2026 ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic

Introduction

There's something genuinely fun about Myrtle Beach week on the PGA Tour. Most alternate-field events feel like the Tour is running on autopilot, a perfectly fine tournament that nobody really gets worked up about. This one is different. The ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic has carved out its own identity in just two editions, partly because the Dunes Golf and Beach Club is a legitimately great golf course, partly because the Grand Strand community has embraced this thing with passion, and partly because the first two editions have produced genuinely compelling finishes. Chris Gotterup won the inaugural event in 2024 as a 150-to-1 shot and Ryan Fox chipped in on the first playoff hole in 2025 to snag his first PGA Tour title. This tournament has a flair for the dramatic, and the third chapter gives us every reason to expect more of the same.

The storyline that's going to dominate coverage this week is Brooks Koepka. The five-time major champion is making his return to competitive golf on the PGA Tour after his time with LIV Golf, using the Myrtle Beach Classic as competitive preparation ahead of the PGA Championship, which begins May 14 at Aronimink Golf Club. Because of his return agreement with the Tour, Koepka can't accept sponsor exemptions into signature events, which is why he's teeing it up on the Dunes instead of at Quail Hollow with the Truist Championship field. A win in Myrtle Beach would get him into the remaining signature events, the Memorial and the Travelers Championship, which makes this far more than just a tune-up. He's here to compete, and the local crowd is going to be absolutely electric for it.

Beyond Koepka, the field lacks genuine depth. Webb Simpson, Danny Willett, and Brandt Snedeker, who will captain the U.S. Presidents Cup team in September, are all in the field. Harry Higgs returns to the scene of his near-miss, having lost to Fox in that three-way playoff a year ago. And sponsor exemptee Blades Brown, the teenager who made waves with a T-26 as a 16-year-old amateur in 2024, is back for another shot. The Golf Capital of the World is ready. Let's break it down.

Course Breakdown

The Dunes Golf and Beach Club plays as a par-71 at 7,347 yards and annually ranks among Golf World's Top 100 Courses in the USA. It is one of Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s earlier designs, and when it opened in 1949, it was only the second golf course built in and around Myrtle Beach. Jones' fingerprints are everywhere here, pushed-up green complexes, runway-style tee boxes, generous fairway bunkering, and the signature philosophy of hard par, easy bogey. The course is simultaneously generous and punishing, a layout that invites aggressive play while making you pay in full for miscalculations. Rees Jones, Robert Trent's younger son, oversaw extensive renovation work over the past 20 years, refining green sites, adding fairway bunkers, lengthening the course, installing a new irrigation system, and converting the putting surfaces to Champion ultradwarf bermudagrass. Greens were expanded to an average size of 6,000 square feet to accommodate modern putting speeds. He described his goal as building it for today's play while preserving his father's design character, and walking the course, you feel exactly that tension in the best possible way.

The front nine is where the Dunes Club shows its parkland pedigree. The first eight holes are pure Carolina parkland golf, stately and tree-lined. The par-5 fourth introduces the course's first water hazard with a pond fronting a two-tiered green, offering an early risk-reward decision. The par-4 eighth will play as a bruising test with a shallow green partially obscured by one of the course's 71 bunkers. The front side is manageable for a Tour player, but complacency is dangerous. The fairways are on the narrow side, landing areas off the tee are typically 20 to 25 yards across, which means the Dunes is not a spray-it-and-find-it kind of place. Accuracy off the tee matters here in a way that doesn't always show up at these alternate-field venues.

The course's character shifts dramatically at the par-3 ninth, where the Atlantic Ocean heaves into view beyond a fiddly, elevated green. That single glimpse of the ocean marks the beginning of the most demanding and scenic stretch of holes on the property. The back nine is where tournaments are won and lost at the Dunes Club, and the centerpiece of that stretch is the famous "Alligator Alley", holes 11, 12, and 13, which brings water into play in dramatic fashion on three consecutive holes.

