THE PLAYERS Championship Pool Picks: Favorites, Sleepers & Longshots (2026)

Tier-based strategy, course history leaders, and top favorites to help you dominate your 2026 PLAYERS Championship pool.

by Jason Lisk - Mar 10, 2026

Welcome to THE PLAYERS Championship Pool Picks Strategy article for 2026. In this article, we will lay out some strategies to consider if you are playing in a PLAYERS Championship pool that uses tiers or requires you to pick several golfers.

As we add new content throughout this week, we will link it in this section.

• Portfolio Advice and Building Your PLAYERS Championship Entries – Posted Tuesday, March 10
• Top 15 Favorites at 2026 PLAYERS Championship – Posted Monday, March 9
• Best Golfers at TPC Sawgrass (Last 6 Years) – Posted Monday, March 9
• Majors Pool Strategy Articles – Posted Monday, March 9

Portfolio Advice and Building Your PLAYERS Championship Entries

We have specific tier-by-tier pick recommendation options in our Golf Majors & Masters Picks product, based on how conservative or contrarian you want to be.

We currently list four pick set options in the product:

• Conservative: The best relative win odds within each tier
• Balanced: A blend of tier win odds and popularity, based on pool size and reflecting the top grades overall
• Aggressive: Similar to “Balanced” but with more emphasis on lower popularity
• Contrarian: The best win odds among the golfers who have below-average projected tier pick popularity

You can combine these categories to build entries as well. For example, building around some of the bigger favorites into your pool is a solid strategy, as long as you balance it.

For an analogy to another pool type, imagine making a popular NCAA tournament champion pick with relatively high win odds in a March Madness pool, and adding some unpopular value plays to the Final Four to differentiate your entry from the crowd.

So you could build an entry that balances some of the favorites in the “Conservative” pick set with some of the “Contrarian” or “Aggressive” picks in other tiers to create your unique entry. Our grades are designed to reflect pool size and payout structure, so you will naturally see some more contrarian/less popular plays rise in grade in the largest pool sizes compared to smaller ones. You can still use these categories to build out entries.

Building Portfolios For Multiple Entries

If you play multiple entries, you can build them with differentiated key picks and shared picks in other tiers.

For instance, you could build multiple entries, including 1-2 of the “Conservative” picks with those from the other pick sets, and alternate which tier you use the more conservative favorites from.

If you’re playing multiple entries in a pool, we suggest being a little more diverse in your final tier, especially if it includes the entire rest of the field.

While you don’t need to get too crazy in how far down the list you go, you also don’t want to be heavily concentrated on one of the longer shots that could sink several of your entries with a bad performance.

Specific Tiers and Builds for the 2026 PLAYERS Championship

While every contest could have a slightly different tier structure, most are similar, with the biggest contenders in the top tier and then working down.

So, we thought we would discuss some potential strategies for building out tiers. For this exercise, we will use Splash Sports’ 6-tier structure for some of their PLAYERS Championship contests, but a lot of the discussion should still apply to slightly different golfer tiers and total number of tiers.

Tier 1

Scottie Scheffler is going to be the most popular pick, though, comparatively, you may see more picks go to both Rory McIlroy and Collin Morikawa than we saw in the majors pools last year, given Scheffler’s relative form coming in.

McIlroy is probably one of the top plays, as Morikawa could surpass him in popularity given the latter’s form in recent big events.

If you want the lowest owned leverage play, it could be Matt Fitzpatrick, who was a fairly popular pick in golf pools last week and disappointed, which could lead to some rebound value if a lot of people jump off.

Tiers 2 and 3

Two clear “chalk” public players in Tier 2 are Ludvig Aberg and Min Woo Lee, as well as last week’s winner, Akshay Bhatia, as all just finished highly at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

Does this mean you cannot pick them? Of course not, but if you do, you want to lean into values and unpopular combos elsewhere. It’s fine to pair one of these top three with a McIlroy or unpopular Fitzpatrick pick out of Tier 1.

If you are looking for more of a value/leverage play, both Shane Lowry and Robert MacIntyre project as near-average in odds to be best in the group, but at below-average pick rates.

In Tier 3, Chris Gotterup and Viktor Hovland are the chalk plays, dropping down into this tier. Genesis winner Jacob Bridgeman actually looks like a value play, projected to come in well below those top two in popularity. Sam Burns, who hasn’t finished well in his last two events, is a deeper contrarian play in this group at what could be extremely low ownership.

