Jeff’s Hardcore Core- BMW Championship

The BMW Championship, the second leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs is this week and we are down to 70 players. They will be cut down to the Top 30 heading to East Lake and the Tour Championship after Sunday. I will be diving into the BMW, which I think presents us some opportunities from a strategic perspective, the course, game theory, and my player pool, but before that let’s recap last week’s Northern Trust.

What went right? For the first time in a few weeks we had significant exposure to the winner. Patrick Reed was owned by 14% of the field in the $5 and 15% in the $44, so we were 2X the field in both with our 30% exposure. We have been on Reed for several weeks now as we have noticed him trending positively and the game rounding into form.  Patrick Cantlay and Justin Rose were both very good for our top tier finishing 8th and 11th in DK points respectively. Jason Kokrak & Andrew Putnam used Sunday charges to climb up to a T12 and gave us huge production for $7,400. Webb Simpson finished T18, which was fine, but not amazing for $9,400. Joaquin Niemann, Hideki Matsuyama, and Tony Finau all finished T30, but I was hoping for much more from Hideki and Finau.

What went wrong? I decided to pay for top-priced Brooks Koepka. The main reason I wanted exposure was because I felt he would be lightly owned yet again, and that turned out to be the case  as he was owned by 14% of the field in the $5 and only 9% in the $44. Those numbers were even lower than I was estimating and that made my 25% double the field. I watched Koepka closely and really his game was solid. He shot 70-69-69-70, but just could not put together a real low round and uncharacteristically had a couple blow up holes that took him out of contention. In the end he finished T30 and finished with the 21st highest DK points. Despite Koepka not paying off his price, I still like the decision to have 25% exposure, based upon his low ownership. Xander Schauffele was easily the biggest disappointment last week having missed the cut. Normally a big game player, he had such a reasonable price at $8,900. Xander blew up nearly 40% of my rosters before they even got to the weekend. The only other real grenades other than Xander from the core were low dollar guys Emiliano Grillo and Sepp Straka. I didn’t have a ton of exposure to either, so it was not catastrophic, but Grillo found his way onto some really good teams that would have had a shot at a high finish.

Another week with the majority of the core making the cut (13/16) along with the winner, put us in a position to win some GPPs and we had several FGI members that did.  Two more weeks in this season to make a big score, so let’s crush our research and win some $$$.

Jeff’s Strategy & Core- BMW Championship
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