The 12th is a terrific risk-reward hole with the green jutting out onto a peninsula, demanding commitment and precision in equal measure. But it's the 13th that defines this golf course. Hole 13, named "Waterloo," is technically less a dogleg than a 90-degree right angle, rare among golf holes. It wraps around Lake Singleton, and the fairway narrows as a player gets farther from the tee, pinching down to approximately 18 yards across at 330 yards from the tee. The lake runs adjacent to the fairway for over half the length of the hole before a raised, undulating green guarded by no fewer than three large bunkers, two at the front apron and one at the back. The strategic puzzle is genuinely compelling: players with enough nerve and control to place their tee shot 280 yards off the tee and just past a line of oaks on the right will have a shorter shot across the water to reach the green in two, while a player who hits a longer drive to the left side of the fairway faces a longer remaining shot. Eagle or worse, it's all on the table at 13, and how players handle that hole over four rounds will tell the story of the leaderboard.

Although located barely a block from the beach with most holes subject to strong ocean breezes, the style of this course is not seaside or links by any stretch, it has woodland, parkland, and marshland elements, with the ninth being the only hole where a player catches a glimpse of the Atlantic. That wind exposure matters, though. The ocean breezes are constant and shift throughout the day, affecting club selection on virtually every approach shot and making the par-3s especially tricky. Due to extensive drainage and because it sits on a naturally sandy site, the Dunes Club plays very firm, which means bump-and-run approaches are viable but distance control on firm greens is paramount. The finishing hole, a long par-4 with a pond fronting the green, started as a gambling par-5 but today plays as a daunting closer, a reminder that the Dunes Club doesn't let you off easy at the end.

The type of player who wins here is one who drives it in play, works the ball both ways off the tee, excels with mid-iron approaches into firm, elevated greens, and has the short game to navigate the chipping and bunker situations that inevitably arise around those green complexes. The putter matters, these bermudagrass surfaces are fast, and the green complexes have subtle breaks that punish inattention. But the defining quality of a Myrtle Beach champion is strategic clarity: knowing when to take on the lake at 13, and when to lay up and scramble. The Dunes Club rewards patience and penalizes recklessness, and over 72 holes, that distinction separates the winner from the field.

Tournament History

The ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic is a brand-new event, having debuted only in 2024, so its historical record is thin by definition. What we know through two editions is that the scoring can get low when conditions cooperate, inaugural winner Chris Gotterup finished at -22 in 2024, a remarkable number that reflected both the quality of Gotterup's ball-striking that week and a setup that allowed aggressive play. The 2025 edition was more of a grind, with Fox winning in a playoff at -15 after closing with a 5-under 66 that wasn't enough to avoid extra holes until Hughes made bogey at the last. So we have a range between -15 and -22, which tells us the winning number here is highly dependent on conditions, particularly wind off the Atlantic. When it's calm and the course plays receptive, double-digits under par is achievable. When the ocean breezes pick up and the Dunes Club firms up, something in the mid-teens is more likely. The par-5s, particularly the fourth and fifteenth, are the primary scoring opportunities, and Waterloo (13) tends to be a net even or worse for the field each week. Strong performances on those par-5s while avoiding bogeys on the bruising par-4s is the formula.

Recent Champions:

• 2025 — Ryan Fox (-15, playoff win over Mackenzie Hughes and Harry Higgs)

• 2024 — Chris Gotterup (-22)

Field Breakdown

The headline of the week at the Dunes Club is not a leaderboard position, it's a returning player program. Brooks Koepka has committed to the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic as part of his preparation for the PGA Championship, which begins next week at Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia. As part of his return agreement with the PGA Tour, Koepka is ineligible to accept sponsor exemptions into signature events, meaning the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow is not an option for him this week. A win in Myrtle Beach would get him into the two remaining signature events, the Memorial and the Travelers Championship, making this far more than a casual tune-up. Koepka is here to compete, he has genuine motivation to win, and the Myrtle Beach crowd is going to treat Thursday morning like a signature event anyway. He is the clear betting favorite and the undisputed headliner, but "headliner" and "best course fit" are not always synonymous, and that distinction is worth exploring when building a card this week.

