Best bets for the Barracuda Championship
Sweden’s Vincent Norrman, a current PGA TOUR rookie, earned a full two-year TOUR exemption and his first TOUR victory last weekend in a playoff over Englishman Nathan Kimsey. In the process, Norrman cashed a 25/1 outright winner for this column (our 10th winner in 2023). He is back in this week’s field at the Barracuda Championship with a price tag of 28/1.
At the top of this market is German Stephan Jaeger (16/1), who has made 22 of 25 cuts this year on TOUR and comes in off finishes of 9th and 13th at the Rocket Mortgage and John Deere Classics.
Keith Mitchell (20/1) is the highest-ranked player in this field with a ranking of 62 in the OWGR and has two Top 5s this year at Pebble Beach and at Riviera. Canadian Taylor Pendrith joins Mitchell at 20/1, and he finished T-6 last weekend at the Barbasol and had another Top 10 earlier this year (T-7) at Pebble Beach.
At 25/1 are a trio of players, including Beau Hossler, Patrick Rodgers, and Mark Hubbard, who finished 4th in this event last year. JJ Spaun (33/1) won the Valero Texas Open last year, which got him into all of the major championships in 2022, but that exemption has run out, and now he tries to earn his second PGA TOUR victory in the alternate event this week. Several players are grouped at 35/1, including last year’s Barracuda winner Chez Reavie, Akshay Bhatia, Justin Suh, Sam Stevens, and Nicolas Lindheim.
The Event
The Barracuda Championship has been held in the Reno/Lake Tahoe area yearly since 1999 and started as the Reno-Tahoe Open before computer security and data storage company Barracuda Networks became the title sponsor in 2014. It spent most years as an alternate event played opposite of the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, which is now the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational. In 2022, it moves up in the schedule to be the alternate to the Open Championship. Like last week’s Barbasol Championship, this is a co-sanctioned event with the PGA and DP World Tours. The alternate event winner does not earn a Masters Tournament invitation but does earn 24 OWGR points, 300 FedEx Cup points, a full two-year PGA Tour exemption and an entry into the PGA Championship. Since 2012, this event has used the Modified Stableford scoring system, which was used prior at the International event in Colorado.
