Jeff’s Hardcore Core- The ZoZo Championship

The 2nd event of the Asia swing heads to Japan this week for the inaugural ZoZo Championship.  We do not have any specific course history to reference, but you better believe I have dug deep on the details and intricacies of Accordia Golf Narashino Country Club to see what type of course it is and what types of players it favors.  I will dive deep into that analysis, my strategy for the week, roster composition, ownership, and my player pool, but first let’s recap last week’s CJ Cup, which was a profitable one.

What went right? Owning Justin Thomas despite knowing he was going to be popular obviously turned out to be the right move. He ended up being owned in the big $8 GPP by 24%, which was close to my prediction of 21%. My 36% exposure put me just short of being overweight a full 2X, but I knew that it would be the case. Sometimes I am ok coming in at 1.5X overweight especially if it is the highest priced guy and he is going to be the most popular. I chose to be contrarian by owning Hideki Matsuyama and thought he would be owned by 10-13% of the field, but was pleasantly surprised that number was only 8% when lineups locked. I played 35% Matsuyama thinking that would put me at 2.5X or even 3X overweight, but I actually ended up 4X, which I was very happy about. I was even happier with Matsuyama’s results as he played extremely well and finished 3rd. This was one of those contrarian plays that really seemed easy to me. Yes, he has not won in quite a while, but he is still one of the most talented players in the world, typically plays very well in Asia, and people just had no interest in owning him. All the better for us.  Thankfully I also had some guys in the $6k range do well that went along with my JT/Matsuyama stacks.

Another play that I felt would be contrarian that had a ton of upside was Ben An. I loved the course set-up for him and as it ended up he was owned by single digits as well. It is very difficult to find anybody decent owned by single digits in small field events, so I really monitor the industry, to know that information and it really paid of with Hideki and An who ended up T6. Other solid plays included $6,300 Wyndham Clark, Niemann who finished T12 with a closing eagle, $6,800 Sii Woo Kim (T26), CHII (T20), and tertiary play Danny Lee, who we were able to get to 2X overweight exposure with only a 7% investment. A very good week for the core.

What went wrong? Matthew Wolff was my biggest disappointment of the week, just not being able to get out of his own way the entire tournament. $8,800 was such a fair price for the ceiling we were getting for such a talented player. It was just an all around bad performance and result for somebody that I had nearly a third of my teams tied to, so that hurt. Chesson Hadley gave me what Chesson Hadley usually gives me and that is a pile of shit lit on fire, enough said about that guy. The other guy who actually hurt me more than I should have let was Brian Stuard. His trending good play, solid statistics, and cheap price made me a buyer. I wrote the following in my column- “He might get some owners this week, which is not ideal, but I am going to go 20% and just know that I am not going to get to 2X, but maybe 1.5X over the field”. He ended up being owned by about 12%, so I did not get to 2X and thankfully I only owned 20%. Sometimes, even though you do not have a huge stake in a player, they somehow end up on all of your really good teams and that happened to me last week. I had several teams with JT, An, Lee, and low and behold fricking Brian Stuard. It could have very well been Wyndham Clark or Sii Woo Kim or Grillo, or CHIII who I also had nice exposures to instead of Stuard, but it is funny how it sometimes happens that way.

I had a decent sized profit as a whole, so I can’t complain, but I was unable to hit any big GPP wins. We will certainly keep grinding and put ourselves in position for a big week, as they are hard to come by, but do happen on occasion. Best of luck this week Team FGI!

Jeff’s Strategy & Player Core- ZoZo Championship

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