The 2026 U.S. Open betting preview is here. We break down the odds, favorites, sleepers, and best bets for Shinnecock Hills before the year's third major. In this First Look, we preview the 2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, New York, running June 18 to 21. Scottie Scheffler headlines the board at +550 as he chases the career Grand Slam, with Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and 2018 Shinnecock winner Brooks Koepka all in the mix. We cover the full odds board, our favorite value plays and sleepers, the matchups we like, and how Shinnecock's brutal setup shapes who can actually win. What we cover: - The betting favorites and full outright odds - Sleepers and longshots with real value - Course breakdown: how Shinnecock Hills plays
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0:00 - US Open First Look at Shinnecock Hills
0:04:00 - Odds Board: Scottie at 6-1, Rory, Rahm, and the Second Tier
0:06:00 - Scottie's Grand Slam Bid and Father's Day Birthday Storyline
0:07:00 - Thursday Wind Forecast and How USGA Will Set Up the Course
0:08:00 - Wider Fairways in 2026 and What That Changes Off the Tee
0:12:00 - Two-Foot Fescue Rough and Why Missing Fairways Is Death
0:19:00 - Brian Harman Accuracy Angle vs. Minwoo Lee Bomber Risk
0:21:00 - Par Four Scoring Is the Key Filter at Shinnecock
0:25:00 - Bogey and Double Bogey Avoidance on Impossible Conditions
0:30:00 - Comp Courses: Pinehurst, Links Style, and Open Championship Data
0:34:00 - Very Difficult Scoring Filter in the Rabbit Hole
0:36:00 - Model Output: Scottie, Rahm, Xander, Henley on Top
0:53:00 - Cam Smith, Tommy Fleetwood, and Ty Hatton as Live Plays
2026 U.S. Open Picks, Predictions and Best Bets: First Look
Everyone, welcome in. Betsperts Golf here for our first look at the 2026 U.S. Open, Shinnecock Hills, joined as always by my guy Ron Claus, PGA Splits 101. Ron, I am a huge fan, heater might not be the right word, but a huge fan of USGA U.S. Open events. I love major championships because the course and the venue end up being the star, and I just don't think you get a better combination than Pinehurst No. 2, Oakmont, Shinnecock Hills. Cannot wait for this one. How are we doing?
Yeah, doing well. Completely agree. This is one I've had circled on my calendar since way back when they first announced it was coming back here. I've always loved links golf, and this is the closest thing we have in America, at least on the major circuit. And you look at how it just punishes players. You look at that score, almost five strokes over par on average per round. You throw in all the elements, the wind, there's nowhere for those players to hide once it gets going like that. And obviously the USGA had some issues the last couple of times here, and I'm pretty confident, based on what I've heard, that they're going to be a little more conservative at the start. I think that's what it should be. It should be kind of a crescendo, where Thursday you're easing in, and then by Sunday that's when hopefully the chaos is fully out there.
I think you look at the field, I don't want to say it's wide open, but I think it's a little bit more wide open, where you have Scottie and, obviously, so many runner-ups still playing so well. He's at tempting odds, I think he's six hundred, maybe even more than that somewhere. But it's just a field where, are you going to focus on players who are good in the wind? Are you going to look at links history, recent form? There are just so many variables to consider that I think the Rabbit Hole is really going to be a helpful tool. We're going to get into all that today.
The course, you can go back and watch, and I have. I don't know that the 2004 event is super helpful in terms of foretelling what's going to happen here, but it is very entertaining to watch, because we just don't see stuff like that. The weekend got really crazy in 2004, in particular Sunday, where the scoring average was seventy-nine on a par seventy. And that includes them proactively watering like five holes after every group walked off the tee. Guys with hoses come down, hose it down, try to slow it down a little bit, and you still had scores nine over par. And Saturday back in 2018, the last time we were here, Saturday got a little wonky. They tried their best on Sunday to put a lot more pins in the middle of greens to do what they can.
