FedEx St. Jude Top 20 Odds: The AI Model Verdict

Updated August 13, 2026 · 11 min read · Jake Hari

The FedEx St. Jude Championship gives Kalshi a cleaner board than the usual golf outright. Instead of one winner and 68 losers, the exchange lists a separate yes/no contract for every player: does this man finish in the top 20, ties included, over 72 holes at TPC Southwind. That is a placement question, not a lightning-strike one, and it is exactly the read the DFS and matchup crowd actually uses. We handed the whole 69-man board to six AI models, let none of them see a single price, and asked each to score every player's top-20 chance from a fetched, dated brief on the field, the course, and current form. They came back with a favorite the market already agrees on and a middle of the board they carve up differently.

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The Quick Answer

Kalshi's top-20 board makes Scottie Scheffler the safest name on the sheet near 79¢, with Tommy Fleetwood (~56¢), Rory McIlroy (~55¢), Xander Schauffele (~54¢), Cameron Young and Sam Burns (~50¢) heading a deep pack of coin-flip contracts. Our price-blind, six-model panel agrees Scheffler is the floor of the field, blending him to about 76%, but its single biggest disagreement runs the other way: it lifts red-hot Hideki Matsuyama to about 64% against a 50¢ market, the largest lean on the board. It also backs Viktor Hovland (~53%) and Sam Burns (~56%) over the crowd, and it fades two names the market trusts: Cameron Young (50¢ market, ~39% panel) and Si Woo Kim (46¢ market, ~36% panel). The full model-by-model board, every seat's number, and the dark horses trading in single digits are below.

Because this is a top-20 board, not a winner board, the prices do not add up to 100. Each contract stands on its own, and roughly 20 to 22 of them will pay out once ties are counted, so the whole sheet sums well past 2,000 cents on purpose. The story is not one favorite; it is where the panel thinks the line between a safe top-20 floor and a boom-or-bust week actually falls.

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The Market At A Glance

Venue	Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state, as of August 2026)
The Event	"FedEx St. Jude Championship: Top 20 Finishers" (Kalshi event KXPGATOP20-FESJC26), a separate yes/no contract for each player, 69 contracts on the board
The Contract	Each market resolves YES if that player finishes in the top 20, including ties, in the 2026 FedEx St. Jude Championship, 72-hole stroke play, no cut. Ties are why more than 20 contracts can settle YES.
When	August 13 to 16, 2026, TPC Southwind, Memphis, Tennessee; the board settles when the final round is official, Sunday, August 16
Prices Below As Of	The morning of August 13, 2026, about 6:29 a.m. ET, before Round 1 tee times (latest snapshot; prices on this page refresh as the market moves during tournament week)

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi event contracts trade on a CFTC-regulated exchange; you must be 18 or older and in an eligible state to participate. Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles, in the full graded Model Verdict scoreboard.

The Setup: A No-Cut Field Where The Floor Is The Story

Two structural facts drive every number below.

First, this is the FedExCup Playoffs opener, a 69-man field made up of the top 70 in FedExCup points, with no cut, so every player plays all four rounds. That matters more for a top-20 market than for an outright. In a cut event, a top-20 contract carries hidden weekend risk; here there is none, so a top-20 finish is a pure four-round consistency test against a uniformly elite field. There are no soft spots to feast on and no bubble players to pass, which is why even the safest names top out near 79¢ rather than in the 90s.

Second, TPC Southwind is a 7,233-yard par 70 that rewards precision over power: narrow fairways, water in play on 11 holes, and tiny Champion Bermuda greens around 4,300 square feet that put a premium on mid-iron control from 150 to 175 yards. Winning scores land in the mid-teens under par: Hideki Matsuyama won at 17 under in 2024, and Justin Rose took the 2025 title in a playoff at 16 under. An accuracy test spreads the field a little, which is exactly why the panel keeps even the world number one under an 80% top-20 floor and hands real numbers to complete, unspectacular ballstrikers.

What Anchors The Board

Three fetched facts define where the individual numbers land.

• Scottie Scheffler Is The World Number One And Southwind Fits Him. He leads the FedExCup standings and owns a solo fourth in 2024 and a T3 in 2025 at TPC Southwind. A player that consistent, on a course that suits him, is the closest thing a no-cut top-20 board has to a lock, and even he is not one.
• Hideki Matsuyama Is The Hot Hand With A Trophy Here. He won this event in 2024, and his last three starts read T3 at the 3M Open, T5 at the Rocket Classic, and T7 at the Wyndham Championship, an elite-consistency run heading into a course he has already conquered. This is where the panel and the market disagree most.
• Course History Sits With The Accurate Ballstrikers. Tommy Fleetwood owns three career top-5s at TPC Southwind and led here through 54 holes in 2025; Viktor Hovland was runner-up at Southwind in 2024; Collin Morikawa posted a T5 here in 2022 and leads this field in strokes gained on approach; Patrick Cantlay and Russell Henley are among the best in the field by scoring average at this course. Precision, not distance, is the fetchable edge in Memphis.

