Kalshi's favorite for the Biltmore Championship Asheville is a 21-year-old rookie at 6.2¢, and his whole case is one win in 16 career starts. The board opened at 7:05 p.m. ET on Sunday, September 13, without Justin Thomas, the highest-ranked player committed to the PGA Tour's first Asheville stop in more than 80 years, who withdrew Sunday with no reason given and was replaced by Cameron Champ. There is no Thomas contract on the exchange. What filled the gap is a 129-name market where nobody asks more than a nickel and a half, and where roughly $3,000 of one-way buying is what set the price at the top.
The event is KXPGATOUR-BICA26, one yes/no contract per golfer, and each one resolves Yes and pays $1 if that golfer wins. The clause that changes the trade: a golfer who withdraws before teeing off resolves No, so a pre-tournament WD is a loss and not a refund. The tournament runs September 17-20 at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, a par 71 in Arden, North Carolina, with a $5 million purse and 500 FedExCup points to the winner. New to this? Start with how Kalshi's event markets work, and check where Kalshi is legal before you trade.
The Board: Everyone Kalshi Asks 2¢ Or More For
Yes bid and ask in cents, the win probability implied by the DraftKings outright price published Monday (raw, no vig removed), and lifetime contracts traded. Prices read at 3:36 p.m. ET on Monday, September 14, three days before the first round, after 1,205,469 contracts had traded since the Sunday-night open.
| Golfer | Yes bid | Yes ask | DraftKings implied | Contracts traded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jackson Koivun | 6.1¢ | 6.2¢ | 7.02% | 60,891 |
| Jacob Bridgeman | 4.0¢ | 4.2¢ | 5.13% | 96,323 |
| Doug Ghim | 3.6¢ | 3.7¢ | 3.85% | 12,155 |
| Davis Thompson | 3.5¢ | 3.6¢ | 3.45% | 32,248 |
| Benjamin James | 3.1¢ | 3.4¢ | 3.92% | 21,094 |
| Corey Conners | 2.6¢ | 2.8¢ | 3.33% | 22,636 |
| J.T. Poston | 2.6¢ | 2.7¢ | 3.23% | 18,623 |
| Marco Penge | 2.2¢ | 2.7¢ | 3.03% | 13,720 |
| Rasmus Højgaard | 1.8¢ | 2.7¢ | 3.23% | 36,309 |
| Kevin Yu | 2.3¢ | 2.4¢ | 2.70% | 2,012 |
| Jackson Suber | 2.1¢ | 2.2¢ | 2.38% | 15,143 |
| Beau Hossler | 2.0¢ | 2.1¢ | 2.70% | 1,464 |
| Eric Cole | 1.5¢ | 2.1¢ | 2.78% | 1,511 |
| Ryo Hisatsune | 1.4¢ | 2.1¢ | 2.56% | 26,676 |
| Blades Brown | 1.7¢ | 2.0¢ | 2.56% | 15,678 |
| Keita Nakajima | 1.5¢ | 2.0¢ | 2.50% | 24,171 |
That is the whole buyable board. Only 16 golfers of 129 ask 2¢ or more, and only 46 ask a full penny. Add up every Yes ask on the event and you get about 117¢, a normal exchange overround, but the top of the board is flatter than any golf market should be three days out: last week's Irish Open board on our Kalshi golf picks page had a 22¢ favorite after one round, and this one has a 6.2¢ favorite with no golf played.
Against the book, the exchange is the cheaper venue almost everywhere. Kalshi's ask is lower than the DraftKings implied price on 15 of the 16 rows, Davis Thompson being the exception at 3.6¢ against 3.45%. Kalshi also charges a taker fee on fills, roughly 7% of the price times one minus the price, and after it Doug Ghim flips to DraftKings and Jackson Suber is a wash. That still leaves 13 rows where the exchange wins outright. Shop the number across every major book on our live golf odds screen before you pay either price. OddsShopper Pro puts them all on one screen, 20% off with code BILTMORE20.
What 6.2¢ On A Rookie Is Buying
Jackson Koivun won the 3M Open in July in his 13th career start and his third since turning pro, beating Scottie Scheffler by three with back-to-back bogey-free weekend rounds and a 25-under 259 that broke the tournament record. That win got him into the playoffs and, at 21, a captain's pick from Brandt Snedeker, which makes him the youngest American in a Presidents Cup since Jordan Spieth in 2015.