The problem is, it's not even like they trick the course up to make it like this. It just is so exposed, like Ron said, to the elements. It's in the Hamptons, on the coast. It is links style, it's wide open, it's elevated up into that area too. So it just sits in a spot where it is absolutely inevitable to run into kind of insane weather at times. It looks like the forecast, we're going to get that a little bit on Thursday. I don't want to play weatherman too far out, but running into these really problematic winds is inevitable, and the early forecast looks like that's going to happen again. So you're going to have the situation where, I mean, par four is a really good score on a lot of holes. And it makes for an interesting test because we don't really see that very often.
Now, we had Aronimink, and you can make the case that Aronimink kind of tricked it out. They had to do something very specific to set up that golf course to keep scores in check, and it worked, but it did create some, you could say, boring golf. We're not going to have that here at Shinnecock. And to Ron's point, with the top of the odds board being a little bit of maybe some wide-open questions. I guess Scottie leaves questions for us that we don't typically have, when he goes and plays like he did at Jack's Place last time out. It's been a place he's kind of run over, and then didn't. But I think the narratives are very, very strong.
Before we get into that, let's look here at the field, the odds board, courtesy of Sharp Stack over at 4for4. You can shop around and get Scottie north of five fifty, and maybe a couple of places might have some bonuses or numbers a little bigger than that. But we've seen Scottie going off at four to one, three to one in a handful of events lately, so getting him closer up to six is pretty interesting. Rory, between basically nine and twelve. Jon Rahm, kind of his own tier, as high as fourteen. Then you've got a pretty sizable group right around the twenty to thirty range. Cam Young, Matt Fitzpatrick, Xander Schauffele, Tommy Fleetwood, who played outstanding here last time on Sunday, shot a sixty-three and left some shots out there, went real hot on the back. Ludvig, Bryson, those guys are all short of thirty. Then another tier of Brooks, Wyndham Clark, Collin Morikawa, Sam Burns, Russell Henley, Si Woo, JT, Hatton, Gotterup, and Cantlay all right around fifty. Then there's not much in the mid-fifties and sixties, and you fall off into the seventy-five range.
But again, to Ron's point, it feels a little bit more open. Now, we can look real silly any time we say it feels really wide open and Scottie is a lot of narratives for Scottie. We have Father's Day for a lot of these guys on Sunday, which also happens to be Scottie's thirtieth birthday, and Scottie can seal the deal for the Grand Slam. So narratives rolling into Scottie make a ton of sense here, but again, not a reason alone to make some bets. Definitely an interesting odds board. Shop around, things are going to move here on a Monday, but I'm sure people have picked off some really nice futures. I know Ron and I were both a little active over the weekend trying to get in some numbers we thought were going to maybe go away, and that's proven to be the case in some instances. Some people are going to wait for the wind to see if there's a wave advantage. That makes a lot of sense as well. Early forecasts on Thursday in particular show the winds are going to be fairly unavoidable, so I do think you see some softer pin placements, some middle-of-the-green stuff, because they don't typically roll these greens out to be super-duper fast.
Let's get into some of the core stuff, because you really can't, just like an Open Championship in a way, link-style golf course, you can't trick the greens out too much because of the winds. There are so many components to this course. One of the things this year, the fairways are going to be about seven, eight yards wider than they were even in 2018, so we're looking at forty-eight-yard-wide fairways. People are going to say, oh, well, that just makes it easy off the tee, but again, when you throw in all the elements, the wind. There are so many parts that are interesting to talk about with this course. Just doing the research on it, it's so strategic. I didn't even think about this watching it back in 2018, but when you look at the holes, most of these fairways sit at an angle to the tee shot. There's really nothing where you're just hitting it straight ahead. Everything's on an angle, even the approach shots at a different angle than off the tee.
Yeah, and they're not necessarily dog legs like typical dog legs. Some of them are, a lot of kind of snake fairways. But even with the dog legs, where you think, well, the bigger hitters just cut across them, it's not just about being in the fairway. It's also about where you are, because this course is all about angles. Rory McIlroy had a great quote, angles really do matter here. So it's not just being in the fairway, it's do you have an angle to the green where you're going to have access to the pin location, and trying to do your best to create as many uphill putts as you can, because the sloped greens here, you do not want downhill putts.