Here is the short version first, then every model's raw number.

The Board

Prices are Kalshi cents, and on a top-20 board each cent reads directly as a probability: a 79¢ Scheffler contract is an ~79% top-20 chance, with no overround to strip out because these contracts are independent rather than one shared pie. The Model blend is the mean of the six seats after a revision round.

Golfer	Why it sits here	Market (top-20)	Model blend
Scottie Scheffler	World No. 1, FedExCup leader, solo-4th/T3 course history	79¢	76%
Hideki Matsuyama	2024 Memphis champ, T3/T5/T7 in his last three	50¢	64%
Tommy Fleetwood	Three career top-5s here, 54-hole leader in 2025	56¢	60%
Xander Schauffele	Elite ballstriker, T2 at Memphis in 2024	54¢	59%
Rory McIlroy	Masters champ, three-time FedExCup winner	55¢	58%
Sam Burns	Pair of top-5s at TPC Southwind, strong summer	50¢	56%
Viktor Hovland	Runner-up here in 2024, elite tee-to-green	44¢	53%
Matt Fitzpatrick	Precise iron player, fits the accuracy test	49¢	52%
Collin Morikawa	Leads field in approach, T5 here in 2022	48¢	52%
Cameron Young	Two 2026 wins, but T61 at the Wyndham last week	50¢	39%
Si Woo Kim	T3 at the Wyndham last week; panel is light here	46¢	36%

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

Every Seat's Number

Every player on the board is listed below, the crawlable board in full, no names cut. The Blend is the simple mean of the six seats after they read one another's reasoning and revised. Lean is the blend minus the market price, read as direction and size, not a precise edge.

