Just five years ago, this Major was in November—remember that? Dustin Johnson’s win at Augusta right around Thanksgiving, months after the pandemic had the globe sheltering in place. It was the biggest single-weekend sporting event since the pandemic changed sports all around the world, and this tournament became more popular than ever. We’re now just under a half-decade and one Scottie Scheffler removed from that—hard to believe—and, for many bettors, The Masters represents the beginning of the golf season. And why not? March Madness concludes, baseball begins. Jim Nantz’s “Hello, friends” as fresh as the dew on the blades of rough. Magnolias and the sun shining coins on Rae’s Creek. Our purses have had too many team-sport priorities, and now it’s time to settle in for some bets we can track across four glorious days down in Georgia. Below, I’ve got my full betting cheat sheet and betting preview for The Masters, including outright winner predictions, prop bets, and parlays for which I’ll be filing tickets.
Indeed—that’s one of the biggest allures to so many of golf’s betting markets: your bet isn’t busted, at the earliest, until the cut line. And bets always have the ability to hang around until Sunday, especially at The Masters. You want to hang in there until someone is draped in green. And, hopefully, you end your weekend draped in, you know, the more capitalist green.
Below I run you through my complete betting card for the 2025 Masters, with links to tail in the DraftKings Network betting group. Follow my handle @dansby_edits for more insights throughout this year’s first Major.
The Masters 2025: winner prediction and best bet
Xander Schauffele (+1800)
The rib injury is the first thing anyone thinks about before they thumb Schauffele on any bet on their DraftKings Sportsbook app this week. Why wouldn’t it be? We’re all pretty used to Scottie Scheffler’s rust after his hand injury. So, too, for the 2024 CHAMPION GOLFER OF THE YEAR.
Through it all, though, Schauffele still ranks third on the TOUR in Approach to Greens (1.021). For transparency, everywhere else, 132nd or worse (though no worse than 166th!). And what is Augusta National? Say it with me now: a second-shot golf course! We’ve known this our entire time watching the tradition unlike any other.
With the short game being so absolutely crucial to success at Augusta National, I like getting 18-to-1 odds on someone with Xander’s pedigree at this course. Let us not forget he was the one neck-and-neck with Tiger Woods at the 2019 Masters, and he also had a green jacket seemingly locked up until he skied one into the water on 16 two years later, when Hideki Matsuyama famously won.
Schauffele won two majors in the last year, and is not-so-quietly on a Scottie-Scheffler-lite run right now, with that PGA Championship win and a victory at Royal Troon. His T12 placing at Valspar may not exactly inspire much confidence that he’s ready to duke it out and end atop the summit of a top-ten leaderboard.
Quick note on the tiers
It’s perfectly reasonable to grab the shorter-odds favorites (just Scheffler, McIlroy, and Morikawa) over Schauffele, given their current forms. But let’s just remember who has the most balanced skill-set of them all, and has thrived in a lot of bright-lights opportunities in golf’s biggest moments over the last five years.
Back to Xander—
He’s my favorite golfer, so I’ll look for every reason to bet on him. Maybe he’s a better DFS play than he is an outright-winner, even at his $9,000+ salary. But that Approach to Greens stat being so definitively elite amidst an otherwise uncharacteristically-dismissable stretch of play from Xander has me thinking he’s on the brink of a big performance. He did tell Golf Digest, after all, that his goal was to get as many regulation reps in before The Masters.
That’s because he’s got every intention of winning it this year and setting the menu for next year’s Champions’ Dinner. While Rory and Morikawa are playing for redemption, and Scheffler’s playing because he’s inevitable, Schauffele is playing with the taste of major wins fresh on his tongue. That’ll be the difference come Sunday. X marks the spot.
Best bet: Xander Schauffele to win The Masters (+1800)
Tail X to get one major closer to the Grand Slam with me in the DKN betting group here!
Honorable mentions and outright-winner thoughts:
- Will Zalatoris (+6000), Corey Conners (+6000), and Cameron Smith (+6000) all at a 60-to-1 odds, huh? Feels like a tier of sleepers everyone should be eyeing. All three have a track record of great play at Augusta National—Smith and Zalatoris both most notoriously during their rookie seasons on the TOUR—and feel like good options to attack for deep-sleeper winners. I’d prefer them over some of the names in the +3000-to-5000 odds tiers. Conners is fresh off three top-eight finishes!