Koepka has made five cuts in eight PGA Tour starts this season with four top-20 finishes, highlighted by a T-9 at the Cognizant Classic and a T-12 at the Masters, which is exactly the kind of steady, if not spectacular, form you'd expect from a five-time major champion shaking off rust after years on LIV. He is clearly rounding into competitive shape. The question I keep coming back to is whether the Dunes Club suits his game specifically, the narrow fairways, the precision approach play, the strategic par-3s and the penal back nine all demand a level of shot-making precision that Koepka's power game doesn't always deliver in non-major settings. He's a monster in majors because his mind locks in; this is not a major. But he's also Brooks Koepka, and dismissing him outright would be foolish.

The second tier of legitimate contenders starts with Rasmus Hojgaard. He has shown flashes of brilliance but also more volatility. Marco Penge, the DP World Tour three-time winner who earned his PGA Tour card this season, has made four straight cuts and recorded a T-4 at the Valspar, which makes him one of the more intriguing course-fit candidates in this field. Penge brings the kind of precise, methodical iron play that the Dunes Club rewards. Austin Smotherman and Austin Eckroat are solid mid-tier options, both are reliable cut-makers who can get hot for a week, and an alternate-field venue with a soft field comparison is where players like them thrive. Mackenzie Hughes, who lost in last year's three-way playoff, will be motivated to finally close one out here, and his precision approach game and steady demeanor are tailor-made for this type of course. Harry Higgs, the other playoff casualty from 2025, has the ball-striking to contend but has failed to record a top-20 in 19 PGA Tour events since his near-miss at Myrtle Beach last May, that's a run of form that's hard to overlook even at a venue he nearly won at.

The young talent contingent is headlined by Luke Clanton, David Ford, and Gordon Sargent, all PGA Tour University standouts who are using this season to establish themselves on Tour. These are players worth watching on a scorecard rather than betting on, but at the right long number, one of them could burn you. Karl Vilips, who is on my betting card this week, is in the same category of statistically unusual profiles: his putter is elite, his ball-striking has been shaky, but his results have been trending in the right direction and the putting alone can carry him on a course with true and consistent bermudagrass surfaces. Matti Schmid rounds out the group of mid-tier Europeans who have shown they can compete on Tour. Schmid turned in back-to-back top-10 results at the Cognizant Classic and Puerto Rico Open after finishing 49th or worse in six straight events, which is exactly the kind of form reversal worth chasing at a number like +4400.

The veteran contingent adds a pleasant dose of narrative to the week. Webb Simpson, who won the 2012 U.S. Open, and Danny Willett, the 2016 Masters champion, are both making their Myrtle Beach Classic debuts, which is a genuine get for a tournament still building its prestige. Brandt Snedeker, who will captain the U.S. Presidents Cup team in September, is making his third appearance at the Dunes Club, he missed the cut in each of the first two, which tells you all you need to know about the difficulty gap between his current form and what this course demands. Billy Horschel is always a threat on bermudagrass, and if he gets his approach game dialed in this week, he belongs in any top-10 conversation.

And then there's Blades Brown. The 18-year-old Tennessee native is back at the Dunes Club on a sponsor exemption, and his presence here is not a feel-good checkbox, it's a genuine threat. Brown made the cut as a 16-year-old amateur at the 2024 Myrtle Beach Classic, the inaugural edition of this tournament, and has done nothing but build on that foundation since. At The American Express in January, Brown fired a bogey-free 60 in the second round, the youngest player in PGA Tour history to shoot 60 or better, and shared the 36-hole lead with Scottie Scheffler. He has three straight cuts made on Tour coming in, including a solo third at the Puerto Rico Open, plus a runner-up in his last Korn Ferry Tour start. He already has course history here, he already plays well in the heat, and at +7500, the crowd will be rooting for him as loudly as anyone in the field. Brown is a legitimate sleeper, not a storyline, and those are the best kind of long shots to have on your ticket.

