With eight days until the first round of The Masters Tournament, the field for the season’s first major has been almost set. The only way a player can qualify for The Masters now is if they win this weekend’s Valero Texas Open at the Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio.
Most of the betting favorites to win this weekend’s tournament — including Ludvig Åberg (+1200), Corey Conners (+1600), and Tommy Fleetwood (+1600) — are already guaranteed to have a tee time at Augusta National. The player with the shortest odds to win who’s not already in The Masters field is Si Woo Kim, the World No. 66, who has the 11th-shortest odds to be holding the trophy come Sunday afternoon at +3500.
After Kim, the next four are Keith Mitchell (+4000), Bud Cauley (+4500), Ben Griffin (+4500), and Gary Woodland (+5000).
Of those five players, Woodland is the most accomplished, having racked up four PGA TOUR victories, including the 2019 U.S. Open. However, despite making 12 previous Masters appearances, he’s only made five cuts and has never recorded a Top-10 finish at Augusta National. Kim, another four-time PGA TOUR winner, doesn’t own a major championship trophy, but he does have a better track record at The Masters than Woodland does, having missed just one cut. Both men have appeared at The Masters every season since 2017, so one of them will constitute a big absence regardless.
A win on Sunday would be the second of Mitchell’s career, after he won The Honda Classic in 2019. Although he has made two appearances in the season’s first major and made the cut both times, he’s never finished in better than a tie for 43rd. Meanwhile, neither Cauley nor Griffin has won a PGA TOUR tournament, and neither has ever teed it up at Augusta National. No Masters debutant has ever won the tournament since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979.
Griffin was the last man out of the 2025 field, missing out by less than one one-hundredth of a world ranking point. During last weekend’s Texas Children’s Houston Open, Griffin’s Sunday 65 was good enough for a tie for 18th, but Michael Kim’s tie for 32nd vaulted him to 50th place in the Official World Golf Ranking, one spot ahead Griffin. If Griffin had made just one more birdie, or Michael Kim two more bogeys, he would’ve qualified for the tournament instead.
After the tournament, which qualified him for his second Masters, Michael Kim posted on X in reply to Griffin, “Go win Valero and I’ll see you there!!”
Thankfully for Griffin, he has a decent chance, with the second-best Course Fit Score in the 150-player field for this weekend’s tournament. TPC San Antonio especially rewards players who excel on their approach shots and in greenside bunkers, two areas where the 28-year-old stands out. The other main contenders to punch a last-minute ticket to Augusta National all have more glaring flaws; Si Woo Kim struggles too much with his putter, Woodland with his wedges, and Cauley on long-distance putts.
Of the four, Cauley is probably in the best form, having finished in the Top 10 in each of the last two tournaments of the Florida Swing, but Woodland finished as the runner-up to Min Woo Lee last weekend in his remarkable comeback from the brain surgery he underwent in September 2023. Si Woo Kim, who missed the cut last weekend, is in the worst form, but week-to-week results can be fickle when the margins are as thin as they are on the PGA TOUR.
Among other long-shots in this week’s field who have not yet qualified for The Masters, the biggest name is Rickie Fowler (+6500), a six-time PGA TOUR winner and former Masters runner-up who has slipped to 110th in the world rankings after reaching a career high of fourth in 2016. In 2014, he became one of just four players to finish in the top five of all four major championships, and he ranks among the most accomplished players to never win a major championship. Fowler has missed the cut at The Masters just once in 11 starts, although he failed to qualify in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
