The 10 best bets to win this year’s British Open

We’re down to the final major championship of the golf season, this week’s British Open at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. This is always the trickiest major to forecast, considering the fickle British Isles weather that can doom anyone with the wrong tee time. But we’ll give it a shot.

Here’s a look at the makeup of recent winners:

• Eleven of the past 13 winners had a previous top-10 finish at the British Open, including Xander Schauffele last year.

• Seventeen of the past 24 British Open winners had a victory in the same season entering that year’s tournament. Only one of those 24 – long-shot Ben Curtis at the 2003 British Open – didn’t have at least two top-10 finishes that season entering the British Open. So we’re looking for someone with a win or at least two top-10s this year.

• Ten of the past 13 winners had a top-20 finish in at least one of their previous two major appearances.

• Each of the past 13 winners had won a major or finished second at a major in his career.

• Eleven of the past 13 winners had at least one top-10 finish in their previous three tournaments.

• This one might be more of a peculiarity than anything else, but only one of the past 15 British Open winners finished better than a tie for 17th at the previous year’s tournament. In 2023, Brian Harman won the Claret Jug one year after finishing sixth. No other winner in recent memory has come all that close to that two-year run of success.

With that in mind, here’s who has my interest at the British Open this week. Odds taken Monday.

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Scottie Scheffler (+450)

The British Open has been Scheffler’s worst major, but when you have two top-10 finishes and no result worse than 23rd place in four appearances, “worst” needs to be taken with an entire shaker of salt. The world No. 1 – who has three wins since the start of May, one of them a runaway victory at the PGA Championship – more or less has a course-proof game at this point. The British Open tends to reward players who either find the green in regulation or can scramble to a par or better when they miss the putting surface, and Scheffler is strong in both of those categories. (He ranks second in scrambling on the PGA Tour and 13th in greens in regulation.) If he can simply get his putter working on greens that will be slower than he is used to on the PGA Tour – Scheffler lost strokes putting in each of his four British Open appearances, and he lost strokes putting last weekend during an eighth-place finish at the Scottish Open – it’s bad news for the rest of the field because the rest of his game is immaculate.

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Rory McIlroy (+700)

Everyone expected a home-cooked coronation for McIlroy in 2019 – Royal Portrush is only about 60 miles to the northwest of his Northern Ireland hometown. Instead, he hit his opening tee shot out of bounds on his way to an 8-over-par 79, and not even a second-round 65 – tied for the second-lowest round anyone posted that week – could save him from a missed cut. McIlroy followed his stirring Masters victory in April with a prolonged bout of grumpiness and somewhat middling play, but he held the lead Sunday at the Scottish Open before Chris Gotterup sped past him to win by two. (The past three British Open winners all played the Scottish Open the week before, and none of them finished worse than 15th.) McIlroy won the 2014 British Open at Royal Liverpool and has six other top-10 finishes at the tournament, so it would be unwise to count him out this week.

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Jon Rahm (+1200)

Rahm hasn’t won this year on the LIV Golf circuit, but he finished no worse than 11th in 10 tournaments. He was second at last weekend’s LIV tournament in Spain, one stroke behind winner Talor Gooch. He also was seventh at the U.S. Open and eighth at the PGA Championship, and the two-time major champion has been knocking on the door at the British Open of late, with third-, second- and seventh-place finishes over the past four years. (He was 11th at Royal Portrush in 2019.) Rahm leads LIV in GIR and ranks third in scrambling, two huge assets to have in your bag at the British Open.

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Tommy Fleetwood (+2800)

Oh, Tommy. Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. What are we to do with you? Last month, Fleetwood gutted anyone who bet him to win the Travelers Championship (this reporter included) with his 72nd-hole three-putt, and he still has yet to win on U.S. soil. But last I checked, the British Open is being played an ocean away from the United States, and the Englishman (who has won seven times on the European tour) checks a lot of boxes. Top-10s this season? Fleetwood has five. Major-championship win or second-place finish? Fleetwood finished second at a major twice, one of them at the very same Royal Portrush course where this week’s tournament is being played. Recent top-10? We already mentioned the Travelers. Heck, Fleetwood even missed the cut at last year’s British Open, checking that weird box.

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Viktor Hovland (+3000)

There’s a bit of wariness around Hovland considering that he withdrew from the Travelers Championship with a neck injury last month after playing two holes of his final round. But he doesn’t seem all that concerned about it, if the vacation photos that surfaced on social media in the interim are any indication, and he was 11th at last week’s Scottish Open. Hovland has only two top-10s this season, but one was a win at the Valspar Championship and the other was a third-place finish at the U.S. Open, and that’s enough to check the form boxes. He also has performed well at the British Open: Before last year’s missed cut, he had finished no worse than 13th in three appearances, with a tie for fourth in 2022. Hovland’s play around the greens is always a worry, but he ranked second at the U.S. Open in strokes gained around the green and was ninth in scrambling at the Scottish Open.

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Robert MacIntyre (+3500)

MacIntyre has five top-10 finishes this season, the most impressive of which was his solo second at the U.S. Open. The Scotsman also tied for sixth when Royal Portrush last hosted the British Open in 2019, and he is a much better player now than he was then at just 22 and making his British Open debut. One of MacIntyre’s two PGA Tour wins in 2024 came at the Canadian Open, which was played on a course designed by Harry Colt, who also crafted Royal Portrush.

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Sepp Straka (+5000)

Short-hitting University of Georgia golfers have had some recent success at the British Open (see two of the entries below), so why not take a shot with a Bulldog with two PGA Tour wins this season? There is obvious risk here because Straka missed the cut at all three majors this year, and he has just two top-10 finishes in 17 major appearances. But one of them was a tie for second at the British Open two years ago at Royal Liverpool, and one of Straka’s four career PGA Tour wins came at PGA National, a Florida course known for its share of wind and bad weather. (British Open winners McIlroy, Ernie Els and Padraig Harrington also won at PGA National.) Straka is one of the PGA Tour’s most accurate players off the tee and from the fairway (he is fourth in strokes gained approach this year), and keeping the ball in play is key at the British Open.

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Russell Henley (+6500)

Henley, also a Georgia product, enters with three consecutive top-10s, one of them at the U.S. Open, and an elite-field win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March. He has just four top-10 finishes in 44 major championship appearances, but all four of them came in the past two years, and one of them was a fifth-place performance last year at Royal Troon. He ranks 14th on the PGA Tour in greens in regulation and sixth in strokes gained around the green, suggesting an ability to overcome errant approaches. One of Henley’s five PGA Tour wins came at PGA National, a good comparison course.

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Patrick Reed (+8000)

Reed comes in on the heels of his victory at the LIV event near Dallas last month, one of nine top-10 finishes this year as he makes his push to be included on the U.S. Ryder Cup team. The 2018 Masters champion is one of the better scramblers in the game, and though his recent British Open form hasn’t been great (missed cut, tied for 47th and tied for 33rd in his past three appearances), he did finish alone in 10th place the previous time Royal Portrush hosted the event in 2019.

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Brian Harman (+12000)

Another Bulldog. Harman followed his 2023 British Open win with a 60th-place finish in 2024, but as noted in one of our keys above, that makes me like him more this year. He also has a PGA Tour victory this season, at the Texas Open, and finished eighth at the Travelers Championship last month, so he has a bit of form coming in. Harman isn’t wild off the tee and his game gets stronger as he gets closer to the pin, which are key assets at the British Open.