Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Sony Open

With week 1 of the PGA year under our belts we move onto our first full-field, cut event this week with the Sony Open. I would not consider week 1’s results for my core a success, but it certainly wasn’t a disaster either.  As we discuss all the time, if we do not have the winner in a small field event, our chances of winning a GPP are almost zero.  When Dustin Johnson goes bonkers and we do not have him in our core, than our chances are zero.  If you are a regular reader, you know that just about anytime DJ is in the field, he is in my core, because I know what he is capable of.  I owned a huge share of him at the WGC-HSBC when he choked away his huge lead on Sunday and I thought that might affect his physche.  Then when he followed that up by playing putrid in the Bahamas at the Hero, I thought this might not be the time to jump back on board.  I also thought that maybe his motivation level would not be real high and we all know when that happens, he is a different player.  It turned out however that his unmatched talent took over and we saw what he is capable of and what we have seen before.

If you would have told me that three of the four top guys that I went with in my core finished T4 or better, I would have almost guaranteed a win out of one of them. Alas, I settled for two T4s and a T2 out of Fowler, Matsuyama, and Rahm.  The lower dollar guys in my core were what really hurt last week with Steele, DeChambeau, and Stanley all vastly underperforming.   We did talk about how the cream does tend to rise to the top in this event and it sure did as there were only two lower priced guys to crack the Top 10 in Vegas and Sii Woo Kim, both of which I could have done 500 lineups and not had those two stacked on a team.

I like the Tournament of Champions, but getting back to a full-field with a cut makes me really excited.  We have some significant tournament history to work with and a bunch of guys who played last week in the TOC coming over to Oahu for this event.  You may have noticed in the past that guys coming over from the TOC tend to do well, including 12 of the past 19 winners having played at Kapalua.  Whether it is the fact that they are acclimated or they are just high quality players who are capable of winning a PGA Tour event, we need to keep that in mind.

Another item to note is that there are a few players who’s price I would consider extremely low this week.  Our Odds vs. Pricing Tool is excellent for identifying just who these guys are.  We saw this several times last year where some high quality players were priced among some non-high quality players causing major ownership spikes.  The one that stood out to me most this week is Jason Dufner who is the 46^th highest priced player at $7,300.  I thought back to last season when there were guys who I thought their price was obviously too low and came up with the following: Charles Howell III $7,300 at Farmers (owned by 31% in $3 and 40% in the $333),  Shane Lowry $7,000 at Pebble Beach (27% in the $3 and 42% in the $333), Tony Finau $7,100 at the Shell Houston Open (27% in the $3 and 39% in the $333), Peter Uihlein $7,200 at FedEx St Jude (39% in both the $3 and $333), Stewart Cink $6,900 at Greenbrier (32% in the $3 and 39% in the $333), and Adam Hadwin several times. I feel like Dufner could have significant inflated ownership like the above listed guys this week because of the really low price.

So how did those guys finish while being low priced and owned by such a large percentage of the field?  I will tell you shortly as well as discussing how we should situations like these in GPPs.  This is a critical topic and one that we need to think deeply about, because it will have such a dramatic impact on our results.

Jeff’s Strategy & Hardcore Core- Sony Open
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