And so off the tee, players not only have to hit a precise line, but they also have to consider how far they're going to hit it, considering rollout. Firm and fast is the idea of the week here. You have sandy soil, obviously, right on this area of Long Island, which gives it a lot of its links characteristics. Another thing, it's right on the water, and not just on the water, but sitting on this high point in the area, so it's even more exposed to the wind than typical. So we're bringing in things like, how do you flight your shots? Can you hit the ball both ways? How well do you control your ball in the wind? Some of that stuff we can look at in the Rabbit Hole and see how players have performed in windy conditions in the past.
And then the routing. William Flynn designed this in 1931, and it's just brilliant routing, because most of the holes, even shots within holes, play in different directions. So most of the time, just going back and watching 2018, you can see the thought process going on in players' minds, trying to figure out exactly which way the wind is blowing for this shot right here. And then you throw on the terrain. This is kind of where some of the Augusta National comp comes in. You have all these uneven lies in the fairways, elevation changes up and down. These greens are tilted, and they're also crowned and kind of elevated, and that's what makes the approach game so difficult. Another thing I love, and a lot of people have talked about it, we all love to see this, when you have tons of short grass around the greens and very little rough. So you're hitting into the wind on approach, you have these crowned greens, and when a ball gets near the edge of the green, and not just false fronts, if you over-hit greens you're dead, because the ball's going to roll twenty to thirty yards off the back. There's just so much intrigue.
I think around the green is just going to be huge this week, because you look at 2018, the made-fairway percentage was seventy-one percent, very high. Then you look at greens in reg, it's fifty-four percent. That's a sign right there that there are going to be a lot of shots hit from these short grass areas. And there's also, we haven't got to the blind shots, there are blind tee shots, blind approach shots. So you're adding that unpredictability that Scottie has complained about in the past, that there are some things players are not going to be able to control this week. All that combined is kind of what makes this just such a fun week.
Could not agree more. And I highly recommend people go rewatch. The full final round of 2018 is on YouTube, you can watch the full final round of all four. And like I said, maybe not super relevant for how they're going to do it this week, because they've been really clear that they want Shinnecock to be Shinnecock. Some of the tightening of the fairways they did in 2018, they are not doing this year. So you're going to hear a lot about these wide fairways, but to Ron's point, yes, they're wide, but at an angle, you do have to worry about your distance, because you could run out of fairway with the angle you're trying to leave yourself for your approach shot. So yes, the width of the fairway at its widest point is pretty wide, but hitting fairways in 2018 wasn't a super hard issue for everybody. Now, you were absolutely dead if you missed.
These will be classified as large greens, but it's very similar to Pinehurst, where the actual playability of the green is much, much smaller in terms of your landing space and holding the green. So you do see in the correlated course list not a bunch of old-school U.S. Open tracks. You do have Pinehurst on there, but then you start to see a lot of the Open Championship rota before you get to Augusta. Which again, Augusta, very wide fairways off the tee, large greens, but in terms of where you can actually land on the green, it's very difficult. And similar to Augusta, shaved runoffs, where if you're scrambling, you're having to pitch off into these elevated green complexes that are very slopey. So I think the Pinehurst, Augusta, Open Championship mix is kind of the corollary course mix this week more so than anything else, especially U.S.-Open-related. You're going to get some U.S. Open stuff in there for relative-to-par distance type stuff, but in terms of how it's going to play, those courses listed are a pretty great way to look at it.
There are some great holes. Risk-reward, I do think you see, if you watch Brooks and DJ, that second-to-last group in 2018, a lot of iron off the tee, just trying to keep themselves in play. Obviously those guys have distance, so distance is an advantage for them, because they can hit that driving iron a mile and it rolls out. But I think you'll see some of that in the data. And these are hard, because we just don't have data from 2004, we have limited 2018 data. But let's look at the core stats page here for Shinnecock Hills. It's a very, very long, seventy-four-hundred-yard par seventy, so you have the fewer par fives here. A lot of bunkering. We know the average scoring conditions are difficult. Not a lot of water, kind of one hole of water to navigate, but it can come into play. False front, very much back to front, where you're like, oh, it's just one water hole, but no, it can very much be in the mix.