What separates the realistic contenders from the rest of the field this week comes down to two things: the ability to keep the ball on the narrow fairways of the Dunes Club long enough to give yourself manageable approach angles, and the short game and putting competency to navigate the firm bermudagrass greens and the scoring opportunities that arrive on the par-5s. This is a field where career-defining wins for mid-tier players happen, as Gotterup and Fox proved. The winner will likely not be the most famous name in the field. He'll be the player who quietly gets around Waterloo without disaster four times, and takes care of business on the par-5s. Finding that player at a big number is exactly what this week is for.

Early Weather Forecast

The weather picture for tournament week in Myrtle Beach is reasonably promising, with the biggest concern arriving right at the start and the weekend looking much more playable.

Thursday: Scattered showers are in the forecast for Thursday, with a 78% chance of rain, winds potentially peaking at 21 mph, and a high near 83°F. This is the most volatile day of the week, and tee time draw will matter. Morning waves could catch the worst of any shower activity, depending on timing, if the rain arrives in the afternoon as is typical for coastal South Carolina convective systems, afternoon starters may bear the brunt of delays. Players in the morning should try to get around quickly before conditions deteriorate. Scoring on Thursday could be split dramatically depending on when groups go off, which makes the first-round leaderboard difficult to read at face value. Don't overreact to low numbers from early starters.

Friday: Friday looks like a welcome reversal, sunny skies, winds running around 16 mph on average, and a high near 70°F. The cooler temperatures and steady breeze will make the Dunes Club play a bit firmer and trickier than Thursday, but the clean conditions should produce more even scoring across the field. The wind at 16 mph is meaningful, the par-3s will require careful club selection, and the approach into 18 with a pond short of the green will demand respect. Players who survived Thursday's weather and maintained their composure will have a chance to separate themselves on a day where the better ball-strikers should thrive.

Saturday: Saturday looks like the best scoring day of the week, sunny, a high of 77°F, with winds closer to 14 mph and conditions forecast to be comfortable throughout the day. Expect the leaderboard to compress if the Dunes Club softens up at all overnight. The par-5s will be more accessible, and if the wind is out of a favorable direction, the back nine scoring average should come down. This is typically the day when the tournament field separates into true contenders and pretenders.

Sunday: Sunday rounds out the week with another warm day, temperatures climbing toward 78°F with a low around 70°F overnight Saturday, suggesting a humid start to the final round. Winds look to be light to moderate, which could set up low scoring on Sunday if the course plays receptive. The finishing stretch, particularly the pond-front 18th, will still demand respect regardless of conditions, and any wind off the ocean during the afternoon will make the back nine's water holes bite. If we have a packed leaderboard heading to Sunday, which this event has produced in both editions, the final round should be compelling television.

Outright Betting Breakdown

Brooks Koepka +1800

Koepka is the chalk of the week, and unlike a lot of betting chalk, there are genuine reasons to respect the price. This is a five-time major champion who is motivated to win, who is trending in the right direction form-wise, and who carries the kind of mental presence that makes him dangerous in any environment where there's pressure on the line. He's not just collecting a paycheck in Myrtle Beach, he needs this win to unlock the signature event pathway, and Koepka at his best has always been a player who rises to exactly the occasions that matter most.

In eight PGA Tour starts this season, Koepka has made five cuts with four top-20 finishes, including a T-9 at the Cognizant Classic and a T-12 at the Masters. That Masters result in particular is notable, Augusta National rewards the same blend of power and patience that the Dunes Club requires, and finishing inside the top 15 at a major against the best field in the world is legitimate evidence that the game is close to where it needs to be. He missed the cut at the Zurich Classic alongside Shane Lowry most recently, but team formats don't always reflect individual ball-striking, and I'm not going to let one team event redirect me off a player who just handled Augusta National.

