Fantasy Golf Sleeper Report – 2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Fantasy Sleeper Report

There’s horses for courses, and then there’s Max Homa on Poa Annua greens.

The immensely-likable 32-year-old has now racked up six PGA TOUR wins following victory at last week’s Farmers Insurance Open, and four of them have come on Poa Annua greens. That’s something to keep in the forefront of your mind whenever the TOUR rolls around to the West Coast.

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It could have been so different, has Sunday’s sportsbook favorite Jon Rahm not made a litany of errors that brought an end to his extraordinary winning run. Sam Ryder, who looked to be waltzing away with the title at one point, will take some time to forget the double-bogey on 15 that saw his hopes go down the pan.

And then there’s Homa, who gained eight strokes on the field on Sunday – scarcely believable – in tricky conditions to claim another famous win in California.

What price with the sportsbooks would he have been had he entered the AT&T Pebble Beach this week? We’re still in Cali and we’re still on Poa Annua greens, so the answer is very short indeed.

Instead, the likes of U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick, the unpredictable Jordan Spieth and the classy Viktor Hovland will lead the way in the betting market, followed closely by the likes of defending champion Tom Hoge, Seamus Power and Kevin Kisner.

Hoge won in decent fashion last year, making a mockery of his 203-start wait for a PGA TOUR win by accelerating to the finishing line with four birdies in a bogey-free back nine at Pebble Beach on Sunday. More prolific sorts like Spieth and Patrick Cantlay could only watch on and admire Hoge’s fortitude.

For those not looped in, the AT&T Pebble Beach is a pro-am event played across three courses, and these are not ideal conditions for bettors – a tip of the hat to you if you predicted the wins of Nick Taylor, Ted Potter Jr and Vaughn Taylor here in recent times.

The pros are paired with a ‘celebrity partner’ – ranging from Hollywood A-listers to TikTok influencers, and together they take on Spyglass Hill, Monterey Peninsula and Pebble Beach itself. There’s little to write about the first two courses, they are simply feature-less and set up to give the amateurs in the field half a chance, whereas Pebble Beach is one of the most storied layouts on the PGA TOUR.

A former U.S. Open host, Pebble Beach features some of the most iconic backdrops and holes in all of golf, and while conditions are set up favorably due to the nature of this event, this is a venue that still provides fun golf to watch.

Bettors can also be buoyed by a rollcall of winners at long odds. Hoge (60/1), Nick Taylor (160/1) and Ted Potter (300/1) have all secured handsome paydays for their backers, and while Daniel Berger (14/1) and Phil Mickelson (25/1) have bucked that trend at times, the AT&T Pebble Beach is still an event to get excited about.

But who makes our shortlist of Pebble Beach 2023 sleepers?

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Ben Griffin – 60/1 – Although his odds are somewhat short relative to his rookie status, there’s no doubt that Ben Griffin has been playing excellent golf of late.

In eight ShotLink measured starts on the PGA TOUR, Griffin has gained strokes on approach in seven of them, and as basic building blocks for success are concerned that’s an excellent place to start.

His best work has come at the Sony Open and Bermuda Championship, which you may know as short, coastal tests not all that dissimilar to Pebble Beach, and according to his OWGR profile the second-best ranking points performance of his career came in a second place finish at a pro-am event on the Korn Ferry Tour.

Taylor Moore – 60/1 – It went completely under the radar, and you suspect he won’t want it at the top of his golfing resumé, but Taylor Moore won the ‘team’ component of the Pro-Am with his playing partner 12 months ago.

That’s noteworthy because Moore delivered a sublime ball-striking performance on his way to T11 at the Farmers Insurance Open last week, and so these two converging factors are particularly interesting.

He has a pretty good short game, by all accounts, and so if Moore combines last week’s improvements with his baseline performance, he could be set for another excellent outing at Pebble Beach.

Nick Hardy – 75/1 – Bursting onto the scene with a T14 finish at the U.S. Open in the summer, Nick Hardy has since followed up with two PGA TOUR top-10s in an up-and-down run of things.

But he’s gained strokes on the field on approach in each of his last six measured starts, and in that U.S. Open gained a whopping +2.14 strokes putting on the Poa Annua greens of The Country Club in Massachusetts.

It means that Hardy has the toolkit to do very nicely at Pebble Beach, and he will be hoping to build on a start on the PGA TOUR in which he has shown plenty of potential.

Matthew NeSmith – 80/1 – The idiosyncratic nature of Poa Annua greens seems to be to the liking of Matthew NeSmith, who has shown some form with the flatstick on these surfaces – including T11 and T16 in this event in the past three years.

They didn’t work for him at the Farmers, admittedly, where he missed the cut, but the bigger picture is that he gained strokes on approach in his five outings prior to that.

October yielded three consecutive top-10 finishes for NeSmith, while at roughly this time last year he finished T3 at a quality Valspar Championship. He’s a player with a tremendously high ceiling.

S.H. Kim – 80/1 – Since the return of the PGA TOUR in January, S.H. Kim has finished T12 and T20 at the Sony Open and Farmers Insurance Open respectively.

What’s most interesting about that run is that he gained strokes on the field in every department, and that shows his all-round game is in fine fettle – usually an arbiter of continued success.

Kim won the Japan PGA Championship in 2021 – that’s a big deal for Asian players, and has shown form in coastal tests in Florida, the Bahamas and Hawaii, so he should take nicely to the conditions at Pebble Beach.

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Want more of this week’s fantasy predictions? Check out our full fantasy preview for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am here.

Sleeper Report Predictions This Season (2022-2023)

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