Best Golf Handicappers 2026: US Picks Ranked by ROI
Most "best golf picks" lists are affiliate pages with invented numbers. This one only includes services whose results are published somewhere you can go and read, and every row links to its source so you can check it rather than take our word for it. Where a service doesn't publish a figure, we leave it blank instead of filling it in.
Every service here picks top-finish bets for US bettors: Golf Digest, PGATOUR.com and our own picks at US sportsbooks in American odds, and Data Golf at bet365. UK tipsters bet different markets at different prices, so a percentage from one side does not measure the same bet as a percentage from the other. They have their own leaderboard.
ROI without each record's best bet
Top 10 and top-finish bets only · outline = no independent record · whyTop 10 and top-finish bets
-
1
Golf Tipsters
Top 5 and Top 10 finish bets · five picks a week · 1,726 bets
No independent recordThe only backtest in this table. Every other row is real picks or bets, made before each event.
- Without best bet
- +15.0%best bet about +38 units; average of 30 runs
- ROI, every bet
- +16.0%ties settled dead heat
- Profit (units)
- +561.7on 3,500 staked, 350 events
- Worst drawdown
- -118 units
- Period
- since 2019
- Source
- Our own record
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2
Rick Gehman
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · RickRunGood, on the panel to 2023 · 34 of 140 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us- Without best bet
- +9.5%best bet +7.5 units: Mackenzie Hughes +750, 2020 Houston Open
- ROI, every bet
- +14.8%ties settled dead heat; +29.8% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- +20.76on 140 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-234 seasons
-
3
Stephen Hennessey
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · Golf Digest · 55 of 247 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by usOne bet is 50 of his 68.72 units: a +5000 Top 10 on Hayden Buckley at the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge. Golf Digest printed the price before the event, and Buckley finished T5. With every bet counted he is +27.8%, the highest figure on this page.
- Without best bet
- +7.6%best bet +50 units: Hayden Buckley +5000, 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge
- ROI, every bet
- +27.8%ties settled dead heat; +35.1% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- +68.72on 247 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-267 seasons
-
4
Data Golf
Data Golf bet log, Top 5, 10 and 20 bets · Model bet log, closed in 2022 · 352 of 3,050 landed
No independent record · logged by Data Golf as it bet, at bet365Only its Top 5, 10 and 20 bets are counted; with matchups and outrights, its whole log is +3.9%. Stakes vary with the model's edge, so this is profit over units staked, not 1 unit a bet. All at bet365, in decimal odds. Logs for 2019, 2020 and 2021.
- Without best bet
- +6.8%best bet +15.36 units: Callum Shinkwin Top 5 +4000, 2019
- ROI, every bet
- +8.3%ties settled by bet365, dead heat
- Profit (units)
- +81.29on 975 staked across 3,050 bets
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-213 seasons
-
5
Andy Lack
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · No Laying Up · 32 of 130 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us- Without best bet
- -4.9%best bet +7 units: Corey Conners +700, 2026 Travelers Championship
- ROI, every bet
- +0.6%ties settled dead heat; +7.7% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- +0.72on 130 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2022-264 seasons
-
6
Lee Alldrick
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · FanShare Sports, on the panel to 2023 · 25 of 127 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by usUK-based, but these are the panel's bets at US sportsbooks.
- Without best bet
- -8.7%best bet +9 units: Troy Merritt +900, 2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am
- ROI, every bet
- -1.5%ties settled dead heat; +7.4% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- -1.93on 127 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-234 seasons
-
7
Chris Breece
PGATOUR.com Expert Picks, Top 5, 10 and 20 bets · PGA TOUR, Golfbet · 39 of 138 landed
No independent record · picks published by PGATOUR.com before each event, settled by us at 1 unit each- Without best bet
- -10.5%best bet +6.5 units: Sahith Theegala Top 5 +650, 2024 TOUR Championship
- ROI, every bet
- -5.8%ties settled dead heat; +0.2% paid in full
- Profit (units)
- -7.94on 138 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2024-263 seasons
-
8
Keith Stewart
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · Read The Line · 25 of 98 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us- Without best bet
- -11.8%best bet +7.5 units: Jhonattan Vegas +750, 2024 3M Open
- ROI, every bet
- -4.0%ties settled dead heat; +4.3% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- -3.92on 98 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2024-263 seasons
-
9
Pat Mayo
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · Mayo Media Network · 48 of 253 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us2026 alone is +27.22 units at dead heat. The six seasons before it net -42.24.