You talked about the large greens, but again, they are not large in terms of how they play. You will have, I think, a graduated rough, first-cut-ish, but then you get into the fairly gnarly fescue, which can look like eight-inch fescue, and you're having to play sideways to get yourself out of there. It's mixed off the tee. I think it's going to be very, very player-specific. I'm interested to see how some of the longer players approach it. Does a Rory, does a Bryson, Ludvig, do those guys take the Brooks and DJ approach, or do they try to navigate and send it with a little more driver off the tee? And again, you get in these spots where fairway accuracy is easy and scoring is insanely difficult. It just goes to show it gets harder as you get closer to the hole here. Everything from there on out is difficult.
From an off-the-tee standpoint, in 2018 we saw driver usage about six percent less than we see on a PGA Tour event typically. I think this is going to be pretty drastic player to player. You could see that driving accuracy significantly higher, to Ron's point, but still we see it reflected in the approach details, greens in reg, very difficult. Greens in reg from the rough, twenty-three percent. You were done from the rough, I think even from the first cut to be able to hold it, spin it. That could be from the rough, or into an elevated green with a false front into some wind, which gets really treacherous. And these guys, the USGA does not have to soup this thing up. It's just how the land plays, how the elements play, and that creates a lot of fun stuff for us to watch.
Going for the green stuff doesn't matter a ton, because we have fewer par fives, and the par-five sixteenth is a three-shot hole for everybody. You really just have to be dialed. You'll see that in the approach shot distribution stuff too, it's pretty flat. I don't think anything jumped out here for me. You see a little bit more from the one-fifty to one-seventy-five range, a little bit more from the two-fifty-plus from the fairways, but I don't think there's anything we need to be super dialed into there specifically.
Past leaderboards, not a lot of under par. You saw a lot of bogeys out there. You saw some numbers for the taking there on Sunday. The Saturday stuff got a little crazy. I thought it was really interesting watching back the final group of Finau and Daniel Berger. Those guys went out super early on Saturday, started the day mid-thirties on the leaderboard, played their round, had been done for five hours, and then they find out, hey, you're going off first because everyone came back to you on Saturday afternoon and it got really crazy. So Sunday was a little different, they put a lot more pins in the middle of the greens to play it a little more friendly, but even then you saw the day play tough.
Anything specific on the course metrics you want to highlight? Well, just going back quickly to the comp courses, that Sunday at the U.S. Open definitely had a different vibe. Shinnecock is just a beast once it dries out. You look here in round four at the scoring average. Sorry about that, no idea, it just popped up on my phone. You're good, it was on brand, it was content. But it's really hard to pick a course that's similar to Shinnecock, there aren't many, so obviously a couple of the Open courses. Like you said, I think Pinehurst, there's obviously some differences, but I think that is a really good list to use. And then going back to the rough and some of these approach stats, it's five inches, and only about eight feet further on past that it's getting to ten inches, and then right after that you're getting into, I think John Bodenhamer, who's one of the guys in charge of setting up this course, he talked about it's two feet, and it's called bluestem fescue, and it kind of turns a purpley-brown color. So yeah, you're pretty much dead. And if you're going off the beaten path.
When I watched 2018, you went back and looked at the data, and Brooks only hit driver fifty-seven percent of the time, below the field average. So accuracy is something that is going to be a huge focus for me this week. And I was thinking, with wider fairways, you take a guy who's shorter here, like a Brian Harman, who can, in my mind, create an advantage. Say he hits eighty-five percent of fairways and he's hitting to his spots, and yes, his iron shots are a little further in, but he's on the right angle to the green, he's not worrying about the rough. I think that guy has just as good a chance to win as someone who's more of a bomber type, a Min Woo Lee who's taking some chances, maybe trying to cut a few corners that didn't get away with. And so I think that's the interesting part for me, even when looking at this data, going through the Rabbit Hole and seeing, okay, distance from edge of the fairway, that's one of the tools we use. Even looking at our missed-fairway-penalty filter, which is obviously going to be set to high this week.
