AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am One And Done Pick Strategy (2024)

The 2024 Pebble Beach Pro-Am is the second Signature Event of the year, so where should you look for One And Done picks in a strong field?

The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is the second Signature Event of the new year, and the first since the Sentry in Hawaii in early January. It’s the first year in the Signature Event rotation for Pebble Beach, as the tournament made major structural shifts to get Designated Event status, replacing the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

Those changes including changing the field size format, and moving to the no-cut format where all the pros will play on the weekend (and the amateurs will be done after Friday). It also includes removing the Monterey Peninsula course from the rotation, so that the event will now be played only at Pebble Beach and Spyglass Hill. (If you check our Course Strokes Gained ratings, those now only include past rounds played at those two courses.)

Because of its Signature Event status, this event ranks within the top tier in prize purse. It’s likely behind a few of the Majors and the three player-hosted Signature Events in first-place prize money, but the winner gets $3.6 million. It has also attracted a strong field, even stronger than the Sentry opener.

If you want to see where this tournament ranks in your specific One And Done pool, you can set up your pool entry in our One And Done Golf product.

Last Week

For the fourth week in a row, an extreme longshot won the PGA event. This time, it was Frenchman Matthieu Pavon making a big up-and-down birdie out of the rough on the 18th hole, to hold off Nicolai Hojgaard.

Last week, the only top-graded recommendation in this pick article to finish near the top was Tony Finau, who finished tied for sixth place. Hojgaard just missed the cut for the article, but for those of you who were subscribing to our product, he did move into the top six on average pick grade before the tournament began, based on positive betting line movement.

It was still, likely, a reasonable successful week strategically, because our over-arching strategy was to not use the top golfers in the field, and none of them won, Xander Schauffele and Ludvig Aberg (tied for ninth) were the only two to get in the Top 10. A decent chunk of One-And-Done pool pickers used up some top golfers on this one.

2024 Pebble Beach Field Overview

This analysis serves as a compliment to the data we provide in our Data Grid once you set up your One And Done Golf Picks entry, where you can get customized pick grading based on things like the number of picks you need each week, and the number of tournaments used in your pool.

Here are some notable highlights for the Pebble Beach field:

• Rory McIlroy is making his 2024 PGA Tour debut, and checks in at No. 1, just narrowly ahead of Scottie Scheffler in our rankings.
• Tyrell Hatton, who was No. 10 in our ratings, is rumored to be joining LIV golf this week and expected to no longer be in the field.
• Nearly all of our top-rated golfers are in this field, as other than the LIV golfers, the only other golfer ranked inside our top 30 not in this week’s field is Min Woo Lee, who was a PGA Tour rookie, hasn’t been able to earn his way into the Signature Events yet.
• Justin Rose, No. 62 in our rankings, won this event last year, and is competing again, but this is a vastly different field from last year’s version, as only 34 golfers who played in the event last year are back in the field.

2024 Pebble Beach One And Done Pick Strategy

Big Names, Big Event

For the last three weeks, we have generally been advising saving the best golfers for use in bigger tournaments. Even if you did not hit a top finish with your individual pick, if you used that strategy, things have generally worked out, as “the chalk” picks largely failed, and other entries in your pool have burned some of them at lower value events.

Now is the time to fire golfers that do rank near the top … to a point.

We would still advise largely saving our top three available golfers: Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, and Viktor Hovland. That’s for two reasons. First, they could be more popular as the biggest names and the first real spot for others to use them. Second, even though Pebble Beach is a Signature Event, others do have more upside than the $3.6 million first place prize here.

The Players Championship is at $4.5 million to first. Three of the Signature Events (Genesis Invitational, Arnold Palmer Invitational, and The Memorial) are getting bumped up to $4.0 million to first this year. We don’t know the Majors’ purse sizes yet this year, but we project that the U.S. Open and The Masters could also rank higher in the pecking order.

So we would look at that next tier of golfers, just behind the top favorites, but fully capable of winning at Pebble Beach. But taking any of those top three (or Xander Schauffele, who is also ranked inside our top six) is a reasonable decision.

Cantlay, Spieth, Morikawa, and Homa Lead the Way

When we look at that next tier, our grades are typically focusing in on four golfers getting a grade of 90 or above in a lot of pools, with those grades shifting a bit depending on golfers already used.

Those golfers are Patrick Cantlay, Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa, and Max Homa. They happen to be the golfers currently with the 5th (Homa), 6th (Cantlay), and tied for 7th-best win odds (Morikawa and Spieth).

Cantlay is an interesting one. He has excellent course history at Pebble Beach (+2.4 strokes gained at the two courses used this week, and a 3rd and 4th place finish his last two times here). That might ordinarily lead to some moderately high popularity, but he is coming off two terrible performances by his standards. He has finished outside the Top 50 at each of the last two events on the West Coast swing. That recent form might lead entries to look elsewhere.

So the decision on Cantlay is going against recent form, to take a guy who is going to generally rank in the top 5 to 8 in win odds at these Signature Events.

In addition to those four, here are other golfers with a greater than 1.7% chance to win based on implied betting odds:

• Justin Thomas (No. 33, +2500)
• Ludvig Aberg (No. 14, +3000)
• Tommy Fleetwood (No. 12, +3300)
• Matt Fitzpatrick (No. 18, +3500)
• Tony Finau (No. 32, +4000)
• Sam Burns (No. 26, +4000)
• Sungjae Im (No. 20, +4000)

Longer Shots

We’ve seen some real long shots win early this season, and it’s probable that no one in your pool has hit a tourney winner yet. We’ve highlighted three longer shots each week (since the Sony Open) and while we haven’t hit a winner, four of the nine highlighted long shots have finished Top 10 that week, including Nicolai Hojgaard finishing 2nd place last week.

Here are the longer shots at +4500 or more to consider this week:

• J.T. Poston (+4500)
• Russell Henley (+5500)
• Adam Scott (+6500)

2024 The American Express One And Done Picks

Here are our highest graded picks for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in One and Done pools (in a sample single-pick pool using all tournaments through the BMW Championship) as of Tuesday morning. However, the odds can and do change, so check back to our One And Done product up until your pick deadline to see the latest rankings. Your individual pool may also differ slightly in the specific golfers, based on how many tournaments you use and how many picks you need to make in the pool, as well as by who you have already used.

• Patrick Cantlay
• Collin Morikawa
• Jordan Spieth
• Max Homa
• Ludvig Aberg
• Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Thomas (6th place tie)