Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Shriners Hospital for Children Open

Week 4 of the fall PGA season and for the third week in a row another “S” tournament, this week it is the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Actually a loaded field with top name players, which is different than usual for this event. I will dive into my strategy for the week as well as my player pool, but first let’s recap the Safeway from last week.

What went right? Many of the low $7k guys that we targeted last week made the cut with several giving us finishes that produced value for their price. Jim Fuyrk (T17), Lanto Griffin (T17), Daniel Berger (T23), Adam Long (T23), Kevin Chappell (T40), and Cameron Tringale (T44) were all a part of that. I chose to go with an extreme starts and scrubs roster build and two of those top tier guys performed to the level we needed them to- Justin Thomas (T4) and Colin Morikawa (T10). Beyond that it was pretty bleak last week.

What went wrong? When you elect to own the top tier guys, you need them to get you at least Top 10 finishes and that did not happen last week. Patrick Cantlay (T40), Sungjae Im (T49), and Ben An (MC) basically took any lineups they were in, out of contention, which for my core was a lot. Basically I had 60% of my rosters shaved off from those guys alone. I have talked about how difficult it is to get 6/6 through the cut with the new Top 65 cutline, and we saw that again last week as only about 2-3% of teams in GPPs were able to do that. I like to pride myself on being able to usually double the field in that number every week, which would have been about 4-6% of my teams getting 6/6. For the first time since I can remember, I had literally zero teams with 6/6. You certainly do not need 6/6 to cash in GPPs, but almost 100% of the time you will need all six. I also can’t remember the last time that I have owned so many guys miss the cut. Bronson Burgoon, Nate Lashley, Ben An, Kyle Stanley, Martin Laird, Doc Redman, and Tom Hoge all bit the dust early. It was a bad week all around and when we have those occasionally, I always like to take away something from them to try and continue to make adjustments. So, what will I take away from last week? We need to factor in just how high variance PGA DFS is and how much that has increased due to the new cut rules. I have always been a huge proponent of fading high owned players. If a guy is going to be owned by more than a quarter to a third of the field, I almost always hit the fade button. Those are for extreme cases however. We need to factor in “higher” ownership, not just the “highest” ownership. Nobody was owned by more than 25% last week, but many were owned between 10-24% and a bunch of those were $7k guys. When you sit back and look at the fact that Nate Lashley was owned by nearly 16% of the field, I think wow, that would be a decent opportunity to pivot off a guy that misses the cut in about half of the PGA events that he has played on the PGA Tour. Even if he pulls out a good performance like say Harold Varner did for similar ownership and price finishing T17, it certainly does not eliminate us from winning any GPPs. The only way it could hurt us real bad is if he posted a Top 3 finish which is highly unlikely. So, half the time he misses the cut and we shave 16% of our competition away, about 5% of the time we get hurt, and the rest of the time it doesn’t matter. My point is I am going to be trying to identify better those guys who have inflated ownership (15-20%), that have a high likelihood of missing the cut. Much of the time that is going to be guys in the $7k to $8k range.

Alright, let’s dive into my core of players this week-

Jeff’s Strategy & Core- Shriners Hospital for Children Open

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