- Without best bet
- -12.3%best bet +16 units: Robby Shelton +1600, 2019 Greenbrier
- ROI, every bet
- -5.9%ties settled dead heat; +13.4% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- -15.02on 253 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-267 seasons
-
10
Ben Everill
PGATOUR.com Expert Picks, Top 5, 10 and 20 bets · PGA TOUR, Golfbet, on the panel to 2025 · 17 of 61 landed
No independent record · picks published by PGATOUR.com before each event, settled by us at 1 unit each- Without best bet
- -22.5%best bet +3.6 units: Frankie Capan III Top 20 +360, 2025 American Express
- ROI, every bet
- -16.2%ties settled dead heat; -6.6% paid in full
- Profit (units)
- -9.89on 61 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2024-252 seasons
-
11
Christopher Powers
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · Golf Digest · 40 of 248 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us0 for 33 in 2025.
- Without best bet
- -26.4%best bet +13 units: Ollie Schniederjans +1300, 2020 Bermuda Championship
- ROI, every bet
- -21.0%ties settled dead heat; -11.4% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- -52.13on 248 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-267 seasons
-
12
Brandon Gdula
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · numberFire, on the panel to 2025 · 42 of 224 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us- Without best bet
- -28.4%best bet +9 units: Paul Casey +900, 2020 PGA Championship
- ROI, every bet
- -24.2%ties settled dead heat; -2.0% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- -54.26on 224 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-256 seasons
-
13
Will Gray
PGATOUR.com Expert Picks, Top 5, 10 and 20 bets · PGA TOUR, Golfbet · 27 of 146 landed
No independent record · picks published by PGATOUR.com before each event, settled by us at 1 unit each- Without best bet
- -30.6%best bet +7 units: Joel Dahmen Top 20 +700, 2026 Farmers Insurance Open
- ROI, every bet
- -25.6%ties settled dead heat; -16.5% paid in full
- Profit (units)
- -37.42on 146 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2024-263 seasons
-
14
Anonymous tour caddie
Golf Digest betting panel, Top 10 bets · Golf Digest panel · 38 of 192 landed
No independent record · picks published by Golf Digest before each event, settled by us- Without best bet
- -33.6%best bet +8 units: Alex Noren +800, 2020 Northern Trust
- ROI, every bet
- -29.3%ties settled dead heat; -21.5% paid in full, as Golf Digest counts
- Profit (units)
- -56.21on 192 staked, 1 unit per bet
- Worst drawdown
- Not published
- Period
- 2019-256 seasons
The whole Golf Digest panel together: -105.33 units on 1,774 Top 10 bets, -5.9% at dead heat (+6.1% paid in full). Download every pick.
The whole PGATOUR.com panel together: -63.99 units on 482 top-finish bets, -13.3% at dead heat (-2.4% paid in full). Download every pick.
How to read this table
The notes behind every number. Tap a heading to open it.
Why we rank without each record's best bet.
On a record of a few hundred bets, one long-odds hit can move the ROI by 20 points. Stephen Hennessey's +27.8% with every bet counted is the highest figure on this page, but 50 of his 68.72 units came from one bet: a +5000 Top 10 on Hayden Buckley at the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge. The price was real - Golf Digest printed it before the event - and Buckley finished T5. Without that one bet, he is +7.6% over 246 bets.
So every row is ranked on its ROI with its single most profitable bet taken out. The rule is the same for every row, ours included, and it asks one question: what did the rest of the record do? The all-bets ROI is still on every row, next to it.
Read this rule with care, because it helps us. Our backtest has about 1,726 bets, against 61 to 253 for each Golf Digest and PGATOUR.com expert, so taking out one bet moves our figure much less than theirs. Data Golf, with 3,050 bets, is bigger than ours, and the rule moves it by 1.6 points. We chose the rule after we saw Hennessey's record. It moved our row from second to first.
Our row is a backtest. Every other row is real picks.
Golf Tipsters' +16.0% is a walk-forward backtest over 350 events since 2019: the method was fixed on events before each season and then applied blind. It is not a log of picks we sent - that ledger only began filling on 14 August 2026. Every other row is the opposite: picks printed in a free article before each tournament, or bets Data Golf logged as it placed them. On evidence, that makes ours the weakest row in the table, whatever its rank, and under RULE FIVE our own word does not count toward a score.
