Jeff’s Hardcore Core- CareerBuilder Challenge

Thirteen of sixteen of my core made the cut last week at the Sony Open, which made for a very exciting weekend. Patrick Rodgers had a ten-foot putt on 18 to make the cut and give us 14, but it was not to be. I was very high on Spieth, not only because his game fit the course so well, but am I the only one that can sense Justin Thomas’s success irking Jordan a little bit? Spieth was clearly motivated and finished very well, but Justin Thomas is just a better golfer right now, period. A couple of guys that I had in my core that were incredibly low owned and performed well were Luke List and Cameron Smith. Apparently this week Luke List is everybody’s pick, but last week nobody liked him. Something clicked with his game in the Fall season and I have been all over him and will continue to be. Unfortunately we will have to deal with other owners this week. Webb Simpson put up a real nice performance especially considering his price. Charles Howell was also very good for our Core, as was Russell Knox. I had about 40% exposure to Daniel Berger and it looked really good early, but he fell apart and dropped way back the weekend and did not provide me value for his price. I was up a little bit in GPPs last week, but not much. I did have a team finish 12th in the $300 as it was 1 of 15 teams in the entire contest to get 6 guys through the cut.

That brings up a point that I want to make. I hear a ton of people in the industry talk about GPP plays without distinguishing between what type of GPP. I want you to identify what type of GPPs you are playing in and determine what type of strategy you are going to employ before choosing your players. For a small entry contest it is far more important to have six guys through the cut than it is to identify the winner. A good example of this was last weekend when our friend Tommy G from Guru Elite DFS entered the 25-player field, $1,000 Clubhouse event. He was the only person in the contest to have all six of his guys through the cut and because of that he won the contest, despite the fact he did not have Justin Thomas. In these smaller contests, you need to focus on selecting guys who you believe are more apt to make the cut, rather than who has the highest upside (if it is at the expense of downside). In other words I am looking for guys with a higher floor than a higher ceiling. Conversely, if you have any hopes of winning a large-field contest like the $3 with 50,000+, you are going to need the winner and most likely five other guys in the Top 15. You need to take more risk in these contests and be more contrarian with your picks. The types of players that you need to target are high ceiling guys, even though they might have a low floor. My core is generally comprised of a mixture of the two, because I play in both field types. It is quite obvious however what players are the higher floor/lower ceiling type guys (CHIII, Swafford, etc) vs. the low floor/high ceiling type players (Si Woo Kim, Knox, etc). If you have any questions, do not hesitate to send me an email, my number one priority is to make Team FGI members better players and win money.

This week is a bit different than most in that we do not have a lot of the top players in the world. This is definitely going to affect the kind of strategy I employ this week and will talk a bit about that now.

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I use sportsbook odds as one of many pieces of information included in my research every week.  The first thing I do every week when the pricing is released is build our Sportsbook Odds vs. Daily Pricing Tool and analyze it closely.  This tool is a perfect first look and helps identify screaming values and guys that are blatantly mis-priced.  A perfect example was last week in Webb Simpson.  Yes Webb can be extremely up and down, but for some reason the sportsbooks liked him a lot more than Draftkings priced him.  He came out to be a +35 on our tool, which if it is toward the middle or top of players, that is a big number.  Simpson was only $6,800 and that tool helped me identify him as a great value.  It turned out really nicely as he way outperformed his price. I would encourage you to use this tool as one of the first things you look at every week, help identify those under-priced players and see if everything else lines up for them that week.

In looking at the sportsbook odds this week, they are different because we do not have the super stars like Spieth, Day, or DJ at 5 to 1 to win.  The favorite this week is Patrick Reed who is 16 to 1 to win.  What this says is that other weeks, the higher priced guys in the field are more likely to win than this week.  In those other weeks, I will say that I usually (although not always) like a stars and scrubs approach to make sure I get exposure to those favorites who have a very good chance of winning the golf tournament.  This week the odds are much flatter so that the guy with the 20^th lowest odds has a better chance of winning than other weeks.  For this reason I am going to go with a more balanced approach, rather than having a high exposure to the top five guys. Brendan Steele has a much better chance of winning this week than a tournament that features Rory, Day, Stenson, etc.  Now, I will have exposure to a couple of them, especially in the smaller field contests, because I just know they will be ignored.  I would bet Patrick Reed will be owned as lowly as Justin Thomas was last week in the small field/higher dollar contests, which is why I will try and be contrarian.  But for the $3 event I will be, and recommend you not have as much exposure to the top priced guys this week as you normally would.

Best of luck this week my friends!

Reed

Howell

Grillo

Rahm

Steele

Dufner

List

Piercy

Palmer

Laird

Glover

Lahiri (One of those picks where if you are playing 1 team, I probably would not roster Lahiri. But if you are doing multi entry mix him in, because he is one of those low-floor/high ceiling guys that I talked about above.  He is also very contrarian and will have single digit owners this week)

Huh

Cameron Smith

DeChambeau

Schauffele

Hagy

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