That's one of the differences between here and Augusta, where you could kind of bomb away at Augusta because the rough is so short. Once you get further into the hole, I think it becomes very similar to Augusta, but the wide fairways add another level of strategy. And just a few other things, in the article I go over some of the key stats, but obviously par seventy, so we're looking at par-four scoring as huge this week. Set that filter to difficult in the Rabbit Hole, and our new strokes-gained stat is in there where you can look at who plays well. And again, only two par fives, so a lot of the best hitters who are long take advantage of those par fives on a typical course, you have four of them, you only have two here. So really narrowing it down to who are the best par-four scorers on difficult courses. Again, bogey avoidance, double-bogey avoidance, we can take a look at all those scoring metrics, those are going to be really key this week.
I couldn't agree more. The call-out on the Harman and the stylistic-off-the-tee stuff is going to be fascinating to watch. This is the ideal setup, the ideal situation where we aren't crossing off a bunch of names on the board automatically before we start based off their lack of distance. Even though it is a very long par seventy, I think these guys are all in play, because if you have control of your golf ball off the tee, you lack distance, but you can gain strokes with your driver through accuracy. Maybe a Russell Henley and a Brian Harman can hit driver off the tee, where someone like Rory's trying to lay back a little bit, because you can't guarantee he's going to keep it on the planet and you can't be in the purple ten-inch fescue. These are the fascinating tests. That's why Pinehurst was appealing, that's why we saw interesting names at the top of the leaderboard at Oakmont, where it was different, more really thick rough everywhere, but at the same time you could not hang if you couldn't keep the ball in play off the tee. The difference from Oakmont, I think, is as we get closer to the hole.
So it's a fantastic test of the professional game. The elements open it up to these scenarios where it gets really crazy and unpredictable. Some guys don't like that as much, but it's part of the game, and there's just not a lot they can do to slow it down. Like we talked about, they're going back to the membership fairways, and they're going to try to not roll the greens out as fast, because you really can't have twelve, twelve-and-a-half Stimp greens when winds can gust to thirty, it's somewhat unplayable. So you can be a little more cognizant of where you put pins, but it's also unavoidable. What they can't do is stop thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind gusts, and they can't stop these insane back-to-front green complexes from sloping and running and taking your ball somewhere you don't want to go. So it does create an entire test of controlling your golf ball for four days through the elements, knowing your peers are going through it too, and who can come out standing at the top, regardless of score.
I think we both agree that I don't want it tricked up, score relative to par just for the sake of it. I want to see good golf shots rewarded, bad ones punished, and who can keep it going between the ears. It's a great quote you referenced in your preview, the no-laying-up guys, they want every club used in the bag, and they want the fifth club too, which is between your ears. You've got to be able to hang, and know that you're going to be in the shit at times, and then how do you come out of it and say, all right, bogey's a good score on this hole right now based off where I am, take that and go to the next hole and avoid the doubles and the big blow-up holes, because it's inevitable. You're going to have some big numbers, and just who can keep those off the scorecard is going to get rewarded.
The number of, I'll say long putts, but just those seven-to-twelve-foot par saves that Brooks had to hit was interesting, because I don't know that we're going to model a ton of putting. That's a huge piece of it this week, but I don't know what the predictability is in holing putts from that range in terms of forecasting and modeling. But it is on the menu this week, you are going to have to save par from that range, that thirty-three to fifty percent makeability range, a bunch this week. The winner is going to have to make a bunch of those par-save putts. DJ couldn't make them, Brooks made them in bunches on Sunday, and that's why he won.