Golfer	Market	Fable	Opus	Sonnet	DeepSeek	GLM	Kimi	Blend	Lean
Scottie Scheffler	79¢	76	76	78	78	75	76	76%	−2
Hideki Matsuyama	50¢	58	59	63	68	68	65	64%	+14
Tommy Fleetwood	56¢	58	56	61	65	60	63	60%	+4
Xander Schauffele	54¢	56	55	58	63	62	62	59%	+5
Rory McIlroy	55¢	58	53	58	63	58	58	58%	+3
Sam Burns	50¢	52	51	54	60	60	59	56%	+6
Viktor Hovland	44¢	50	47	53	58	56	53	53%	+8
Matt Fitzpatrick	49¢	50	48	51	60	53	52	52%	+3
Collin Morikawa	48¢	48	48	51	58	52	54	52%	+3
Patrick Cantlay	48¢	44	46	45	55	48	52	48%	+1
Russell Henley	42¢	46	47	46	50	50	48	48%	+5
Ludvig Åberg	44¢	46	45	48	50	48	46	47%	+3
J.J. Spaun	38¢	42	41	45	44	46	45	44%	+5
Justin Thomas	46¢	42	42	43	46	46	43	44%	−3
Aaron Rai	34¢	38	40	42	40	44	42	41%	+6
Cameron Young	50¢	38	39	34	48	36	41	39%	−11
Shane Lowry	32¢	34	38	37	40	40	38	38%	+6
Chris Gotterup	38¢	36	37	38	40	33	41	38%	+0
Harris English	28¢	34	38	35	35	38	36	36%	+8
Si Woo Kim	46¢	34	35	33	35	40	38	36%	−11
Sungjae Im	30¢	34	38	34	35	35	36	35%	+6
Justin Rose	30¢	32	34	33	35	38	39	35%	+6
Robert MacIntyre	38¢	34	37	31	35	32	37	34%	−3
Tom Kim	38¢	30	33	32	35	35	37	34%	−5
Corey Conners	29¢	32	33	30	33	34	36	33%	+4
Ben Griffin	38¢	36	34	31	30	29	36	33%	−5
Brian Harman	24¢	30	34	31	32	36	33	33%	+8
Maverick McNealy	36¢	32	34	31	30	28	35	32%	−4
Min Woo Lee	32¢	28	33	32	30	32	34	32%	−1
Jordan Spieth	26¢	30	32	29	35	30	32	31%	+5
Wyndham Clark	32¢	30	33	31	30	32	32	31%	−1
Adam Scott	24¢	26	31	27	35	32	33	31%	+6
Akshay Bhatia	27¢	30	33	27	30	30	33	30%	+4
Jackson Koivun	40¢	32	30	29	30	28	34	30%	−10
J.T. Poston	26¢	28	31	25	30	30	31	29%	+4
Ryan Gerard	38¢	30	31	26	25	28	34	29%	−8
Alex Noren	30¢	26	30	25	30	32	30	29%	−1
Michael Thorbjornsen	36¢	28	30	24	25	28	33	28%	−8
Sahith Theegala	22¢	24	30	24	30	28	30	28%	+6
Rickie Fowler	30¢	24	27	26	30	26	30	27%	−3
Nick Taylor	18¢	24	29	24	25	28	30	27%	+8
Nicolai Højgaard	23¢	24	28	23	25	26	30	26%	+3
Kurt Kitayama	30¢	24	28	24	25	26	28	26%	−5
Keith Mitchell	26¢	24	29	22	25	26	28	26%	−1
Eric Cole	26¢	22	25	21	25	28	27	25%	−1
Bud Cauley	26¢	26	28	21	20	26	25	24%	−2
Harry Hall	22¢	26	26	21	20	24	29	24%	+3
Michael Brennan	30¢	26	25	21	20	26	28	24%	−5
Jake Knapp	22¢	24	26	20	25	24	26	24%	+2
Jacob Bridgeman	28¢	26	25	20	20	26	27	24%	−4
Ryan Fox	20¢	24	28	22	20	22	27	24%	+3
Max Homa	16¢	22	25	21	25	24	25	24%	+7
Michael Kim	24¢	24	28	20	20	24	24	23%	−0
Alex Smalley	30¢	22	26	20	20	26	25	23%	−7
Sam Stevens	16¢	24	26	18	20	24	24	23%	+7
Alex Fitzpatrick	30¢	22	24	20	20	22	25	22%	−8
Ryo Hisatsune	22¢	22	23	20	20	24	24	22%	+0
Gary Woodland	20¢	20	25	19	20	24	24	22%	+2
Jordan L. Smith	26¢	22	24	18	20	22	24	22%	−5
Nicolás Echavarría	20¢	20	25	17	20	24	23	22%	+2
Patrick Rodgers	8¢	18	24	17	20	24	25	21%	+14
Matti Schmid	12¢	20	24	17	15	24	25	21%	+8
Aldrich Potgieter	8¢	20	23	17	15	22	24	20%	+12
Kristoffer Reitan	24¢	20	22	17	15	22	24	20%	−4
Matthew McCarty	18¢	20	22	17	15	24	22	20%	+2
Pierceson Coody	12¢	18	23	17	15	24	23	20%	+8
Ricky Castillo	18¢	18	21	17	15	24	22	20%	+1
Sepp Straka	17¢	16	21	16	18	22	19	19%	+2
Sudarshan Yellamaraju	14¢	16	19	14	15	22	20	18%	+3

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

A note on the panel. Our standard Model Verdict lineup runs eight seats. On this run two were unavailable: the ChatGPT and Gemini command-line seats are not installed on the machine that produced these verdicts. This board therefore runs on six models: Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi. All six scored the field the morning of August 13, 2026 without seeing any prices, working from a fetched, dated summary of the field, the course, and each contender's recent form and Memphis history. They then read one another's anonymized reasoning and revised. Every model's number also lands in our back-tested Model Verdict ledger, where past price-blind calls are graded against settled results so the method is measured, not just asserted.

More Live Boards From The Same Panel

The same price-blind panel scores the biggest live boards on Kalshi. Nearest neighbors while you read Memphis:

More live boards from the same panel: FedEx St. Jude Championship winner (same field, outright: Scottie Scheffler leads near 16¢, Rory McIlroy ~5.6¢) · 2027 Pro Football champion (the Los Angeles Rams top the board near 16¢). Prices fetched August 13, 2026.

Scottie Scheffler: The Safest Name On The Sheet

Scheffler is the one contract the market and every seat treat the same way. Kalshi prices him at 79¢ to finish top 20, and the panel blends him to about 76%, the highest number on the board by a dozen points. The case is not complicated: he is the world number one, he leads the FedExCup standings, and his Southwind record (solo fourth in 2024, T3 in 2025) says the accuracy test suits him. What keeps even him under an 80% floor is the same thing that shapes the whole board: a no-cut field of the year's 69 best players, on a course where one wayward day near the water can drop anyone outside 20. A three-quarters top-20 chance is the ceiling this event hands its best player.

