Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Houston Open

Our first DFS Match-Play experience is in the books and it certainly did not play out the way I expected it to.  Coming into the week, I figured there would be a lot of confusion surrounding the layout, scoring, and overall the best strategy to implement in playing this new game.  I had a feeling that there would be a lot of people picking multiple players from the same pool, which significantly decreased their chances of succeeding in large field GPPs.  Even though I expected it, when lineups locked, I was still shocked to see that 21% of all teams entered contained multiple players from the same pool.  I was very optimistic about Team FGI’s chances at that point because we specifically talked about looking closely at our lineups and making sure that did not happen to ours.  We also looked at the bracket itself and talked about avoiding round of 16 match-ups with our players as well in the case they advanced out of pool play. I have been around long enough to know better than to get my hopes up too high, but I was feeling good that we essentially shaved a fifth of the field off of having a chance at winning the $100k grand prize.  I had further positivitiy when I saw Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson come in with ownership of well less than 30%.  I mentioned on the podcast that I didn’t think anybody would be owned by over 30% and despite the fact that Zach scoffed at that, Rory came in at 26% and DJ at 22%.  I felt really confident that both of those guys would run deep in the tournament and built my core around that scenario.  It did not take long for it to become clear that neither of them showed up mentally in Austin and they displayed a half-ass effort and exited stage left early.  Having a large share of my teams slashed by DJ, Rory, and Day all exiting, it cut down considerably on the amount of teams that I had in play.  I still had some live teams since I had heavy exposure to Alex Noren, Patrick Reed, Louis Oosthuizen, Matt Kuhar, Charles Howell III and Kiradech Aphibarnrat who all won their pools. Unfortunately I had minimal exposure to Bubba and zero exposure to Kevin Kisner (because he was in DJs group).  Noren turned out to be the best performer in my core this week, bu alas it was my big guns that killed me and not having a few key players solidified a losing week for me.

I am happy to turn the page to Texas this week and tee us up for The Masters next week.  It is an exciting time of year for us DFS golf people and for golf fans as a whole.  Tons of great story lines heading into Augusta, but first lets do some damage with the Houston Open!

Jeff’s Strategy & Hardcore Core-Houston Open
Sign up for an FGI account today to see the rest of this post.