Sorry, you're muted. Everything you just said kind of also brings up the strategy from a betting and DFS perspective, of, okay, how do we take all these things and how does it affect what players we're picking? One of the conundrums for me is you look at two guys near the top of the board, Xander Schauffele and Tommy Fleetwood. If you look at Xander's U.S. Open history, when you look at the course history sheet I did, he has the best average finishing position at U.S. Opens over the past decade. Xander has been tremendous here. But then, okay, this is not a typical U.S. Open venue, so you look at Tommy Fleetwood, who hasn't been the best U.S. Open player, but I think we'd both agree this course, the style of it, kind of fits Fleetwood's game a little better. Obviously he has a lot more links history, playing a lot of those tournaments going back years. Don't get me wrong, Xander has every club in the bag, Xander can do anything, but when you're comparing players, I think all these things we're talking about goes into that, and you have to consider how players play in the wind, looking at Pinehurst or the Open Championship courses as examples.
And another guy like Tyrrell Hatton, he's literally the best links player in this field. So like you said, it comes down to, for me, an approach-through-putting game this week. Off the tee is going to be lower on my weights, because there are so many ways you can get it done off the tee. But again, looking at short grass areas, how do you chip off those, and just really using the Rabbit Hole's difficulty filters to get the best picture we can.
I agree with a lot of that. The modeling off the tee is going to be really tricky, but it's going to be such a fascinating watch to see club selection. You'll see these different groups within it, guys have insanely different strategies in terms of how they do it. We saw that in 2018, I think we see it even more here with fairways being a little more generous. But don't let that fool you, to Ron's point, yes, you're going to hit greens, you're going to hit fairways at a high rate, but guys hit fairways at a high rate in 2018, so that doesn't change. It's just the strategy of what guys want to do and how they push it down that's going to be pretty interesting.
You can see it's all loaded here in the Rabbit Hole, DraftKings salaries in here as well. Tommy's a great call-out, Tommy should have won that. He left some putts on the back, he got white-hot, hard to say a guy who shot a sixty-three was disappointed, but he did not birdie the par-five sixteenth and he did not birdie eighteen, though he left himself like a six-foot uphill putt, very much had that right in his grasp with a great Sunday. So let's start there, with some difficult scoring features.
The tough part with the comp course stuff, and I don't know how you feel about it, I think we've done a good job narrowing down what the comp courses are, the problem is a lot of these are major championships that have four rounds once a decade, and it's such a random small sample, so we're grabbing all these small random samples. Let's take a look. We'll load the comp courses. I do think it is a little bit directional, a little bit signal. We'll go back and see the last five years of the comp courses, I think that captures most of the ones played here. You get a pretty huge sample for most of these guys. Yellamaraju, four rounds, he's getting a Sawgrass bump here. We'll pull that out to make sense of this. We're going to pretty much get Scottie at the top of the data no matter what. Ludvig's played well at these comp courses as well, again, some Sawgrass in there for Ludvig, a smaller sample from others. Collin Morikawa, again, you're getting, I think we're probably on the cusp of losing some of the really good ones, although Royal St. George's would be a Morikawa Open Championship. But Rory, Xander, Henley, Patrick Reed, Jon Rahm, those guys are all gaining at least a stroke and a half on the field on comp courses over the last five years. Then you get Lowry, Fleetwood, Hatton, some of the guys you've called out, Bobby Mac, Cam Smith, Hideki, Brooks, Cantlay, Tom Kim, Rosie, and Fitz, all gaining at least a full stroke on the field in these comp courses in the last five years if you're looking to start there.
Again, people have mixed feelings on five years of comp course data. Just a quick pro tip, if you don't think TPC Sawgrass is a good comp, you can X that out, click apply, and it runs again. So you have the ability, whatever your research tells you. Some people may disagree, Sawgrass is obviously a different type of event. So you take out Sawgrass, and part of that kills the sample for a lot of the guys, but I agree, and you still see Scottie, Collin, Rory, Xander separating, plus some other good stuff from a lot of the new guys. Gotterup actually pops up a little bit in that smallish sample relative to the other guys, but a lot of the same names.
