really firm, the power to leave wedge approaches can be an enormous advantage. Some of the highest hitters on the PGA Tour have proven particularly comfortable here down the years.

Just how the course has been affected by the heavy rain that has fallen over the past few days, time will tell, but while that firmness may be gone from the greens, lush rough and soft fairways might make things really difficult. Those who drive the ball short and not always straight seem likely to be up against it.

Morikawa has defied his relative distance handicap, but by way of illustrating how difficult that is, to rank third in strokes-gained off-the-tee last year he had to hit 82.1% of fairways. That might not sound much, but at Torrey Pines it's almost impossible. Not since 2015 had anybody else hit more than four in five, and Morikawa was the first player to reach his tally since Fred Funk some 20 years earlier.

Approach play in general is also highly important and as you might expect of a US Open course, this is somewhere you just have to be in control of things. Those wedges I mentioned might come in handy on the par-fives, three of them hard to reach in two, but for the most part the demand is on quality irons from a fair distance out. Not much comes easy at Torrey Pines.

Jason Day is one of those course specialists who hits his ball to the moon and he has to be respected, but I narrowly prefer TONY FINAU at the same price and he's rated the player most likely to overturn the favourites.

This has always felt like a venue where Finau should be at his best and so it's proved, with eight top-25s from nine starts in the Farmers, dating right back to an excellent tie for 24th on his rookie appearance in 2015.

Ninth place last year saw him threaten the course record with a round of 64 at the South and as you might expect, he was one of the two players in the field who finished ahead of Morikawa in those driving statistics.

Fifth last season in strokes-gained approach, his iron play might be some of the most underrated in golf with so much focus on his raw power, and it helps make him an absolutely ideal fit for Torrey Pines, where he's been in the mix four times since 2017.

As for how he's playing right now, eight under-par rounds to begin the year looks decent enough to me. I'm not sure Kapalua is entirely his bag – it's hard to keep up there if you're not an elite putter, and he's never once been in the mix for The Sentry – and I wouldn't say the AmEx is ideal for similar reasons.

Solid golf across both, with the putter just about behaving on the face of it last week, might just have him primed for this third start of the year. And let's not forget, having been left out of the Ryder Cup side, he didn't play from late-August to early-December, returning with an excellent top-five in the Hero World Challenge at Albany.

Five wins over the past two and a half years is a healthy return and while backing both him and Day is a perfectly viable option, I rate Finau the more likely contender and therefore the better bet. He was second-favourite to Rahm 12 months ago and I don't think he's at all far from that level now.

California double for popular local?

Next on my list is SAHITH THEEGALA, who first came here as a small child and has put his vast experience to use since returning as a professional.

Finishes of 25th and fourth across his last two starts in the event, following a missed cut on debut, confirm that as well as being comfortingly familiar, Torrey Pines is a really good venue for Theegala, who grew up two hours away from here.

Part of the reason is that he's long enough off the tee, and his waywardness isn't as big of an issue as you might think. Time and again we hear about the importance of fairways at courses like this, but the truth is they're so difficult to hit that everyone has to score from the rough.

Bubba Watson once talked about why that made him more comfortable here, because he was used to doing that already and it felt like it hurt other players much more, and Theegala is a similar, swashbuckling player who already has a highlight-reel of recovery shots to his name.

We saw some of them when he captured his first PGA Tour title in California in the Fortinet Championship, adding to top-10s here and at Riviera, and over the last couple of years he's started to produce his very best stuff in front of his large following on home soil.

As for how he's playing, Theegala began the season with second place in The Sentry before missing the cut narrowly in the Sony Open, which I'd have down as one of the least suitable venues for him on the entire calendar, and I expect to see him back in contention under ideal conditions this week.

Theegala has ranked seventh and fourth in strokes-gained approach on his last two Farmers starts and he's capable of some top-class putting numbers, as we saw at Silverado. Long enough to compete with the very biggest hitters, he has the right game to double his PGA Tour tally.

Harris English finished third here in a US Open and is back in good nick so he's respected, but at a slightly bigger price I can't resist taking a chance on WILL ZALATORIS.

Having missed the core of last season through injury and then returned with a tailed-off performance at the Hero just before Christmas, Zalatoris has produced five sub-70 rounds in succession now and the very fact he's teeing it up less than 72 hours after the AmEx finished suggests he's feeling good.

That was the impression he gave at the Sony, where a poor first round left him in an impossible position, and while he'll need to step up on his efforts at La Quinta it was encouraging to see him shoot 65-68 over the weekend, his only dropped shot at the tougher Stadium Course on Sunday coming at his final hole, just as it had on Thursday.

It's very difficult to get a firm handle on where he is with his remodelled swing, but this could be the only opportunity we get to back Zalatoris at a big price in a modest field and it's one I want to take. Remember, for now he's not in the 'signature' events at Pebble Beach and Riviera and would need to win here to change that.

Torrey Pines also happens to be one of the very best courses on the circuit for him. Zalatoris really ought to have won here two years ago, when he lost a play-off to Luke List, and he was seventh in his first start of 2021 despite not having played in close to two months.

Like the top four in the betting and indeed Theegala, he's from California and locals have always done well in the handful of events held out in the Golden State. Homa is the most stark example but there are plenty more, including several of the less well-known winners of the Farmers plus the likes of James Hahn and John Merrick at Riviera.

There's a shot-in-the-dark element to this and he won't be for everyone, but this world-class golfer could challenge for favouritism at his best. Just how far away that is, we'll find out over the coming four days.