It is also an average. The backtest simulates each tournament thousands of times to price it, and the picks shift with the random numbers, so we publish the mean of 30 runs. With every bet counted, single runs landed anywhere from +10.8% to +25.3%. Without the best bet, they landed from +10.0% to +23.7%. The lowest run is only 0.5 points above Rick Gehman's +9.5%. Luck in which golfers finish inside the top 10 moves every row on this page by much more than that. If an independent reviewer ever trials the service, that figure goes in the column and ours gives way to it.
Nobody independent checks any US golf record we found.
UK tipsters have Smart Betting Club, which receives picks before each event and settles them, and Honest Betting Reviews, which subscribes and follows them with real money. We found no US equivalent for golf. Every row on this page is kept by the service itself, by the publisher that prints it, or by an app that also sells the picks. That is why no bar on this page is solid.
How we counted the Golf Digest figures - and why they are lower than Golf Digest's own.
Golf Digest's betting panel prints each expert's picks before every event, including one Top 10 bet each, at US sportsbook prices. We rebuilt every one of those Top 10 picks from 2019-20 to 2026 - 1,774 settled bets - and checked each against the real finish. The full list, with the article each pick came from, is here.
The rules are a sportsbook's. Every bet is 1 unit. A tie at 10th is settled dead heat: the stake is split by the places left inside the top 10, so a +1400 bet that ties 10th with five others pays about 2.5 units, not 14. A player who withdrew before the first round is void. Our own record is settled the same way.
Golf Digest's own season tallies pay ties in full, and they have bookkeeping slips: weeks never added, losing picks not charged, hits credited at a different price from the one printed, and a few group-winner bets counted as Top 10 bets. Its weekly hit-or-miss lines, though, were right every time. Paid in full, the whole panel is +6.1%; settled as a sportsbook would, it is -5.9%. Each row shows both.
Experts with fewer than 50 settled bets - a tour coach, Ryan Noonan, Jason Sobel and a few guest pickers - are in the list but not ranked. We did not use the panel's headline claims, such as being "up 145 units" in one nine-week span: that is a window picked after a hot run, mixing outrights, matchups and Top 10 bets from several people.
How we counted the PGATOUR.com and Data Golf figures - and the estimate in them.
PGATOUR.com. Its Golfbet team publishes Expert Picks before every event. In 2024 each expert gave one Top 10 pick a week. From 2025 the picks are free-form "props", and we counted every Top 5, Top 10 and Top 20 finishing bet among them - 482 settled bets from 2024 to 2026. We left out parlays, "both to finish" bets and first-round markets. Each pick is settled dead heat, the same as the Golf Digest rows. Every pick, with its article.
One figure is an estimate. From 2025 the articles give no stake, so we count every pick as 1 unit, as in 2024. Paid in full rather than dead heat, our 2024 count is within two units of PGATOUR.com's own 2024 table for each expert. Experts with fewer than 50 settled bets - Matt DelVecchio, Casey Johnston, Jimmy Reinman and five others - are in the list but not ranked.
Data Golf. Its public bet log for 2019, 2020 and 2021 lists every bet it placed. We counted only its Top 5, Top 10 and Top 20 bets: 3,050 bets and 975 units staked. Its stakes change with the model's edge, so its ROI is profit over units staked, and the "without best bet" figure takes out that bet's stake as well as its profit. All its bets were at bet365, in decimal odds, and it stopped posting bets in 2022.
Only Top 10 and top-finish records are ranked here - and even those are close, not identical.
Golf Digest's experts bet Top 10s; PGATOUR.com's experts and Data Golf bet Top 5, Top 10 and Top 20; we bet Top 5 and Top 10. Those markets land at different rates and carry different margins. Records that mix outrights, matchups, props or live bets, with no list of single bets to separate them - Spencer Aguiar, Axis, Bursik's Bets and the Action Network app records among them - are not ranked on this page, because a return built partly on near even-money matchups is a different achievement from one built on longer-priced finishing bets.
Units with no stake total are not a return, so they are not ranked.
Several US records publish units won but not units staked, so no ROI can be worked out: Taft Gantt at CBS (+46 units from June to September 2025, most of it one long-odds winner) and David Bearman at SportsLine (up more than 18 units in 2026). A model "up nearly $9,000" with no stake is left out for the same reason. PGATOUR.com's own 2024 table (all four experts between -20 and -37 units) mixes winners and matchups, so we used only its top-finish picks, rebuilt one by one.
We looked for these and found no published record.
Jason Sobel, Chris Murphy, Matt Vincenzi and Derek Farnsworth (Action Network articles not linked to a tracked profile), Covers, VSiN and Brady Kannon, Pickswise, FTN, RotoWire and ESPN. If any of them publishes a record with units and stakes, it goes in.
