Welcome to the 3M Open preview, where our PGA crew will dive into all of the golf research and offer their expert predictions for this week’s tournament!
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3M Open Preview
The 3M Championship feels like it was just introduced yesterday, as it enters its seventh year at TPC Twin Cities.
This gives us a pretty good chance of knowing what to expect, but like most TOUR courses, the setup isn’t completely one-dimensional. A lot of prognosticators have pointed out that length plays here – the course is long on paper at more than 7,400 yards.
Course Layout and Factors
With six years of competitive PGA TOUR rounds logged, there’s a very strong indicator that this course plays to accuracy over distance off the tee.
The thing is, even with generous fairways, the penalty for leaving those fairways is often cruel, as who would build a signature course in Minnesota without featuring a ton of water hazards? Rinsed balls off the tee are a major factor, and even if you don’t, the rough doesn’t play exactly easy.
Of course, it’s still a great opportunity for a long hitter to push their driver and roll the dice for a hot week and go super low, but overall, the name of the game here is keeping the ball in play, even if it leaves you going to extra-generous and puttable greens with a long iron. You can play this course from 175-200 yards on approach and still score.
The greens are fairly basic and become quite easy to putt under tournament conditions, as most northern climate courses stay fairly pure (think: not getting chewed on 350+ days per year like Southern California or Florida tracks), and bentgrass is probably the favored putting surface for true rolls.
This leaves a lot of long and midrange makeable putts and easy 2-putts, which all play into what the data is telling us.
3M Open Preview: Winners, Scores, Trends & History
Notable past champions include Jhonattan Vegas, Tony Finau, Cameron Champ, and Matthew Wolff.
In fields like this, where many elite players are sitting out due to the schedule, it opens the door for a really talented player to win, even if the course doesn’t perfectly suit them.
At the end of the day, we are going to adjust our projections to take the edge from long hitters and give the most accurate guys on tour a 5-10% boost. However, it’s not going to make a player twice as good or twice as bad as they normally are because there’s a decent amount of water in play off the tee.
This is a place where poor putters thrive. No disrespect to Vegas, Finau, Champ, and others … but let’s just say that the real overlooked theme here might be that “this is a course that anybody can putt well on” instead of “this is a bombers’ course.”
3M Open Preview: Expert Picks
Here’s the basic recipe: drive it well, hit your irons well, and putt it well. HA! Seriously though, we are probably looking for good ball strikers regardless of length, and a juicy opportunity for one of our favorite subsects to gamble on: guys who normally putt like crap.
We are looking for them to have a once-a-month or once-a-season type performance on some easy greens to make a season-defining finish.
Let’s dive into the betting picks of our 3M Open preview.
Joel Dahmen
He basically fits the above description to a “T” … guy can’t putt for crap, and is almost always a solid ball striker, and very accurate off the tee, but he’s lacking a little distance. He’s also in an interesting situation after the much-debated split from his longtime caddie Geno.
On paper, in this case, it can’t really do anything but help him (they’d missed countless cuts together in a row leading into this), and he quickly got into contention before settling to T17 last week at the Barracuda.
No advanced stats for the stableford format event from last week, but Dahmen has a distinct pattern, and maybe something will break loose with the change. Sometimes, it really is that fickle – golfers just need to mentally get a fresh look at a game they’ve played every day for decades.
In any case, it’s a great setup, on paper, for him to do something a little better than his 250/1 odds.. The sweet spot, however, is probably the “top 5” line (at DraftKings) if you can get it before it moves at +4500, which is well out of line with the market (+3000 WA).
Akshay Bhatia
He’s a guy we’ve always tracked as he’s had flashes of brilliance but kind of fades away at times, and has played to a lot of different strengths early in his development, so it’s kind of hard to put him in a box and project him.
Early in his career, he was extremely long. He lost his card, went back to the KFT, and he is definitely not bombing it like that anymore. In 2024, he wasn’t gaining much off the tee but was flashing some really dominant putting performances, and he won that way.
The thing is, this year (and especially this summer), he has been one of the more dominant iron players, leading this week’s field by far in approach play over the past 10 events, give or take.
That certainly plays here. He should be good at keeping it in play off the tee, and in order to go low, it’s a matter of strong iron play, as this isn’t a wedging contest at 7,400 yards. Most of all, though, he’s just a player that we still see on an upward career arc.
He kind of came on TOUR “too soon” at 23 years old, which is almost like a rookie out of college, but he is playing his sixth year of professional golf. There’s more wins coming from this guy, and in this field with this course, +4000 on DK is attainable.
TPC Twin Cities: Odds To Win
Below are FanDuel’s current odds to win the 3M Open:
- Chris Gotterup +1800
- Sam Burns +1800
- Maverick McNealy +2000
- Wyndham Clark +2500
- Max Greyserman +2800
- Si Woo Kim +2900
- Taylor Pendrith +3300
- Jake Knapp +3400
- Tony Finau +3500
- Rickie Fowler +3500
- Akshay Bhatia +3500
- Michael Thorbjornsen +3500
- Kurt Kitayama +4000
- Davis Thompson +4500
- Adam Scott +4500
- Max Homa +4500
- Kevin Yu +5000
- Cameron Champ +5000
- Luke Clanton +5000
- Sungjae Im +5000
- Emiliano Grillo +5000
- Keith Mitchell +5500
- Jesper Svensson +6000
- Matt Wallace +6000
- Alex Smalley +6000
- Andrew Putnam +6000
- Rico Hoey +6000
- Vince Whaley +6500
- Niklas Norgaard +6500
- Haotong Li +6500
- Sam Stevens +7000
- Patrick Fishburn +7000
- Christiaan Bezuidenhout +7000
- Jhonattan Vegas +7500
- Lee Hodges +7500
- Alex Noren +7500
- Pierceson Coody +7500
- Jacob Bridgeman +7500
- Tom Hoge +8000
- Taylor Moore +8000
- Beau Hossler +8000
- Kevin Roy +8000
- Matti Schmid +8000
- Doug Ghim +8000
- Matt McCarty +9000
- Sahith Theegala +9000
