Biltmore Championship 2026 Betting Preview: 4 Picks

The Biltmore Championship Asheville runs from 17 to 20 September at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove in North Carolina, a 5,000,000 dollar Fall Series event and the first playing of the tournament.

First playing means exactly what it sounds like: there is no course history for anyone in the field, so every course-fit signal we would normally lean on is unavailable. What we have instead is recent form, and one useful question to ask of it.

The question worth asking of a form number

Strokes gained averages over a short window are easily distorted by a single outlier week. So for every player on our shortlist we recomputed the average with their best single event removed, which separates a genuinely hot run from one big Sunday.

It changed the card. Ben Kohles came out of it best in the entire field at +1.53 per round with his best week stripped out. Kristoffer Ventura, who had looked a reasonable longshot on the raw number, fell to +0.71 and came off the card. If you are new to the underlying measure, our strokes gained explainer is the place to start.

Jackson Koivun, 12/1

The model's number one at 6.73 percent to win, with the best place profile in the field: 38.4 percent for a top 10 and 77.6 percent to make the cut. He has a win inside his last seven starts.

He is also the pick most exposed to the test above. His recent average leans heavily on one +4.26 per round week at the 3M Open, and removing it drops him to +0.78. We have kept him at the top of the card because the place probability is comfortably the strongest available and a big week from a fast-improving young player is arguably signal rather than noise, but it is a caveat worth stating.

Kevin Yu, 33/1

Model rank 2 at 5.61 percent, 35.6 percent for a top 10, and the largest gap to the market of any short-priced runner in the field at 2.78 times the de-vigged price. He finished 4th in his most recent start.

Davis Thompson, 28/1

Model rank 3 at 4.73 percent and 33.8 percent for a top 10, off the most durable form of the group: +1.31 per round once his single best week is removed, with T14, T8 and T7 in his last three starts.

Ben Kohles, 55/1

The most sustained form of any player we looked at on either tour this week. Model rank 6 at 3.86 percent, against a market price implying 1.22 percent.

A note on the longshots

The raw top of our model-versus-market table for this event is full of triple-figure prices, up to 2000/1. Every one of them sits at the make-cut floor of 42.7 percent, which indicates an absence of data rather than the presence of value. Ranking purely on that ratio would produce a card of longshots every week by construction. These four were ranked within their own price bands and then decided on evidence.

The card

• Jackson Koivun, 12/1, 1.5pt each-way
• Kevin Yu, 33/1, 1pt each-way
• Davis Thompson, 28/1, 0.75pt each-way
• Ben Kohles, 55/1, 0.75pt each-way

Each-way terms are 1/5 the odds, 6 places, and the total staked is 8 points because an each-way bet stakes twice. Prices are the best available across bet365, BoyleSports, Ladbrokes and Coral at time of writing. Our each-way guide and dead heat rules cover how the place part settles.

Every pick is settled in public on our tipster track record, which currently runs at a positive return over 62 settled picks.