Ben Coley previews the Masters, where several big names have questions to answer. Find out who he's siding with at Augusta National.
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Golf betting tips: The Masters
4pts win Xander Schauffele at 17/1 (Betfair Exchange, bet365 16/1 general)
3pts e.w. Tommy Fleetwood at 20/1 (General 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
2pts e.w. Robert MacIntyre at 28/1 (bet365, Betfred 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
2pts e.w. Hideki Matsuyama at 33/1 (William Hill, 888sport 1/4 1,2,3,4,5,6)
"I'd like to start this press conference with a question myself," said Rory McIlroy, the newest Masters champion but no ordinary Masters champion – one who, in earning a Green Jacket, joined an exclusive club of just six career grand slam winners. Fourteen years on from losing his lead here then beginning his collection of majors at the US Open, finally he had them all.
"What are we all going to talk about next year?"
It was a fitting way to begin a meeting which, had he taken one more shot over the final hour and a half of a suitably chaotic conclusion to a years-long saga, might never have happened. How, had Justin Rose birdied the play-off hole first and forced McIlroy perhaps to miss even from three feet, would he have recovered?
Thankfully, the unanswerable can remain as such and we're left with his question instead. What exactly are we going to talk about, now that the Masters returns without McIlroy's quest, without Tiger Woods, without Phil Mickelson, without the realistic possibility of something occurring here which would leave such a mark on the history of this wonderful sport?
The answer may be as simple as the one constant which makes the Masters so special: Augusta National. Whatever lies ahead over the coming days, there are certain assurances provided by perhaps the best golf course that has so far been created. Other forces may rob us of the kind of drama we saw in 2025, six years after something comparable, but none can take away the majesty of this occasion. However it ends, this week begins as the greatest in all of sport.
How to win the Masters
To win at Augusta doesn't typically require extremes of patience such as those displayed by the defending champion – Sergio Garcia is the only person to have made more than McIlroy's 17 attempts before winning – but it does place severe demands on the mental side of the game. Here, experience still counts for so much even in the age of speed, the last debut winner still the late Fuzzy Zoeller way back in 1979.
But while the intangibles will make up the heart of whatever story unfolds, at the outset we're able to keep our heads clear as far as what you actually need to do well from a technical perspective in order to harbour realistic ambitions come the back-nine on Masters Sunday. That's where they say the tournament truly begins; where last year McIlroy underlined exactly why they say it.
First, this is a long course with wide, receptive fairways, a total absence of deep rough, and very few reasons to club down significantly off the tee. Only at the par-four third, which most will seek to attack, is iron a viable play away from the four par-threes. If it isn't driver it's most certainly three-wood for the other 13 holes and to win here without being longer than average requires near perfection elsewhere.
More significant, however, are the demands of the second shot and how that bleeds into the third. Augusta's fabled greens are treacherously fast, undulating and repellent; hard to hit and harder still to putt on. The approach shot is therefore key, just as it is virtually anywhere, but what's different at Augusta is that skill, imagination and confidence around the green remain vital. In modern golf, that isn't often the case.
And if asked to pinpoint the underrated skill that ties so many modern Masters champions together, it would be that. We marvel over Adam Scott's swing, but he's blessed with fantastic touch too. Sergio Garcia is one Spaniard for whom the cliched 'Spanish hands' maxim still applies; Jon Rahm is another. Patrick Reed is just about as good as it gets, but Hideki Matsuyama is one of few I'd actually place ahead of him.
Scottie Scheffler is extraordinary in every way and that includes when chipping – who can forget the hole-out at the third early in the final round of his 2022 breakthrough and how vital it was in beating the maestro Cameron Smith – and McIlroy's short-game is better, much better in fact, than he's given credit for. Many of Tiger's most iconic shots took place somewhere to the side of the green, likewise Mickelson.
McIlroy is an extreme and therefore vivid illustration of what it takes to win the Masters. He drove it long but not accurately, his iron play was imperious and he was razor-sharp when scrambling. Believe it or not, he lost strokes to the field with the putter last year and still probably ought to have won by three or four, rather than in extra holes. And he's not the first iffy putter to win here, far from it in fact.