Read the Period column before the ROI column.
Every service publishes over the window it chooses, and those windows are not the same. A two-year record and a seven-year record are not the same evidence even when the percentage matches, and a short window during a good run will always flatter whoever is quoting it - us included.
Every number on this page is an upper bound, ours included.
A published ROI is what the advised price returned, not what a subscriber banked. Picks move the market - a service with thousands of members shortens its own prices within minutes of sending - and the advised price is the best one on offer at the moment of advice, which is rarely the one still on the board when you get there. Winning accounts get limited. None of that is an accusation against anybody listed here; it applies to us too. Read the ROI column as the ceiling of what the picks were worth, not as the floor of what you would have made.
Betting from the UK or Ireland?
UK golf tipsters bet markets and prices that US sportsbooks do not offer, so they are ranked on a separate page rather than in this table - the UK tipster leaderboard.
If you bet at UK betting sites, our sister site GolfForecast covers that market - UK prices, the same approach, the bets you can actually get on.
Go to GolfForecast (UK)Services advertising ROI figures above 100% have been left off entirely. Those numbers exist, but they come from short windows chosen after the fact, and putting them in the same column as a multi-year record would make this table worse rather than more complete.
Golf Tipsters - Full Review
Golf Tipsters is a data-driven service: an algorithm weighs Official World Golf Rankings against live sportsbook prices to find top-finish bets the market has priced too long. No opinions, no hunches, no picking the popular name because it reads well. Every pick names the market, the book holding the best number and the stake.
We bet Top 5 and Top 10 finish markets, five selections per event by default. Top 20 lands far more often and feels better, but priced at what the US books actually charge for it, it has not made money, so we don't send it. That choice costs us a smoother-looking hit rate and is the main reason the ride is lumpy.
Quick Stats
- ROI
- +16.0%
- Events in profit
- 51.7%
- Per-bet hit rate
- 15.7%
- Worst drawdown
- 118 pts
- Longest losing run
- 7 events
- Events
- 350
- Period
- since 2019
- Free Trial
- 30 days
- Pro Price
- $79/mo or $499/yr
Pros
- Every pick we send is published and settled, losers included
- Method fixed before each season and applied blind, not chosen after the results
- 30-day free trial, full service
- Odds comparison across all major US sportsbooks
- Weekly email tips, plus Telegram delivery
Cons
- A shorter record than services going back to 2014
- Drawdowns are real: 118 pts at 10 pts staked per event
- Top-finish markets only - no props, matchups or 3-balls
- Subscription required after the free trial
- Needs accounts at several sportsbooks to get the prices we quote
Golf handicapper FAQ
Who is the best golf handicapper in 2026?
No US golf record we found is checked by an independent third party, so the answer comes with caveats. We rebuilt every Top 10 pick Golf Digest's betting panel published from 2019 to 2026, and every top-finish pick on PGATOUR.com's Expert Picks from 2024 to 2026, and settled each one the way a sportsbook does. With each record's single best bet taken out, Rick Gehman leads the published records at +9.5% over 140 bets. Stephen Hennessey has the highest figure with every bet counted, +27.8%, but one +5000 bet in 2024 is 50 of his 68.72 units; without it he is +7.6%. Our own Golf Tipsters model is +15.0% on the same rule (+16.0% with every bet) in a backtest, which is weaker evidence than picks published in advance. Data Golf's top-finish bets, the largest published record at 3,050 bets, are +8.3% (+6.8% without the best bet), but it stopped posting bets in 2022. As whole panels, Golf Digest is -5.9% over 1,774 bets and PGATOUR.com is -13.3% over 482.
Can I compare US handicappers with UK golf tipsters?
Not on ROI. UK tipsters bet markets and prices that US sportsbooks do not offer, so the same percentage measures a different bet. That is why they have their own leaderboard, and why this page only ranks services that bet at US sportsbooks.
What makes a good golf handicapper?
A published record you can check, kept in advance rather than assembled afterwards, and a long enough window to mean something. Positive ROI matters, but so does the shape of the ride - ask what the worst drawdown and the longest losing run were, because that is what you will actually have to sit through.
Why do some handicappers advertise ROI over 100%?
Almost always because the window was chosen after the results were known. Pick any handicapper's best six months and the number looks spectacular. Compare services over the longest period each of them publishes, not their best one.
How much should I bet on golf picks?
Never more than 2-5% of your bankroll on a single event. A large drawdown against a fixed stake per event means you need a bankroll that can absorb a long run of losing events without having to stop.