After nearly all the best players in the world teed it up last week in The Genesis Invitational at Torrey Pines South — a tournament in which rising star Ludvig Åberg emerged victorious for his second PGA TOUR victory — most of the heavy hitters are sitting out this week’s tournament at Vidanta Vallarta in the Mexican state of Nayarit.
Last week, I suggested that South Korean Sungjae Im would be the best Asian finisher, and instead, it was Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama, the continent’s only men’s major champion. But the second-best Asian finisher was a far less-heralded star, Chinese Taipei’s Kevin Yu. This week, two players from the island will tee it up in the same tournament for just the second time this season. The 132-player field contains both Yu and C.T. Pan, who won a bronze medal in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo after emerging from a seven-man playoff, one of 12 medals that Chinese Taipei won in those games, the most that the island has achieved in its history.
DraftKings Sportsbook is offering a matchup between Pan and Yu as one of its hundreds of PGA TOUR bets available, and as a golf enthusiast with familial roots in Taipei, I figured I had to take an angle. Here’s why I think Yu is better-suited to score better than Pan in the first round.
Best Kevin Yu Prop Bet on DraftKings Sportsbook
Kevin Yu over C.T. Pan (-130)
Pan has a lot of reasons to be confident entering the week, as my colleagues Alex Hunter and Zach Thompson have already pointed out. The PGA TOUR veteran finished in a tie for third at least year’s Mexico Open at Vidanta, his second-best finish of the season. He also finished in a tie for 29th at the event in 2022, although it was played in May that year. Meanwhile, Yu has never teed it up at the event.
Last season, Vidanta Vallarta was about average in difficulty, with the 21st lowest scoring average relative to par among the 50 courses played on the PGA TOUR, and according to Data Golf, it’s easier than the median course played on the PGA TOUR since the 2015 season in all aspects of golf. In fact, it’s the third-easiest course in Data Golf’s database on shots around the green. Its biggest defense is its putting difficulty, where it has been just 0.005 strokes per round easier than the average course, adjusted for the strength of field. That could pose a problem for Yu, who’s just 157th in Strokes Gained: Putting this season. However, Pan is also mediocre with the flat stick and below average on approach shots, while his strength with a wedge — he ranks 18th in Strokes Gained: Around the Green this season — should be neutralized by the course’s overall ease in that department.
Plus, Yu has simply been in better form than Pan has. He has posted top-20 finishes in each of his past two events, including last week’s tournament, where there’s hardly any shame in losing to the world’s best players. Yu has only picked up one PGA TOUR win in his career — as has Pan — but he has more than half as many Top-10 finishes despite playing in fewer than one-third as many tournaments. Yu’s win came just four months ago at the Sanderson Farms Championship, and he’s trending in the right direction. Meanwhile, Pan finished just T-57 at the WM Phoenix Open on a course that theoretically fits his game much better.