To put all this more tangibly, 90% of McIlroy's total strokes gained on the field came with his approaches and his work around the greens. That's up on Scheffler's two (60-65%) and even Matsuyama's one (85%) but while there's no denying that Rahm's secret weapon during his imperious victory was his driver, he too was out-putted by all those who got close to him. It didn't matter, as he oozed tee-to-green class and DataGolf confirms the putter has been the icing on the cake, rather than the key ingredient.
Most of the time, this has been telegraphed in the months before. McIlroy and Scheffler had both won The Players Championship, the biggest tournament of the season prior to the Masters. Rahm had cooled but nobody else had won three times by the middle of February in 2023, and Scheffler's 2022 win was his fourth in six starts. Matsuyama is the only champion from 2010 onwards who was without a top 10 since January. Very few find form here.
There have been some surprises, particularly late in the 2000s and then sporadically in the 2010s, but the two most recent depended a lot on mistakes from the favourites so dramatic that we revisit them each year. Even the best can be overwhelmed by the prospect of earning lifetime membership of Augusta National and one of the two most revered prizes in the sport, but one of them usually survives.
Sky Bet's @SportingLife specials
14/1 - Fleetwood, Schauffele, MacIntyre and Matsuyama all top 20 (including ties)
25/1 - Schwartzel top SA, Johnson top senior, Bridgeman or Griffin top debutant (no ties)
Question marks surround several key players
The question is who and that is complicated by the theme of the build-up: preparation. We're on a run of 11 Masters champions who had played during the fortnight before, which the top four in the betting and several other likely options have not. There are elements to this that are easy to explain away – for a long time, almost every top player took part in the Match Play and the chance of someone else winning the Masters was slim – but there have been other complications which are harder to weigh up.
Some have been enforced, such as Scottie Scheffler and the arrival of his second child, Collin Morikawa and his bad back, Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau and the revised LIV Golf schedule which means they're yet to play in the US this year. Others, like Rory McIlroy, Cam Young and Justin Rose, chose to take three weeks off between The Players and Augusta, while Robert MacIntyre, Ludvig Aberg and Tommy Fleetwood all went to Texas and played 30 holes on Sunday after a weather delay on Saturday.
Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick, Viktor Hovland and Brooks Koepka chose the Valspar, itself three weeks out; Shane Lowry and Min Woo Lee chose Houston, Akshay Bhatia went to India, Patrick Reed to South Africa, and not in recent memory have we been left to weigh up so many different roads to Magnolia Lane.
It all makes for a head-scratching puzzle and whereas for each of the last four years the champion has been unquestionably primed, this week it seems they will have overcome either a hurdle or a hiccup, or at least answered a question as to the sense behind their scheduling.
Among the big four at the head of the betting my preference would be for Scheffler and Rahm and the former is of course tempting. He's all but doubled in price for having done very little wrong and I do find it borderline hysterical that we've gone from heralding potentially one of the top three golfers of all time to talk of a kind of crisis – all because of finishes of 24th and 22nd before baby number two arrived.
Scheffler is almost unique among the star PGA Tour players in that this is the biggest price he's been all year whereas for some, we're being asked to back them at their shortest. Those keen to have him on-side should consider getting creative and bet365's 14/1 that he leads at halfway and wins might be the most interesting option, having been the formula for eight of his last 16 wins including both here.
Rahm meanwhile briefly usurped Scheffler in the DataGolf rankings and has been excellent this year: inside the top-five after all bar one of his 20 LIV Golf rounds, a winner once and a play-off loser twice. Certainly he's playing better now than at any other time since joining LIV and to my eye it's right that he's considered the biggest threat to Scheffler.
Ultimately though I keep coming back to the conclusion that siding with world-class players who've prepared better is the right way to go about an always tricky puzzle, so I'll begin with HIDEKI MATSUYAMA.
The 2021 champion has cooled a little since an excellent start to the year but that's just fine with me and I love the way he prepared in Texas last week, quietly readying himself for a return to a course which is made for him.
Matsuyama went there with questions to answer about his approach play, which had dropped below his high standards since he ranked second when runner-up in Phoenix, and did so resoundingly by ranking ninth in strokes-gained approach. He was better still off the tee, ranking second in the area he's typically weakest, and for the fifth time in six starts gained strokes with the putter.
