Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Farmers Insurance Open

The Farmers Insurance Open this week is what I would consider the first huge tournament of the year. A full-field, with most of the worlds top players, on a tough course, I am really excited. Draftkings even acknowledged it was a big event by increasing the size of many contests this week. No matter what happens this week, I don’t think it will be any crazier than what we saw last week. Who would have predicted Adam Long, 31 year old tour rookie after shooting 20 over par in his five previous events ( 4 MC and a T63) would win the Desert Classic? Truly remarkable and the .01% of people that owned him were happy. A day three cut, slaughtered nearly 99% of the field as the cutline was an absurd -9. We saw Lefty almost win and Adam Hadwin make the jackasses who continually argue that course history is irrelevant look foolish again. I hope you took my advice in my column last week and played a lot of showdown slates and stacked all La Quinta and Nicklaus Tournament course players on your rosters. I was able to win every single double up I played for three days and won 76 of 82 H2Hs in those first three days as well. As I mentioned in my column, it seems like an obvious strategy, but there are a lot of people playing DFS that are not as sharp as you and I and there were some horrific decisions made by people in their cash game lineups for those showdown slates that in turn gave us a huge edge. I really wish we had that same opportunity all year, because it truly is a great benefit to us and one that we will continue to exploit every year. Of course, this week we also have different courses being played, with one being more difficult than the other, so maybe we can do something similar, but we will talk about it in the strategy section. As for the main slate core, it was a bit of a mixed bag.

What went right? Of the 18 players that I built my rosters around, 12 of them made the cut. Now, in a normal week that is not a good week by my standards, but this week was a bit different and there were tons of guys who surprisingly missed the cut, so it was not horrible this week. My choice for top tier guy was Jon Rahm and that proved to be the correct choice as he narrowly outscored Patrick Cantlay and widely outscored Justin Rose. Abraham Ancer was a decent $9k play, although it looked for a while we would get a Top 10 performance out of him, but he fell back over the weekend to T18. Lucas Glover, Sungjae Im, and Daniel Berger were all very solid for us in the high $7k-$8k range. I was especially fond of my decision to roster Daniel Berger. I talked about believing that he would be scarcely owned and it would not take a big investment to be overweight and that proved to be correct. He was owned by 8% of the field and I was easily overweight with only an 18% stake. A guy with his upside for only $7,700, I felt the reward was worth the risk. Easily the best performance of anybody in the core from last week was Dominic Bozzelli, who was priced at $6,400 and finished T5 and gave us a monster 120.5 DK point performance.

What went wrong? Not owning either Adam Hadwin or Phil Mickelson proved costly as they posted 139.5 and 147.5 DK points respectively. I really liked Hadwin based upon his tournament history, I just could not get past his high price. Sometimes when I look back at decisions I make, I would not change my decision if I had to make it over again, but in this case I would. Too many times we get hung up on a player being priced much more than they usually are. There was a reason Hadwin was priced so high last week and that is because he dominates those courses, period. He said in an interview he loves this desert style course and is used to it because he plays them everyday in his home in Scottsdale. We were not the only people scared off of him because of the price as only 8% of the field owned him. It was an opportunity for us to be contrarian with a great play and I made a mistake and missed it. With Mickelson, I don’t regret the decision of not owning him that much. I realize Phil is typically a good desert golf player, but having played one event since the Tour Championship and that hadn’t been in three months, who knew what in the world we were going to get from him. I also, didn’t think he would be as slightly owned as he was either (7%), but the uncertainty scared everybody else as well. Still, without those two guys, if you got 6/6 through the cut and had a few guys in the Top 25, you had a good chance of some decently high cashes.

I personally ended up being up nicely last week, largely in part to the showdown slates as I ended a bit down in main slate GPPs. If you didn’t do so great on the main slate either, do not be discouraged as it is one of the most difficult events we see all year to try and predict the way the whole week would shake down. The unpredictability with three different courses, the pro-am feature, and the massive amount of scoring was reflected in the wonky leaderboard. That is precisely why it so important to exploit edges like with the showdown slate sometimes and also to stay disciplined with your bankroll. We have some big events coming up, where large tournaments have huge prizes, we want to be in the game to have a shot at them. Keep working hard and good things will happen my friends.

Good luck this week with the Farmers!

Jeff’s Strategy & Core- Farmers Insurance Open
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