Hideki Matsuyama: The Panel's Biggest Overweight

If there is one place the panel plants its flag, it is Hideki Matsuyama. The market prices him at 50¢, a coin flip tied to a knot of names in the middle of the board. The panel blends him to about 64%, a plus-14 lean that is the largest disagreement on the sheet. The reasoning is course history stacked on top of live form: Matsuyama won this event in 2024, and his most recent three starts are T3 at the 3M Open, T5 at the Rocket Classic, and T7 at the Wyndham Championship. A past champion on this exact course who is also in the best rolling form of anyone outside the very top of the board is precisely the profile the models weight up and a flat market tail tends to price like an afterthought. Five of the six seats put him at 58% or higher, and two pushed past 65%.

Cameron Young And Si Woo Kim: Where The Panel Fades The Crowd

The board's two biggest fades both run against names the market clearly trusts.

Cameron Young is priced at 50¢ to finish top 20; the panel blends him to about 39%, an 11-point fade. This is not the models missing his ceiling: Young has two wins in 2026 and a runner-up at The Open last month. It is the models reading his profile as boom-or-bust and leaning on his most recent result, a T61 at the Wyndham Championship, as evidence that a placement floor is not his strength. When a player's game is built on speed and streaks, a top-20 contract asks the one question he answers least reliably. Read the split honestly: the market is paying for the ceiling, the panel is doubting the floor, and both can be right depending on which Young shows up.

Si Woo Kim is the fade to watch with more skepticism. The market has him at 46¢; the panel blends him to about 36%, an 11-point gap that looks light given that Kim just finished T3 at the Wyndham Championship and has stacked top-10s all season. [Editor's note: the panel's number here does not fully credit Kim's most recent T3; treat his row as a spot where the market's higher price has the better of the recent evidence.] We surface the row rather than bury it, because the honest version of this board includes the places the models are probably a step behind the crowd.

Where The Panel Changed Its Mind

After round one, every seat read the others' anonymized reasoning and could revise. Three arcs tell the story of what moved.

Moved most on Matsuyama (58→63): 31-event cut streak, five straight top-15s, proven 2024 champ — my number underweighted red-hot proven course form versus the other seats. — Sonnet

Fleetwood (+8 to 63): verified strong recent finishes, the 2025 Southwind 54-hole lead, and an elite accuracy fit persuaded me his top-20 floor far exceeds my earlier 55. — Kimi

One seat revised the other way, cutting a name it decided it had priced on reputation rather than evidence:

Lowered Justin Rose most (48→35): defending champion, but a missed cut at The Open and patchy form — course fit alone can't carry a top-20 floor without current form behind it. — DeepSeek

The net of it: the seats converged upward on the proven-form-plus-course-history names (Matsuyama, Fleetwood, Hovland) and trimmed the players whose case was mostly a good week on this course a year ago. The disagreement that survived was over exactly how high a hot hand's floor should sit.

What Would Change The Panel's Mind

These numbers reflect what was known the morning of August 13, before a shot was struck. Concrete, event-shaped developments that would move them:

• A Withdrawal Or An Opening-Round Injury To A Top Name. In a no-cut field, one fewer elite body reshuffles the entire top-20 math and lifts the names just behind him.
• The Thursday And Friday Leaderboard. With no cut, the 36-hole position is the single biggest live input on a top-20 contract; a favorite who opens even par in soft conditions sees his number climb fast, while a slow start turns a 50¢ coin flip into a live NO.
• Firm-And-Windy Versus Soft-And-Scoreable Setup. A demanding, breezy TPC Southwind widens the gap between the precise ballstrikers (Scheffler, Schauffele, Fitzpatrick, Morikawa) and everyone else; a soft, low-scoring week compresses the board and helps the deep pack of 30-something-cent names.
• A Cameron Young Or Si Woo Kim Signal. Both are priced above where the panel has them. If Young opens with two low rounds, his 50¢ price looks right and the panel's fade looks slow; if Kim keeps the Wyndham form going, his row is the panel's clearest miss.

Settlement Timeline

Marker	Date
Round 1	Thursday, August 13, 2026
Cut	None (all 69 players play four rounds)
Final Round And Settlement	Sunday, August 16, 2026
Next Catalyst	BMW Championship, the following week (top 50 in FedExCup points advance)

This page is re-scored whenever the story moves, with the "prices as of" stamp above carrying the evidence, and prices on the board refresh as the market trades through tournament week. After the market settles, it converts to a graded retrospective that scores every number here against the result.