An atypically poor week around the greens kept him out of the spotlight but he entered the week ranked fifth for the season, which is precisely where he ended last year, and having led the Tour in 2024 this for me is the number one player on the circuit in terms of chipping and pitching ability.
It was troubling to see him reaching for his back early on in San Antonio but I've absolutely no doubt that he'd have withdrawn were it anything more than a twinge which by the end of the week seemed absolutely fine, and as for his overall preparation this is the same path he took to Masters glory five years ago, except that his overall form is much better.
The fact what we appear set for conditions resembling those of 2021 has to be considered a positive and while he's been out of the picture here in four starts since, that's almost all down to the putter. His strokes-gained tee-to-green rankings show eighth as defending champion, fifth a year later, and sixth last year, when his approach play was second only to that of the champion, McIlroy.
I don't know that he'll putt well enough to contend again but I do know that he came in here last year having been hopeless in Texas, as he had been for the most part in 2022 and 2024, whereas right now he's a solid 48th for the season, gaining about a stroke per tournament. For context, had he done that in last year's Masters (assuming everything else was the same), he'd have finished fifth.
Matsuyama's ceiling is higher than all bar the big four and in an age of extra places, he's one of few players in this market I really do believe offers genuine value. And he can definitely win, too, if that putter behaves. He ranked 23rd when winning his Green Jacket and anything in that region again would give him an excellent chance to do so once more.
As he showed when hunting down Scheffler to win the Hero Challenge in December, when capturing The Sentry at the beginning of last season and two titles in the previous one, Matsuyama remains a prolific winner of big tournaments and though it would be no disaster, I hope he doesn't end his career as a one-time major champion. Perhaps this is the week he puts that to bed.
Great Scot can emulate Sandy Lyle
ROBERT MACINTYRE was cut to as short as 16/1 when dancing clear in the Texas Open but having settled at a general 28s, I think there's mileage in siding with him to go one better and he's next into the staking plan.
MacIntyre will have been disappointed not to convert his halfway lead there but the bigger picture is that he's going to arrive at Augusta as one of the form players in the world, having been fourth at Sawgrass and then second to finish off his Masters prep.
Crucially, it's his improved iron play which has delivered this step up from promise to substance as he'd been driving it well and holing putts throughout the first couple of months of the season with limited reward. Then, following better signs in The Players he ranked fourth in strokes-gained approach and first in the tee-to-green stats en route to that runner-up finish behind JJ Spaun.
It was of course Spaun who narrowly got the better of MacIntyre in last summer's US Open, giving the Scot a genuine taste of contending down the closing stretch, and since then he's added another big DP World Tour title and delivered a vital half-point for Europe in the Ryder Cup singles.
Having become a dad in January all is good in MacIntyre's world and as he says himself, when that's the case he produces his best golf. We've now seen it in successive tournaments and as a consequence he's back up to world number eight, whether you prefer the Official World Golf Rankings or DataGolf, making him a genuine contender for major honours in the months ahead.
Everything is in place for his return to Augusta and while he missed the cut last year, that was largely down to some horrendous putting and he surely must've regretted playing the Singapore Classic beforehand. I took a chance on him regardless but noted that my main concern was whether putting on grainy greens out there would hamper his prospects, which it seems was the case.
Having been 12th on his Masters debut, MacIntyre later said 'there’s golf tournaments in the world that I feel I can win, and this is one of them', and the more I look at his profile, the more there is to like. Ultimately, I'd rather be backing him for the Masters than any of the other four majors at these kind of odds, the Open Championship included, and he looks a likely contender.
Another day for Aussie star?
Adam Scott became the first Australian to win this in 2013 and I wonder if we're ready for a second in the shape of Min Woo Lee, another 20-something with designs on the biggest titles in the game. Long touted as a potential major champion, Min Woo has really come of age, combining his explosive scoring power with a newfound consistency which has seen him play well in all seven starts in 2026.
It was a sign of his maturity that this lean powerhouse decided late last year to begin reining in his speed in order to cure the area of weakness he and his team had identified, and it's showing: he's gone from 166th in strokes-gained approach last year to sit a healthy 50th through three months of this one, three separate top-class displays seeing him finish second, sixth, and third.