The course fit question is the real debate with Koepka. He is historically a major championship performer whose approach game, excellent in high-pressure settings, can be inconsistent in regular Tour events. The Dunes Club's narrow fairways could expose him if the driver is wayward, and we've seen stretches this year where his off-the-tee play hasn't been where it was at his peak. His iron game is still elite when he's locked in, and on a course that rewards mid-iron precision into elevated greens, those irons could be the difference. The putting will be what it is, Koepka is serviceable with the flatstick, not a weapon. If he hits greens at a high rate, he doesn't need to be a great putter to win.

I'm on Koepka this week, but it's not my highest-conviction play in the column. At +1800, the implied probability is just over 5%, reasonable for the best player in an alternate-field event with motivation, form, and course adaptability.

2026 PGA Tour Strokes Gained Rankings:

• Total: 36th

• Off-the-Tee: 69th

• Approach: 3rd

• Around the Green: 73rd

• Putting: 141st

Matti Schmid +4400

Schmid is the pick in this column that I'm most excited about from a pure value standpoint. He's a 28-year-old German professional who is absolutely the right profile for the Dunes Club, a long hitter who can control his ball flight, a player who has shown genuine Tour-level competitiveness when his game comes together, and a man whose recent form reversal is exactly the kind of momentum I want to be riding at a number north of 40-to-1.

Schmid posted back-to-back top-10 results to break a run of six consecutive starts where he finished 49th or worse, including three missed cuts, his T-9 at the Cognizant Classic followed by a T-5 at the Puerto Rico Open. That kind of form inflection point is real, and it tends to carry over for at least a few events before the regression arrives. At Puerto Rico, he ranked second in the field in driving distance, third in scrambling opportunities, and T-4 in greens in regulation, that is precisely the skills package that wins at the Dunes Club. A player who can bomb it, find greens in regulation at a high rate, and bail himself out with the short game when he misses is the Myrtle Beach Classic archetype, and Schmid checked all three boxes just two months ago.

His technical profile translates well here. Schmid is a big, powerful German who generates elite ball speed and consistently ranks near the top of the field in driving distance. The Dunes Club's par-5s are where he can manufacture serious advantage, particularly Waterloo at 13, where his length gives him shorter approach angles that shorter players simply don't get. His approach game from the 150-to-200 range has been strong in his better stretches, and the Dunes Club greens, large enough to accept approaches with confidence but firm enough to demand proper trajectory, reward the flight he prefers to hit. The bermudagrass putting surfaces are the one question mark with a European-born player who grew up on bent grass, but Schmid has been competing in the United States long enough to handle the grain.

The concern is the inconsistency, when Schmid goes cold, he goes very cold, as those six consecutive poor events demonstrated. He has not won on the PGA Tour despite multiple opportunities to close one out, including a near-miss runner-up at the 2025 Charles Schwab Challenge. There's a version of this week where the form reversal evaporates and he grinds through a forgettable week in the 40s. But at +4400, I'm buying the momentum, the course fit, and the skill set. Schmid is my second-highest conviction play of the week.

2026 PGA Tour Strokes Gained Rankings:

• Total: 132nd

• Off-the-Tee: 95th

• Approach: 148th

• Around the Green: 97th

• Putting: 84th

Blades Brown +7500

He doesn't have the season-long strokes gained numbers that most of my picks can point to, and at 18 years old with limited full-field Tour experience, the sample size is almost meaningfully small. And yet here I am, putting him on my card, and I feel genuinely good about it. Let me explain why.