Let's get into some of the other filtering options, just how guys have played on difficult and very difficult scoring tests. We don't have a lot of very difficult, so I think adding difficult at least is a good start, and you can add major, course length, whatever you want. Going back to the start of 2025, who's played the best on courses with difficult scoring? We look at scoring average. Pretty much the top of the board, and it's like that for a reason. Scottie and Rory, Rahm's right there, your top three on the odds board. Hatton pops up, Ron's already given him a shout-out today. There's Patrick Reed, who played outstanding golf here in 2018, very much in the mix on Sunday. Fleetwood as well. Bryson, smaller sample, doing a lot of it off the tee, the approach and around the green lagging behind. Bobby Mac, Russell Henley, Xander, Ludvig, Sam Burns, Harris English likes tough golf tests. Jocko with a small sample, Noren, Collin, Mav, Spaun, Keegs, Hovland, Spieth, all at a shot above the field. That's going back to the last eighteen months, difficult golf tests.
If you want a smaller sample, see some guys that have popped late, see if some new names pop up. Rosie again. You and I will have the same discussion, he's almost impossible to model, in my opinion. He just doesn't typically model as well as where he is on the odds board, or what he ends up doing in big championship golf tests. It is what it is, and again, he had a late tee time on Sunday here last time as well. Cam Young pops up looking at the last nine months. Poston's going to get his four rounds there at Muirfield Village, but that's kind of it.
So the Rabbit Hole, if you go to just very difficult, get rid of difficult. This is the most difficult test they will face, the toughest scoring course in the last decade. Anything on very difficult is plus one-point-five strokes over par. Just trying to mirror as best we can what we're going to see. This is the reason I built it with five different levels of scoring, so if you want to look at the real difficult stuff, which we don't get all the time, even in some of the majors recently, this is another cool way to look at it. It's free content, so hit the thumbs up, subscribe, all those things, and if you want to do it differently yourself, promo code US Open, a buck for the week.
Last three years, Scottie, Rahm, Xander, a small sample for Smalley, but we're getting the Smalley four rounds at Aronimink. Rory's right there, Collin, Henley, a small sample for Matthew Jordan and Nick Hardy, but good for them, they've played pretty well in those samples. Tommy Fleetwood, Bryson, Sepp, Ludvig, Cam Smith, still the last three years, so that's actually pretty encouraging for Cam Smith. This is not off the tee, but that's kind of the Cam Smith M.O. all the time. Hatton, Corey, Matti Schmid, Ortiz, smaller samples. Let's look at even the last two years and see if we get at least twenty-four-ish rounds for a lot of guys, put a minimum-round filter on. Rahm, Scottie, Henley, Xander, still that same sample for Smalley, Bryson, Rory, Corey Conners, Morikawa, Reed, Burns, those guys are all right around a one and a half. So gaining a stroke and a half on the field when the field on average is losing a stroke and a half is a nice way to separate, a good call-up. You get the best of the best on top for the most part, it's why they're the best. We always say the difficult tests are what separate the elites. No surprise.
You and I have talked about Cam Smith a little bit, but I just think he's someone to watch this week. Obviously he started working with the new coach, and we saw the results already, he's gained on approach in three of his last four. I think he gained almost one-point-six strokes per round at the PGA Championship on approach. Off the tee is always going to be somewhat of an issue, but like we talked earlier, this is a course where you can get a little flexible with how you play it, and he clubbed down a little bit. I think he's a good look this week. He sprayed it all over the place at Aronimink and survived for a little bit there. As you get closer to the hole, even though this Cam Smith has been a different Cam Smith than previous versions, as you get closer to the hole is his best attribute. He is still a wizard on and around the greens. And if you're going to have to chip and putt here a ton, there's some intrigue there on a spot that maybe plays a little more generous off the tee, considering that's really his bugaboo.
What are some other core ways you want to look at modeling this week? I know you mentioned par-four scoring, difficult test, obviously a difficult approach test. Yeah, from an approach perspective, difficult, very difficult, just focusing on approach is something I'm going to do for sure. And probably the same with around the green, looking at the short grass areas. But when you get these weeks, as most typical majors are very difficult on approach, I think this is one of the most important things you should be weighing. And again, recent form comes into play, you want players who are out there, but also looking back historically at who performs well when it gets difficult on approach, and using our new scoring metrics where we can see who's giving themselves chances on these types of courses.