The record since is ordinary: T31 at the Rocket Classic, T29 at the Wyndham, T24 at the FedEx St. Jude. The Tour's profile has him 67th in FedExCup points, and four of his last five rounds were 70 or higher. One win in 16 career starts is a thin case for a favorite, however good the week was.
The tape says the buyers are not fighting the price, they set it. Of the 138 Koivun trades Kalshi returned Monday afternoon, 125 had a Yes-side taker: about 57,700 contracts bought at the ask against about 3,200 sold into the bid. The best print is buried near the start, at 10:30 p.m. ET Sunday, when two 3,000-contract lots filled at 0.4¢ and the favorite was bought for $24 in total while the book was still thin. Strip those out and the rest of the buying comes to roughly $3,000. By Monday afternoon the spread was a tenth of a cent, 6.1 bid and 6.2 ask. A price that tight normally means a market has been argued over. This one has not been. It has been bought, in one direction, for about the cost of a used car.
The Two Names Worth The Argument
Ben Rasa's outright rule on our Putting for Dough show is to pass on elite chalk at short prices and start engaging proven talent around 40 to 50 to 1, which on this board is an ask near 2¢. The problem is that the band is full of names with nothing to show this year, and the two golfers with real wins sit just above it.
Jacob Bridgeman at 4.2¢, about 23 to 1, is the statistical outlier here. When the Presidents Cup rosters were set, the PGA Tour's notes had him leading the Tour in Strokes Gained: Putting, and he won the Genesis Invitational at Riviera by one over Rory McIlroy and Kurt Kitayama, then made the Tour Championship and tied for fourth at East Lake. Be clear about the shape of that case: it is putting, the part of a game most likely to cool off week to week, and Rasa's favorite buy-low is the opposite, strong tee-to-green numbers masked by cold greens.
J.T. Poston at 2.7¢, about 36 to 1, is the closer of the two to the band. He won the Memorial in a playoff over Ryan Gerard, a signature event of the same weight as Riviera, and he is a Western Carolina graduate, so these mountains are where he played his college golf. The golfers literally inside Rasa's band are Kevin Yu, Jackson Suber, Beau Hossler, Eric Cole, Ryo Hisatsune, Blades Brown and Keita Nakajima at 2¢ to 2.4¢, and none of them has a win this year of that weight.
Seven Presidents Cup players are still in the field after the Thomas withdrawal, and the Presidents Cup odds page covers that event itself. Only Bridgeman and Koivun are priced like it.
Nobody Has Played This Course For Real
The Cliffs at Walnut Cove is a Jack Nicklaus Signature course that opened in 2005 and has never hosted a Tour event. The Tour lists it at par 71 and 7,249 yards, and it sits between 2,100 and 2,250 feet in a valley bordering Pisgah National Forest. The common rule of thumb is about 2% more carry per 1,000 feet, so a 7,249-yard par 71 up there plays closer to 6,930, which trims the pure length edge.
The bigger consequence is that nobody has ShotLink numbers at Walnut Cove. The usual fit question, whose game matches what this track rewards, has nothing to run on, and any course angle you read this week is a guess. With no reps for anyone, the only honest case for a golfer is his season, which is why both arguments above are built on this year's record.
The Next Tier, 1.2¢ To 1.9¢
Rows 17 through 35 of the same board, same stamp. Below this the asks go sub-penny and the bids go to zero.