A good year to be a Beau selector

Like Aberg, Min Woo Lee is a debutant who has history against him, but he does have experience of the course from the Junior World event which has been held here for a long time now, a division of which Theegala has won. That will help and there are a handful of past Farmers champions who were able to call upon it, but Lee's approach work needs to improve and for now he's short enough.

I was more tempted by Hideki Matsuyama, a real South Course specialist. Not for the first time, a quiet round on the easier North cost him a place last year and while he arrives under a bit of a cloud, that was the case 12 months ago. He's a class act, tough conditions suit, and he's got plenty to play for having just dropped out of the world's top 50 for the first time since entering it more than a decade ago.

Matsuyama though has been throwing in at least one very poor round per week for too long now so I'll scan slightly further down the betting to BEAU HOSSLER, my player to follow on the PGA Tour this year.

That might seem strange given his status as a longstanding maiden who has thrown away a couple of good chances, most notably in the Texas Open a couple of years ago, but Hossler looks to have found a pretty big chunk of improvement lately and reminds me a little of his friend, Wyndham Clark.

By no means am I expecting Hossler to go on and become a major champion this year but with nine top-30s in his last 10 events of 2023, and signs that he's sorted his wedge game at last, this strong driver and deadly putter has so many of the tools required to win big titles.

Last week's T47 at the AmEx smacked of a pipe-opener with this in mind and only once before in that event has he finished higher up the leaderboard, whereas here at Torrey Pines he has a best of ninth to his name. Granted, he's missed his last three cuts, but Hossler hasn't putted well during any of them and returns a much better player.

He ticks that Californian box even if he now calls Texas home, and it's probably worth saying he is only 28, younger than Rahm for instance. Hossler feels like he's been around forever because he hit the front in the US Open as a teenager, but like Clark the best is still to come and I think he's a cracking bet at 66/1 this week.

As with Theegala, the fact that he can spray it a little off the tee isn't too much of a worry here and Hossler certainly has the power to handle the South Course. If he can get rolling on the North Course on Wednesday, I won't be at all surprised to find him in contention come the weekend, perhaps landing that breakthrough victory at last.

Many of the same remarks could apply to Patrick Rodgers, who should've broken his own duck here in California last summer. Rodgers is playing some of the best golf of his life, has two top-10s in the Farmers and produced his best Sony Open finish yet last time, but I felt there was just a little less juice in his price.

Preference is for TAYLOR MONTGOMERY, who has drifted to 100/1 in places, about twice the price he was last week despite this being a similar level in terms of field strength.

And while he did play well at the AmEx last year, I would have Torrey Pines down as just as suitable if not more so. Montgomery is long off the tee, hits it high and putts the lights out, the sort of formula Day has put to use around here down the years.

Montgomery also has a personal connection to the event, as it's the only one his dad ever played in, 30 years ago. It's a special course for the family as it's also where Taylor made his major debut in 2021, before finishing 11th here when still on the Korn Ferry Tour, and then 31st last year.

"I love Torrey Pines," Montgomery said two years ago. "It’s a really big golf course, and there’s not a lot of out of bounds. There’s just thick rough and tiny fairways. You hit driver on every single hole, and I like that."

Throughout all three appearances his approach play has been the issue but there have been significant signs of improvement lately, in particular when ranking second at the Sony Open, and while yes last week was a bit disappointing he did end on the front foot, peppering flags over the final few holes of round four.

Montgomery began working with Butch Harmon late last year so there's an explanation for the improved iron play he's since demonstrated, and if he can continue along this path then a win ought to follow at some stage given the fact he's one of the top three or four putters on the circuit.

Having been a 28/1 shot for this tournament a year ago and a popular selection last week, he looks worth chancing now he's drifted to this kind of price. Montgomery has been catching the eye since October, when he first sought the help of Harmon, and if he gets that putter rolling again, expect to see him feature at some stage.

Panda worth a punt

Justin Suh and Akshay Bhatia are two excellent drivers who both missed the cut by one last week. Suh gave half of his prize money away when playing here on an invite once, at a time when he had no status, and it would be a lovely story were he to return to his home state and contend at a course which ought to bring out his best.

Along with Taylor Pendrith they're respected and I'll have an eye on his compatriot Mackenzie Hughes for his Thursday three-ball, as he boasts an excellent South Course record which probably won't be factored into prices.

But for a final outright bet, I can't resist a flier on NORMAN XIONG.

Once touted as the next big thing, Xiong took longer to make it to the PGA Tour than many expected and still lacks consistency, but he's taken a couple of Korn Ferry Tour chances really impressively to win his two titles by four and five shots respectively.

The most recent of those came in 10-under, defying the sort of tough conditions he'll find this week to finally earn his card, and while he is a rookie there are few if any players in this field with as much experience of Torrey Pines. As well as playing in the Farmers once, he was a permanent fixture in those Junior World events, often winning or going close in various age categories.

Xiong's family moved to San Diego when he was a small boy and so much of his golfing education took place here, while in terms of his game he is a long driver with the attributes required to cope with the demands of a South Course that he knows so well.

All of this relates to his wider profile rather than the state of his game, but he did shoot 13-under over rounds two and three of the AmEx, missing the cut by one after a slow start, and having showed up well early on in the Sony he looks in a pretty good place overall.

If there is to be another surprise winner, I see no more fascinating candidate than the man they call the Panda.

Posted at 1030 GMT on 23/01/24

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