Small sample for some of these guys. We look at the last six months, obviously, with LIV guys, or Padraig playing mostly on the senior tour. But then you get into J.J. Spaun. I'm looking at just approach, last six months, where it's difficult and very difficult to gain. Spaun, Morikawa, Justin Rose, Brooks Koepka, Matt Fitzpatrick, Ludvig, who people will tell you is a bum and doesn't ever deserve to be where he is on the odds board. I understand he hasn't closed the deal enough, but it's like Xander a couple years ago, just couldn't win until he won a few times, and then things change. Berger, Ryan Gerard, Adam Scott, Patrick Reed. There's Xander, Akshay, Sepp, Rory, Tom Kim, Wyndham Clark, Alex. Then you get all the way down to Scottie. This is kind of surprising. This is why we probably only have one win this year. He's gaining a half-stroke on the field on approach, versus where Scottie typically separates. Overall he's been great, he's been so good around the green and the putter's been good, tee-to-green's still elite, still the best player in the world, but this is kind of why we are where we are this year with Scottie relative to the last couple of years.
You can do all this yourself, take advantage of that promo code and jump in for a buck. Bigger time frame, shorter time frame, hone in on the last X amount of rounds. I think looking at difficult approach tests is a great way to look at it too.
Let's look at around the green. Since most of the shots guys miss greens are going to be from short grass, definitely put that scrambling-on-short-grass to difficult. Since it is an all-around difficult test, difficult and very difficult kind of combines that together, I don't mind doing that. This is one I'd take a little bigger sample on, guys, around-the-green play is not as volatile as some of the others. It's going to pull some of the Pinehurst rounds, LA Country Club, some of the Open Championship courses as well. Got a variety of around-the-green metrics. I love using around-the-green proximity, because when you take the scrambling out, you're taking the putting out. That's what I love about ARG proximity, it gives you a hundred-percent view of how good a player is at how close they can chip to the hole in these tough short grass areas. And you can even look at ARG prox specifically from the short grass, which is very crucial this week.
Removing the putting piece specifically, this is a pretty big sample for a lot of these guys. Rahm's up here. Spaun's up here. Mav, Kurt Kitayama. Here's Rory, Cam Young. This is part of why these guys have separated, these guys have contended, Rory's won back-to-back tournaments. The Masters is a lot of demand on your around-the-green proximity on short grass, that was part of why Cam Young was very much in the mix this year, while some of his long-term around-the-green numbers aren't great, there are some changing, developing skills there. Scottie too, here's Tommy, JT, Hideki, Spieth, Ricky, some guys we know that's their bread and butter. You can look at this through strokes gained around the green, which captures a lot of it, here's where you get Cam Young, Patrick Reed, Scottie's right there too, a small sample for Padraig, who's still getting it done around the green, Jason Day.
These are, to your point, with a bigger sample, a baseline skill, it ends up being more sticky, so I feel safer going back a little ways, because this is a skill set guys can develop, but I also feel like someone having three years of showing this as a core tenet of their skill set is something I'm okay pulling back some older data for. Just remembering, if you're pulling in any scrambling-specific stuff, scrambling short grass, you are pulling in an element of putting, which is part of it too. You see scrambling short grass, small sample, Yellamaraju, but that's been good. Sungjae's been good, then you get to Russell Henley, Matt McCarty, Patrick Reed, Reitan, Bobby Mac. Some guys have spent a lot of time in Europe. Kitayama spent a lot of time in Europe before he started coming on the PGA Tour. Spaun's been really good at this. Again, Fitz, Sepp, Tommy, Rory. This is why you get the Open Championship corollaries, it makes sense you get this from some of the Euros, which, again, is not surprising.
I love when we have around-the-green play mattering, because we have so many different ways to look at it, and I do think you can gain an edge by how you slice and dice the data, what you're pulling in.