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

The names the market prices in single digits are where the panel's separation shows up most:

• Patrick Rodgers (~8¢, ~21% Blend). The biggest positive lean on the board in percentage terms: every seat put a journeyman grinder's top-20 chance more than double the market's number, reading the no-cut format as a leveler that gives steady players more looks than a lottery price implies.
• Aldrich Potgieter (~8¢, ~20% Blend). A young bomber the market treats as a pure longshot; the panel gives him a real, if modest, number on raw ceiling.
• Max Homa (~16¢, ~24% Blend) And Sam Stevens (~16¢, ~23% Blend). Two mid-board names the models push up a full seven points, the kind of quietly complete profiles a top-20 market tends to underprice.
• Brian Harman And Nick Taylor (~24¢ And ~18¢, ~33% And ~27% Blends). Accurate, unspectacular players whose games travel to a course that punishes the wild and rewards the steady.

The Traps: Where The Table Can Mislead

Transparency matters more than a clean story, so here is where these numbers would fool you.

• The Si Woo Kim Number Is The Panel's Soft Spot. As flagged above, the models fade a player coming off a T3, and the market's 46¢ likely has the better of the recent evidence. Read that row as a place the panel is probably a step slow, not a signal to fade him.
• These Are Independent Contracts, Not One Pie. Do not "de-vig" this board by dividing prices by their total. Each top-20 contract stands alone; the sheet's prices sum well past 2,000 cents because roughly 20 to 22 players finish top 20 once ties are counted, and that is the design, not an overround to strip out.
• The Board Is Thinly Traded Before The Tournament. Most of these prices come from candlestick marks rather than a live two-sided book, so treat the exact cents as soft and the small gaps between mid-board names as noise, not signal. That thinness tightens fast once Thursday's tee times arrive.

The DFS Placement Angle: Reading The Top-20 Market

For the PGA DFS crowd, this is the more useful Kalshi board of the week. A top-20 contract is a cleaner read on the placement and leverage that actually decide DFS tournaments than a winner-take-all outright is, because it prices a player's floor rather than his lightning-strike ceiling. Read the board as a floor-versus-ceiling map: Scheffler near 79¢ is who the market trusts to cash a lineup slot almost regardless of the week, the pack of 50-something-cent names (Fleetwood, McIlroy, Schauffele, Burns) are the safe cores, and the 20-to-30-cent tail, plus the panel's fades on Young and Si Woo Kim, is where the boom-or-bust leverage lives. If you are building for the same field, Stokastic's PGA DFS Sims model every player's full finishing distribution, and our PGA DFS picks for today turn that into a slate plan.

How To Read These Prices

The models can tell you where they part from the crowd, but the number in front of you still has to be read in context.

Work an example. Say Hideki Matsuyama shows a 50¢ top-20 price. On this board that reads straight through as about a 50% chance he finishes top 20, with no division and no overround, because each contract settles on its own player and nobody else's. The panel's 64% says the models see a proven Memphis winner in hot form as closer to a two-in-three lock than a coin flip. To turn any of these cents into the fair odds you would compare against a sportsbook's top-20 or each-way market, the habit is the same one behind turning Kalshi's cents into real odds: the price is the probability, and the probability is the number to beat.

A few honest points before reading too much into any number above:

• Eligibility. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, not a sportsbook. You must be 18 or older and located in an eligible state, and availability varies by state and can change.
• Liquidity And Spread. This is a thinly traded 69-contract board, and most prices sit on candlestick marks, so getting in or out at your number is not always possible.
• A Moving Week. This is a live tournament that had not started when these prices were captured, about 6:29 a.m. ET on August 13, 2026. A withdrawal, weather, or the Thursday draw could change everything, and prices on this page refresh as the market moves during tournament week.
• Not Advice. Everything here is analysis for information, not a recommendation to trade. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

The Bottom Line

The market and the models mostly agree on the top of this board: Scottie Scheffler is the safest top-20 name in the field, and no-cut golf at TPC Southwind rewards the precise over the powerful. Where they split is the middle. The panel is a clear step higher on red-hot Hideki Matsuyama, backs Tommy Fleetwood, Viktor Hovland and Sam Burns over the crowd, and fades Cameron Young and Si Woo Kim, while flagging that the Kim fade is the number most likely to be wrong. The read to take is not that any single contract is a lock, because even the world number one is only about a three-in-four shot to finish top 20 here. It is that in a no-cut field, the value lives in the players with a proven floor, not the ones with the loudest ceiling. If you want the panel's receipts, every call here gets scored on our graded Model Verdict scoreboard, and if you are playing the same field in DFS, our free expert picks and the Kalshi golf picks hub are the next stops.

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Verdicts generated August 13, 2026. Prices as of August 13, 2026 (morning, before Round 1). Panel: Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, price-blind, after one revision round. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.