Tiers 4 and 5

These tiers are extremely flat in terms of win odds, so popularity can be a more significant driver here. These tiers can be big drivers if you can hit on the value plays. Last year, we highlighted Justin Rose as a value play at The Masters from these tiers, and Robert MacIntyre at the U.S. Open. Both went on to surprise 2nd-place finishes that likely boosted a lot of entries.

Most of these guys have “make the cut” odds in the 60%-70% range, so there are likely to be a couple of groups that produce quite a range of outcomes, from missed cut penalties to top-10 finishes this year. So, hitting on those better outcomes could be key.

You could either take a concentrated approach (hoping you hit the couple of golfers that perform relatively best from these tiers) or more of a balanced approach, where you take concentrated bets on key golfers in the earlier tiers, and then try to pair them with some combos here, hoping a couple ends up working out well for your portfolio.

Some of the value options include Justin Rose, Jordan Spieth, Corey Conners, and Taylor Pendrith. The chalk picks of these tiers include Sepp Straka, Nicolai Hojgaard, Daniel Berger, and Sahith Theegala.

Tier 6 and Beyond

Once you get to Tier 6 or higher (for pools with more tiers), these golfers’ odds of making the cut are typically under 60% (and in some cases well under 50%).

From a game theory perspective, you probably want to go with your best odds, with a big caveat. Avoiding the most popular picks here can have outsized value, if that popular but risky option fails, especially in pools that penalize for missed cuts. We don’t really see any massive popularity splits in these tiers right now, as Michael Thorbjornsen and Brooks Koepka look like the most popular in Tier 6, as the only two we project to approach 10% popularity out of this large group.

So we would just focus on your best win odds options in this range in the U.S. Open, and hope your guy can avoid the rough enough to make the cut.

THE PLAYERS Championship Odds: Top 15 Favorites

The PLAYERS Championship betting odds and tournament win percentages will be displayed on the Data Grid on Monday. Throughout the day, it will populate with information like betting and popularity data.

Here are the top 15 (and ties) in betting odds to win the 2026 PLAYERS Championship:

• Scottie Scheffler +350
• Rory McIlroy +900
• Collin Morikawa +1600
• Xander Schauffele +2200
• Ludvig Aberg +2200
• Tommy Fleetwood +2200
• Cameron Young +2500
• Hideki Matsuyama +2800
• Si Woo Kim +2800
• Russell Henley +3300
• Matt Fitzpatrick +3300
• Viktor Hovland +3300
• Akshay Bhatia +3300
• Chris Gotterup +3300
• Min Woo Lee +3300

If you are one of our Majors & Masters subscribers, you’ll see the odds of each golfer winning their respective tier, based on the tiers you’ve set up.

Best Golfers at TPC Sawgrass: Last Six Years

If we limit it to golfers who have played at least eight rounds in the last six years at TPC Sawgrass, here are the leaders in Strokes Gained over that span:

• Scottie Scheffler: +3.0
• Hideki Matsuyama: +2.7
• Tommy Fleetwood: +2.2
• Bud Cauley: +2.2
• Corey Conners: +2.2
• Rory McIlroy: +2.1
• Tom Hoge: +2.1
• Brian Harman: +2.1
• Shane Lowry: +2.0
• Aaron Rai: +2.0
• Daniel Berger: +2.0

Akshay Bhatia (who just won last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational) finished 3rd here last year, but missed the cut the year before. Because of that, he has a +2.6 Strokes Gained average in six rounds at TPC Sawgrass.

THE PLAYERS Championship Majors Strategy Articles

We have written a Majors pool strategy article on how to think about tier-based Majors pools, which require picking golfers from different groupings. If you haven’t read it, you should review it, as some concepts will be discussed here.

We also have an article on strategies to consider when playing in “Pick X” type pools. In these pools, you do not have to select from within tiers, and the entire field is available, but you pick a preset number of total golfers, like Pick 5 or Pick 8, for THE PLAYERS Championship.

These articles complement the customized pick advice and data in our Golf Majors & Masters Picks product, which allows you to get advice after organizing specific golfers into tiers in your pool.

Depending on which golfers are grouped in tiers, each pool may have different value picks. We cannot cover every possibility in an article, but we hope to highlight some key strategies (and players, as we get into THE PLAYERS Championship week).