Jeff’s Hardcore Core- THE PLAYERS Championship

An absolutely fantastic week for Team FGI last week as Zach continued to smash cash games and there were a ton of FGI logos atop leaderboards throughout GPPs on both Draftkings and Fanduel. It has been a terrific year so far and we look to keep the momentum going through this huge stretch of golf starting this week with THE PLAYERS Championship and The Masters in just four weeks.

I had the opportunity to attend THE PLAYERS a couple years ago and experience TPC Sawgrass, which remains one of my very favorite courses anywhere. I will share with you some of my thoughts about the course itself as well as my strategy and core of players I will be building my GPPs around. There is a big $250k grand prize for the $10 event this week as well as other huge contests. We have had a ton of success with this event in DFS over the last five years as well as hitting my largest ever golf outright win on Webb Simpson last year. Before we dive into THE PLAYERS, lets recap last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational.

What went right? Its always a good thing when you have the winner of the event on a third of all your rosters, which is what we had with Francesco Molinari. I was actually very surprised with his lack of ownership as Zach and I thought he would be around 15%. As it turned out he was only owned by 9% of the field throughout GPPs, which put us at more than 3X overweight. Of course Molinari was not the only positive part of the core as Tommy Fleetwood, Ben An, Lucas Glover, Rory McIlroy, and Rafa Cabrera Bello all cracked the Top 10. Although Rory disappointed on Sunday again, he continues to give us high quality finishes. A T6 from the top priced guy is not usually a great thing, but considering he was far and away the highest scorer above $9,100 it worked out well for us. We knew Cabrera Bello was going to be popular, because of his blatant mis-pricing. We talk about this all the time, that just because a guy is going to be heavily owned does not mean it is necessarily an automatic fade. Sometimes the value is just too great to pass up. If however we decide to roster someone like this we need to make sure we go contrarian in other spots to keep our aggregate ownership in our target range. If you are not focusing on aggregate ownership and roster composition I encourage you to revisit our 3-part GPP series detailing all of the important aspects of every winning GPP roster throughout 2018.  Even if you read it at the start of the year, it is worth re-reading.

Getting back to the core for the Arnold Palmer, in addition to hitting our biggest exposure players, we also hit on lesser owned guys. I also talk about taking shots on guys and having the ability to be overweight the field without risking too much of our weekly bankroll. This worked out perfectly with Matt Wallace, Sung Kang, Kevin Kisner, and Roger Sloan.

What went wrong? There was not too much that went wrong, especially since we only lost a few guys to the cut including Brian Gay, Haotong Li, and Kevin Na and Michael Thompson on the number. I really thought we would see a bounceback effort from Bryson DeChambeau, but he was pretty mediocre all week coming in with a T46. Still, it could have been a lot worse as we steered clear of  lineup sinkers like Day, Mickelson, Koepka , and Oosthuizen. Most everybody that I had major exposure to outperformed their price and gave us a very good chance at cracking some large field GPPs, which is exactly what a bunch of Team FGI members did. Congratulations again to those of you who had giant paydays, and for those of you who barely missed, do not get frustrated. Believe me, I have had so many close calls this season without hitting a huge score, but if we keep putting ourselves in a good position, you will hit one. Best of luck this week Team FGI!

Jeff’s Strategy & Core- THE PLAYERS Championship
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