The 2025 PGA Tour schedule kicks off with a limited-field event beginning Thursday in Hawaii, but golf’s best player won’t be there—Scottie Scheffler needed surgery after a Christmas day incident with a broken glass left fragments in the palm of his right hand. Xander Schauffele, the runner-up to Scheffler in last season’s FedEx Cup race, opened as the clear +700 odds favorite to win the event at bet365.
2025 PGA Tour The Sentry Odds
| Golfer | Odds To Win |
|---|---|
| Xander Schauffele | +700 |
| Justin Thomas | +1100 |
| Collin Morikawa | +1300 |
| Patrick Cantlay | +1700 |
| Ludvig Aberg | +1700 |
| Sungjae Im | +1700 |
| Hideki Matsuyama | +2400 |
| Sahith Theegala | +2400 |
| Corey Conners | +2700 |
| Sam Burns | +2700 |
| Akshay Bhatia | +300 |
| Viktor Hovland | +3200 |
| Tony Finau | +3500 |
Odds as of Dec. 31 at bet365
The 60-player field in The Sentry is comprised of all tournament winners from 2024, as well as the top 50 players in last season’s FedExCup standings. Schauffele won the tournament at the Kapalua Plantation Course in 2019, and tied for second the following year. Among players who have appeared more than once, Collin Morikawa owns the best average finish at 5.2, which includes finishes of T5 or better in each of the past three seasons.
And while The Sentry is a Signature Event of the type designed to attract the tour’s best players, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood and Shane Lowry are all skipping it to prepare for an event in Dubai that begins later in January. Combine that with Scheffler’s absence, and there’s certainly the possibility that the bigger names in the field are edged out by someone like Chris Kirk—a +12000 wager who won this tournament last year.
PGA Tour The Sentry Best Bets
Sungjae Im to Win (+1700) at bet365
The Plantation Course on Maui’s west coast is wide, hilly, and known for downward-sloping fairways that can add dozens of extra yards to a drive. All of which to say, it’s hardly the most penalizing layout on the PGA Tour.
Kirk was 29-under last year, Cameron Smith a ridiculous 34-under in 2022. It all sets up well for a relentless risk-reward player like Im, who was T5 at Kapalua last season, and has been in the 60s in all but two of his 12 career rounds on the island.
Xander Schauffele Top American (+425) at bet365
With Scheffler out and McIlroy not playing, a lot of the betting money will gravitate to Schauffele, who was a +700 wager to win as of Tuesday. Since there’s not much value there (and even less in taking him +150 as a top-five) the nationality prop serves as something of a sweet spot—it widens the chances of cashing out, while still offering a bit of a return. Schauffele was T10 at Kapalua last year, and last finished in the single digits in 2021.
Collin Morikawa Top-5 Finish (+250) at bet365
Last season was good but not great for Morikawa, who posted several notable individual finishes—like second at the Tour Championship, T3 at the Masters and T4 at the PGA—but often faded in final rounds and ultimately went winless for just the second time in his career. But the game is certainly there, and Morikawa clearly feels at home at forgiving Kapalua, where his average score is 67.8 and he’s never finished worse than seventh.
2025 The Sentry Betting Tips
While The Sentry is designed to be a star-studded opener to the season, this year’s tournament lays bare where the PGA Tour is entering 2025—three of the last seven winners (Jon Rahm, Smith and Dustin Johnson) are now on the LIV tour, McIlroy skips the event altogether, and the defending champion is a journeyman who got into the event thanks to his first win in eight years. Scheffler’s absence will be keenly felt in a tournament whose field depth isn’t what it used to be.
That’s reflected in the odds, where the co-No. 2 choice along with Morikawa is Justin Thomas, who despite a nice history in Maui—victories in 2017 and 2020—hasn’t won since the PGA Championship in 2022 and posted just three top-five finishes a year ago.
That begs sports bettors to look deeper down the oddsboard, to players who have shown more week-to-week consistency despite their lesser names. Russell Henley, who posted seven top-10s in 2024, is a sneaky +3500 choice this week. Max Greyserman, the up-and-comer from the fall season, is +4000.
Granted, those aren’t the kind of names you’d normally expect to see in such an elite, limited-field event. But with golf so fractured these days, there’s plenty of room for value-laden choices to surprise, especially when the winning machine known as Scheffler doesn’t play. Kirk’s victory last year in The Sentry seemed then like an aberration; looking back, it might have been a sign of things to come.