Bringing that to Augusta is another new challenge but he was 14th on debut four years ago, producing an excellent weekend's golf, and then carded a three-under 69 for 22nd in 2024. As he's dynamite around the greens, has driven it well here on every visit and is among the best putters in the world, there's a clear case for another step forward – but he ought to be 40-50/1 in my eyes and at 33s we have to let him go.
The nagging worry is that we're a little too soon and the same goes for Akshay Bhatia, who is three and a half years younger and doesn't have a standout major finish as yet. The left-hander produced a dazzling short-game display to win at Bay Hill and played well either side of that before electing to fly to India for a missed cut and while his price is more generous, I suspect we're a year or two early for him.
Further down the market, the prospect of a warm, dry week would lead me more towards Shane Lowry and Patrick Cantlay than it does Nicolai Hojgaard. The latter did have a taste of the lead here on debut and returns in excellent form, but he's yet to win on the PGA Tour and would surely have preferred some rain in the forecast, either during the week itself or those prior to the tournament.
Lowry's friend TOMMY FLEETWOOD and Cantlay's friend XANDER SCHAUFFELE have more obvious claims though and while less exciting prices, they help complete a quartet of bang in-form, world-class players who look primed to go well from near the head of the betting.
Fleetwood is like Matsuyama in that he's exceptional around the greens, something we can overlook at times, and after four top-10 finishes in five starts he returns to Augusta ready to contend.
Third here two years ago was a real breakthrough in terms of finishing position but he'd twice carded rounds of 66 before, evidence of how well this course suits. Certainly, his patented right-to-left ball-flight, exceptional iron play and aforementioned touch make it a natural fit and having made his last eight cuts in succession, he's right at home.
Last year's 21st place looks like a backwards step but it in fact represented tee-to-green improvement, the only difference being that after a torrid time on the greens in Texas the previous week, he endured another here. That he could still card another two sub-70 rounds, making it three in his last five, speaks again to how comfortable he's become at Augusta and sets him up for another crack.
The putter remains a bit of a worry as he's been just a step down on his 2025 form so far but he was better last week than he was at the equivalent tournament last year and any improvement, combined with his PGA Tour breakthrough right here in Georgia, would make him a massive threat in what I consider to be a massive year when it comes to the majors.
Fleetwood arrives at the beginning of this busy three-month period with his iron play peaking and with his putting numbers having improved through each of his last three starts, one more step forward might be all we need for the dream scenario: him receiving a Green Jacket from McIlroy on Sunday night.
SCHAUFFELE's profile is broadly similar in that he progressed quietly enough over the first 10 weeks of the year, then caught fire with his irons to be third in The Players Championship and fourth at the Valspar the following week.
Gaining about 1.5 strokes per round with his approaches across these two is exactly what he needed and this proven major performer, who won two of them in 2024 then went 8-28-12-7 across them last year, appears to have no chinks in his Augusta armour.
That he could be eighth here on just his fifth start of 2025, when he'd missed two months at the beginning of the season and achieved very little in four starts, tells us everything about his own Augusta smarts and Schauffele has done everything but win, with five top-10s including second and third.
Granted, finishing runner-up to Tiger never looked like being anything better but that was on just his second visit, while on his fourth, under those firmer conditions of 2021, he was the last remaining threat to Matsuyama before finding water at the 16th hole on Sunday.
Around that time it was common for Schauffele to go into majors as a 16/1 shot with obvious credentials but question marks hanging over his ability to close the door, but he put those to bed in no uncertain terms two summers ago and I thought his reaction to coming up just shy at Sawgrass said everything about his elevated status within the game.
Closing with three birdies in four holes, Schauffele sensed he hadn't done enough but was clearly thrilled with his progress and backed that up by threatening to post a competitive number behind Fitzpatrick in the Valspar Championship.
On the two occasions he's followed a path from the Valspar to the Masters he's finished inside the top 10 and now, returning better prepared than he was last year and a major champion that he wasn't in 2024, his chance looks as good as anyone's bar Scheffler and Rahm. Choosing between him and the latter wasn't easy, but it's the American who gets the vote.
Posted at 18:00 BST on 06/04/26
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