- Collin Morikawa (+1600) would be my alternate pick for the Schauffele tier. He’s first on the TOUR in birdie average (5.02%) and the league-leader in the stat we love so much for Xander, Approach to Greens, with a 1.190 avg. Scheffler, McIlroy, and Rahm pose an intimidating trio above them on the odds leaderboard, but Morikawa ranks behind only McIlroy in strokes gained tee-to-green in 2025. Statistically, of all the short-odds favorites, his game might be the most crisp relative to his ceiling. Not much value in this price, but what I’m saying is: it’s proportionate.
- If you feel like betting on course pedigree, don’t forget about Ludvig Åberg (+2000), whose win at the Genesis Invitational was so impressive (10+ strokes gained tee-to-green) that it’s impossible to ignore his rookie run at Augusta National in April of 2024. The Genesis win was too similarly dominant to his top-five finish at The Masters last year, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you see him hang around this weekend.
- Speaking of simply betting on someone to hang around until Sunday and place decently, Shane Lowry (+4500) always seems to do just that (or better) at the Majors, and is fourth in shots gained tee-to-green in 2025, right behind Scottie Scheffeler.
Top Finish parlay
You can find the Top Finish (Incl. Ties) subtab under The Masters tab in your DraftKings Sportsbook app, and it’s here I’ll be taking some of the golfers mentioned above. As far as the exact parameters of the Top Finish bets, it’s quite simple: each player in the field has odds you can select for wagers that the golfer will place in the top-forty, -thirty, and -twenty players.
As such, we’ll be taking the following five bets and parlaying them:
Ludvig Åberg Top-20 finish (-165)
Shane Lowry Top-30 finish (-175)
Will Zalatoris Top-30 finish (-145)
Corey Conners Top-30 finish (-140)
Cameron Smith Top-30 finish (-120)
This results in a five-leg parlay odds of +1240, and you can tail it with me here, in the DraftKings Network betting group. I’m also betting them all as singles, terrible odds be damned. I usually keep it -155 or longer, but part of the fun of betting the Masters is riding out a bunch of bets across the whole tournament. So why not?
18-hole matchup R1: Aaron Rai vs. Cameron Young
Right now, Rai is favored in this matchup at -130 odds to Cameron Young’s +105. And I’m all over Young, here. I know Rai is in the midst of a Rainnaisance, per se, and will be the big rookie story at Augusta this year. He’s had dinner with Luke Donald, and he’s the tenth-ranked European in World Golf Rankings six months out from the Ryder Cup. We know what’s on the line.
I think, unfortunately, Rai might, a little bit, too. Here’s his quote from the feature in which he’s speaking about his career upturn in the context of a potential Ryder Cup bid:
“There are a lot of amazing opportunities in front of me this season, but I’m still not 100% sure on how I’m going to deal with them,” he says. “Managing my preparation and schedule around the Majors is going to be really important. You want to play enough in the run up to them, but without getting to a point where the energy starts to fall. That’s a slightly different challenge this year, especially with me being in the Signature events.
“It’s an amazing opportunity, but it creates a tricky dynamic with scheduling. You end up playing two events in a row and then if you want to play three, three becomes four because there’s another Signature event… and then there’s another Major around the corner. It’s a position I haven’t been in before. It’s a little bit of a hypothetical, figuring out what works best, what might not work best.”
It just sounds like someone who’s caught up in the moment a bit, and is trying to steady his perspective about the long goal: representing Europe in the 2024 Ryder Cup. You know I hate to play spoiler, but either Rai is playing his Augusta debut so cool that his insistence on not talking about it is a symptom of nonchalance and not anxious avoidance—more power to the man. I simply have seen this movie play out too many times before.
And, as for the quote above, methinks the golfer doth babble too much.
Young’s veteran savvy at Augusta
Cam Young, on the other hand, might be in a position to approach Augusta National with as much loosey-goosey to his composure as he’s yet had in his career. We’d love that for someone whose second shots are notoriously the worst in his arsenal (0.748 in Approach to Greens, 175th on TOUR), he makes up for it with his driving and putting, 55th and 45th on TOUR respectively.
I remember The Masters when Cam Young drove the green on 11 to little ballyhoo at all. He’s still got that in his bag, and I think that sort of par five advantage will squarely have him win over Rai this year, despite Rai’s clear expectations to be the story as an Augusta rookie.
I’m just betting on the letdown opening round for Rai, and the Augusta veteran in Cam Young (and, really, the best form for a perennial underperformer) at +105 in this one for the early-morning matchups.
Tail Cam Young to squash the Rookie Rai ra-ra with me in the DKN Betting Group here!
