Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Sentry Tournament of Champions

Here we go my friends, the kick-off to the new golf year is this week in Kapalua, Hawaii for the Sentry Tournament of Champions.

I always enjoy the brief Hawaii swing (2 events) as we get to watch golf in the evening hours.  I also really enjoy Kapalua, because it is such a beautiful course with dramatic elevation changes and gorgeous views.

For those of you who have not seen it yet, be sure to check out my Crystal Ball Article: 2023 Edition, which is now posted.  Over the years it has been extremely successful in identifying players that have outperformed their expectations and odds for the coming year.

The game of DFS golf is constantly and rapidly evolving.  I have been playing this game for 10+ years now and we are light years away from where we were a decade ago.  The game has gotten significantly harder to beat as the amount of data and overall knowledge about the game has increased 10-fold.  Being the very first exclusive fantasy golf website in existence, we at FGI have contributed greatly to the knowledge of so many people throughout the industry and have been responsible for much of this change.   From the research tools we have developed to the analysis of trends. We made popular the idea of aggregate ownership (the total ownership of your roster added together) and target parameters of past winning GPP lineups.  I remember years ago Pat Mayo doing an interview with Al Smizzle and it was more geared toward football, but he basically said the guys at FGI had come up with this idea of aggregate ownership for DFS golf lineups and was there such thing in DFS football. Interestingly, he didn’t have an answer, which led me to believe it was not something that he had considered before.  Rolling Stats (segmenting recent statistical rankings vs just long-term rankings) was another concept we developed and implemented.  Moose at Fantasy National took this concept and built a website around basically just segmenting stats into different time frames.  How about the idea of who putted better on bermuda grass vs bentgrass?  Do you think you could find this information anywhere 10 years ago?  The answer is obviously, no.  Where the players grew-up and played college golf, how the salary of a player on DK compared to the odds that the sportsbooks placed on them, gaining leverage on the field by predicting the ownership of players (being contrarian), are all concepts and things that people use in their normal research now that were not known by many at the advent of DFS golf. Hell, even the statistic of strokes gained was a new idea/concept.  If you have not read Mark Broadie’s book Every Shot Counts, I would recommend it highly.   The game of DFS golf is a different animal now and we need to accept it and evolve to try and stay ahead of our competition.  In my 10 years of playing DFS golf, I have received a 1099 tax form from Draftkings in about 7 of them, which means I was profitable in that year. I would consider this pretty successful considering I am almost exclusively a GPP player myself which subjects me to extreme volatility.  I have had several years with 5-figure gains and 1 year with a six-figure gain.  Last year unfortunately was a year that I will not receive a 1099 from Draftkings for. This does not sit well with me at all, and frankly it eats at me very much.   I have spent a lot of time analyzing what I can do to change that for 2023.  I have poured over winning GPP data from 2022 to try and identify trends.  I have looked at myself to see what I can change in my process to be a better player.  Even having played this game for as long as I have I am not immune to falling into bad habits and making mistakes.

One thing I found myself doing is placing too much emphasis on one or two particular aspects and selecting a player solely on that in a given week.  We invented and developed all the tools on our website, which I use in my process each and every week.  I have been guilty of focusing too much on the results of just one or two tools and making an opinion based upon that.  For example, there were a couple of times last year that I did not own guys because their putting splits were really bad on the turf that was being played on that week and it burned me.  I can’t tell you how many times I missed on guys because their form was bad coming into the event.  I know better than that.  So many times over the past 10 years guys have won (or at least have been a good value for their price) despite bad form coming into the event.  Should current form be factored into our decision making? Of course.  But it should only be part of decision of whether to own a guy or not. If he satisfies several other factors in my research, I want to try and not rule him out just because of form.  I was focusing too much on just a couple of factors and becoming too narrow minded.  If you have been part of FGI for a while you know that I am “outside the box” kind of GPP player.  In analyzing what my successes have come from throughout my career in this crazy game, I would attribute much of it to being contrarian and doing opposite of what the field is doing.  In my self-reflection of the past year, I was not doing enough of that.  Going forward I want to rely on my experience in this game and use my gut more.  Thus, I have built in categories for being contrarian and just my “gut feel”.   I also want to make sure I am factoring in the idea of zigging while my competition is zagging.  Again, I do not want this to be my sole reason to own a player on a given week, but I do want to factor it in more.

Another area that I want to improve upon is not having lesser players destroy my core.  We talk so much about gaining leverage on the field by being overweight the field in our ownership.  Generally, I have targeted 2X the field as being a good amount of leverage and I think that remains a good rule of thumb.  I have found however that I have suffered too many lineup casualties from having too much exposure to lower tier guys who are far more volatile than upper tier guys.  I can’t tell you how many weeks I nailed my top tier players, but had a minimal number of 6/6 teams going to the weekend and an unprofitable week overall because I had 18% of Chez Reavie and 20% of Matthew NeSmith when I could have had half of that.  I am going to plan on adding more lower tier players to my core and reducing my exposure to them.  For those guys I really like, I will certainly still try and get to 2X the field, but overall there is nothing wrong with being equal (or even less than the field) on certain guys.  I want to do more of that.  If they play well, great, I have exposure to them and if I nail my middle and top tier guys, I will do well.  But, if they shit the bed, I am not going to lose nearly as many teams as I have been because of it.

For all of these reasons I have talked about above, I have developed more of a systematic approach to selecting my core each week. This will eliminate my decisions being too concentrated on one or two areas.  Thus, I have changed the layout of my column. I have identified 8 areas that I want to factor into the selection of my core each week and give selected weighting to all of them.  I have listed those below in my column. I will have a total rating score for the players I have selected in my core each week.

Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Sentry Tournament of Champions

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