The PGA TOUR is back! The 2026 season starts in the Aloha State with the first tournament of the year taking place in East Honolulu at Waialae Country Club. Rather than starting with the exclusive, Signature Event at the Sentry, this season kicks off with a full-field tournament with a standard cut and plenty of fresh new faces to go with some strong standard bearers. It’s set up to be a great week for DFS fantasy golf contests on DraftKings, so as you set your tournament lineups, check out my top three fantasy golf pivot plays for the week: Ben Griffin ($10,100), Kristoffer Reitan ($7,600) and Seonghyeon Kim ($6,600). I think those three golfers come in relatievly under the radar but have a strong chance to step-up and exceed salary-based expectations as strong pivot plays.
Let’s be sure to define what we’re hunting for in this post, to be sure we’re all aiming at the same green. A “fantasy golf pivot play” is a golfer with low expected ownership in tournament formats but a very high upside. Typically, these selections come with major risk factors compared to more popular options that are available around the same DFS salary. Even though these plays are NOT the safest options in their price range, they have enough potential upside to be worth the extra sweat since they come with lower ownership. Getting players at low ownership is critical to finding success in GPP tournament-style events with many entries, where making yours stand out is critical.. Be sure to check out my companion post to this one that highlights my picks for cash lineups if you’re looking for safer options that raise the floor of your lineup.
Let’s break down why I like each of my top three pivot plays this week!
Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $500K Season Tee Off [$100K to 1st].
Ben Griffin ($10,100)
At the top of the salary structure, four players from the top 10 in the world lead a fairly strong showing for this tournament. Russell Henley ($10,300) has such great history at this event that he’s getting lots of deserved attention, and there are some very strong players priced just below Griffin with Colin Morikawa ($9,800), Hideki Matsuyama ($9,700) and J.J. Spaun ($9,500) all getting lots of attention as well. While Griffin’s ownership will still be high, it could lag behind many of those options, even though he’s coming off an incredibly impressive breakthrough season and has a game that should fit this course very well.
Griffin won three tournaments in 2025 and finished second in two other events. He won his most recent event, which was in early November in Mexico on a track that has many similarities to the one he’ll face this week. Griffin finished in the top 12 in each of his last six events in 2025, and he will be set up for another monster season if he can carry over that success.
While he does bring plenty of win equity and a very high ceiling, he was also consistent with 24 made cuts in his 30 events last year, including at the Sony. In his career, he is 3-for-3 in making it to the weekend at Waialae with a pair of top-30 finishes.
Statistically, Griffin leads the field in Total Strokes Gained per round over the last 12 months, and he is sixth in Strokes Gained: Approach, and eighth in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. His outstanding approach game makes him my favorite straight-up pick in the field this week.
Kristoffer Reitan ($7,600)
Reitan is one of the new faces joining the PGA TOUR this year from the DP World Tour. The top ten players on the final 2025 Race to Dubai Rankings, not otherwise exempt, earn PGA TOUR membership for 2026, and seven of those 10 players are set to tee it up this week at the Sony Open. While Reitan isn’t a name people are as familiar with, he had a great season last year on the DP World Tour and could outperform the more familiar options around him in the salary structure like Rico Hoey ($8,100), Emiliano Grillo ($7,400), and Jake Knapp ($7,800).
Reitan burst onto the scene with a win at the Soudal Open in Belgium, where he erased a nine-shot lead in the final round and won in a playoff over Ewen Ferguson and Darius Van Driel.
Reitan followed up that win with a second-place finish the following week at the Austrian Alpine Open and posted seven top-15 finishes in his nine events starting with his win. He added top-five finishes in September (FedEx Open de France) and October (Alfred Dunhill Links Championship), and then he earned his second career DP World Tour victory early in December at the Nedbank Golf Challenge in honour of Gary Player, where he went wire-to-wire.
He’ll be making his course debut this week, so there’s some added risk, but the 27-year-old from Norway brings enough upside to definitely make him a GPP option in Honolulu.
Seonghyeon Kim ($6,600)
After spending last year on the Korn Ferry Tour, Seonghyeon Kim (formerly known as S.H. Kim in some formats) is back on the PGA TOUR this season. He finished No. 8 on the KFT Points list and has a good enough history on similar tracks and at this event that I think he brings very solid sleeper potential if you opt to build your lineup with a stars and scrubs format and need to find a cheap flier to partner with your stars.
Kim’s KFT win came last May in Kansas City at the AdventHealth Championship, after he started the year strong with a runner-up finish in the season-opening The Bahamas Golf Classic at Atlantis Paradise Island.
He was able to stay in the top 20 of the Korn Ferry Tour Points List for the whole season, and since the top 20 get their spot on the PGA TOUR secured, expect to see plenty of him in 2026.
He played this event twice in his career in his previous seasons on the PGA TOUR, and he made the cut both times. He finished T12 in 2023, with four rounds under 70, and he followed that up with a T30 in 2024, in his most recent appearance at the Sony.
Since earning his card back, Kim has been busy playing in Asia, posting a fourth-place at the Japan Open in October, and top-20 finishes at the Lexus Masters in Korea, the Singapore Open, and the Saudi International.
Kim’s solid course history and familiarity with similar courses should serve him well this week, and his recent form gives plenty of signs that he should be at least a cut-maker this week with the potential for a high finish if he really gets hot.