At The American Express in January, Brown fired a bogey-free 60 in the second round, the youngest player in PGA Tour history to shoot 60 or better, and briefly shared the 36-hole lead with world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. That single data point tells me this kid can play. It's not a fluke, Brown has made three consecutive cuts on Tour in 2026, including a solo third at the Puerto Rico Open, and followed that with a runner-up finish in his most recent Korn Ferry Tour start. The upward trajectory of his game is steep and consistent. More specifically, Brown made the cut at the 2024 Myrtle Beach Classic as a 16-year-old amateur, he has walked these fairways in a PGA Tour setting, he knows the course, and he has already shown he can perform here when the pressure is real. The Dunes Club is not foreign territory for Blades Brown; it's where his professional story began.

His profile is all offense. Brown is a long, athletic ball-striker who plays freely, attacks pins with confidence, and doesn't appear to feel any weight of occasion in a way that paralyzes lesser teenage players. He becomes the youngest player to hold a co-lead after any round on the PGA Tour since Ty Tyron at the 2001 B.C. Open, which tells you this isn't a player who wilts under the spotlight, he seems to actively feed on it. The course setup here, with its par-5 scoring opportunities and strategic back nine, rewards the aggressive-minded player who is willing to take on Waterloo at 13 when the conditions are right. Brown will take it on. He doesn't know how not to.

The risk is obvious: he's 18, the Dunes Club's bermudagrass putting surfaces will challenge anyone who hasn't had years to acclimate. His approach game can also leak, as it did in the closing rounds at Puerto Rico, where a stumble on Saturday cost him a real chance. But +7500 is a number that prices in all of that uncertainty and more. I want exposure to Blades Brown this week.

2026 PGA Tour Strokes Gained Rankings:

• Total: N/A

• Off-the-Tee: N/A

• Approach: N/A

• Around the Green: N/A

• Putting: N/A

Karl Vilips +8000

Vilips is the statistical outlier pick of the column, a player whose strokes gained numbers tell a story that isn't immediately intuitive. He is one of the best putters on the PGA Tour this season by SG: Putting, and on a fast bermudagrass course where the greens have enough subtle break to punish inattention, elite putting can be the tiebreaker that gets a player from Sunday morning contender to Sunday afternoon champion. The Dunes Club is not a course you can bomb your way around, but you can absolutely putt your way around it, and Vilips has the flatstick to do exactly that.

Vilips sits 9th on Tour in SG: Putting this season, and that number has been remarkably consistent across different venues and field strengths. His approach game has been improving, his SG: Approach ranking has moved from 142nd early in the season to 68th by the time of the RBC Heritage, which suggests the ball-striking is coming around to support the putting rather than working against it. At the Houston Open, Vilips sat T-8 through 36 holes at -7, in the same grouping as Zecheng Dou and Adam Scott, and has shown the ability to post low scores when his irons are even marginally functional.

The concern is real: Vilips' off-the-tee numbers have been among the worst on Tour for stretches of this season, and the Dunes Club's tight fairways will expose him if the driver goes sideways. He's also ranked outside the top 100 in the world, which means the experience gap between him and a Koepka in a final-round pressure scenario is not trivial. But at +8000, you're not betting on Vilips to outgun the favorites from tee to green. You're betting on a week where he keeps the ball in play enough, gains four or five strokes on the field with the putter over four rounds, and backs into a leaderboard that favors the hot flatstick on Sunday. That scenario has happened before at alternate-field events.

2026 PGA Tour Strokes Gained Rankings:

• Total: 93rd

• Off-the-Tee: 150th

• Approach: 68th

• Around the Green: 140th

• Putting: 9th

My outright card is built around a simple target: a minimum 10x return on my unit. In practice, that means I spread one total unit across all my selections for the week, structured so that any single winner returns at least 10 units. This means I only need to hit one outright in ten tournaments to break even. It keeps me honest about the odds I'm willing to accept and prevents me from chasing value at prices that don't justify the risk.

That said, this is my system, and it works for my bankroll and my risk tolerance. Yours may look completely different, and it should. Figure out what return threshold makes sense for you, how many units you're comfortable putting at risk in a given week, and build from there. The best betting system is the one you can stick to consistently, not the one that sounds best on paper.

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