| Golfer | Yes bid | Yes ask | DraftKings implied | Contracts traded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Meissner | 1.3¢ | 1.9¢ | 2.86% | 20,925 |
| Andrew Novak | 1.5¢ | 1.8¢ | 2.08% | 32,784 |
| Christiaan Bezuidenhout | 1.6¢ | 1.7¢ | 2.04% | 747 |
| Pierceson Coody | 1.1¢ | 1.7¢ | 2.33% | 24,347 |
| Michael Kim | 1.3¢ | 1.6¢ | 2.22% | 1,788 |
| Ben Kohles | 1.4¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.85% | 5,473 |
| Johnny Keefer | 1.2¢ | 1.5¢ | 2.27% | 13,725 |
| Kris Ventura | 1.1¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.18% | 19,851 |
| Max Greyserman | 0.8¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.92% | 109 |
| Zachary Bauchou | 0.6¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.56% | 0 |
| Emiliano Grillo | 1.1¢ | 1.4¢ | 1.72% | 11,769 |
| Kevin ROY | 0.8¢ | 1.4¢ | 1.96% | 0 |
| Rico Hoey | 0.6¢ | 1.4¢ | 1.82% | 20,875 |
| Nick Taylor | 0.5¢ | 1.4¢ | 1.85% | 115 |
| Chris Kirk | 1.0¢ | 1.3¢ | 1.59% | 0 |
| Billy Horschel | 0.8¢ | 1.3¢ | 1.69% | 29,072 |
| Mackenzie Hughes | 0.8¢ | 1.3¢ | 1.82% | 281 |
| Denny McCarthy | 0.9¢ | 1.2¢ | 2.04% | 7,366 |
| Hao-Tong Li | 0.7¢ | 1.2¢ | 1.52% | 0 |
Kris Ventura is the one row here priced above the book rather than below it, 1.5¢ on the exchange against 1.18% at DraftKings. Billy Horschel matters for a different reason: Golf Channel had him 100th in FedExCup points when the field came out, with Lucas Glover 101st, one on either side of the line between a full card and conditional status for 2027. The winner market does not price survival, but the card bubble is why this field is what it is.
The Tail Is A Sweep, Not A Signal
The three most-traded contracts on the board are not Koivun and Bridgeman. They are Nick Dunlap at 106,010 contracts, Davis Riley at 98,088 and Aaron Wise at 96,372, and all three ask between 0.2¢ and 0.3¢ with bids at zero or a tenth. Koivun, the favorite, has traded about 60,900.
The trades explain it. From 2:32 to 2:42 p.m. ET Monday, Dunlap's tape shows Yes-side takers buying 3,000-contract lots at 0.1¢ every couple of minutes plus one 10,000 lot; Wise's shows the same pattern from 2:55 to 2:57, and Riley's shows 6,000-lot buys at 0.2¢ and 0.3¢. A 3,000-contract lot at 0.1¢ costs $3. Read those volume numbers as a sweep at the minimum tick, not as conviction, and read the prices with the same suspicion, because a 0.1¢ bid means there is nobody to sell to when you want out.
The cost of the board lives down here too. Across the 16 rows at 2¢ and up, the gap between what buyers pay and what sellers get totals about 5¢. Across the 113 rows under 2¢ it totals about 37¢. That is where most of the 117¢ overround sits.
Two rows deserve a specific warning. Seung-Yul Noh is listed at 0.1¢ and is not on the Tour's 128-man field sheet; under the withdrawal clause, a golfer who does not tee off resolves No, so unless he is added that contract is already a loser. And Cameron Champ, the man who took Thomas's place, asks 0.3¢ and has not traded a single contract. The replacement for the best player in the field is a name nobody on the exchange has touched.
More on this: MAC Championship Odds: Ohio Never Has To Play The Favorite · Pac-12 Championship Odds: Boise State Is 0-1 And Still Favored · Kalshi Tour Championship Round 1 Scores: Morikawa 4-For-4 · Tour Championship Top 10 Finishers Kalshi Odds: Final Round · Tour Championship First Round Leader Kalshi Odds: The Result
Where I Land
A 6.2¢ favorite with a tenth-of-a-cent spread looks like a settled price, and it is not. It is one dominant week in July, a Presidents Cup nod, and about $3,000 of one-way buying on a course nobody has played in competition. The names worth the argument are one tier down, Poston at 2.7¢ and Bridgeman at 4.2¢, both with a real win on the card this year and both sitting just outside the band the rule points at. Leave the sub-penny sweep alone, treat the Noh row as already resolved No, and come back Thursday, because on a board this flat the first low round will move more names than any preview can.
Every name here is a different price at every sportsbook, and the gap is the edge. OddsShopper Pro puts the winner and placement prices from every major book on one screen, with the free expert picks beside them, 20% off with code BILTMORE20.
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Prices above are live market data as of the stamp and the implied percentages are raw sportsbook conversions with the vig left in; nothing here is financial advice. The Kalshi picks today hub carries the rest of the exchange's board each day.
