Jeff’s Hardcore Core- U.S Open

Well I am about as excited for this week’s U.S Open as I can possibly be for any event.  One of my favorite events all year at one of my favorite courses of all-time in Pebble Beach. We get to see Pebble every year, but when we get the USGA toughening things up for their major rather than the PGA making it easy for a pro-am, it makes it much more interesting.  I will talk in depth about the course itself as well as what strategy I am going to employ for GPPs, as well as my player pool. I will revisit winning GPP teams for the U.S Open over the past four years to see what they have in common. First let’s recap the Canadian Open.

What went right?
When I opened up my Draftkings app on Thursday morning to see how the ownerships turned out, you can imagine how happy I was to see Rory McIlroy at 12%! My highest owned player in GPPs, I decided to have 35% exposure to Rory in order to be 2X overweight the field. I estimated he would be owned by about 15% of the field, so I was ecstatic to see that I ended up getting to 3X. I have not been hitting a ton of winners over the past month, so it was nice to have Rory completely dominate and score a whopping 30 more DK points than the next highest scoring player. We had a huge edge over 88% of the field just by having Rory, but we had some nice compliments as well. Justin Thomas, my only other $10k player finished an unspectacular, but acceptable T20. Erik Van Rooyen was exceptional for a quarter of our teams as he finished as the 13th highest DK point scorer for $7,800. The two best picks in the core were Willett and Munoz who both finished in the Top 10 DK point scorers and we got them for $7,400 and $7,200 respectively. If you were able to get a roster with all four of those guys on it along with a couple others who made the cut, you did extremely well. We also had a few others who did well for us like Niemann, Walker, and Palmer. I talked about having exposure to more guys last week than usual and it paid off as I was able to get some exposure to guys like Malnati, Gooch, and Tringale who ended up being the 14th highest DK scorer for $7,100.

What went wrong? Most of the guys in my core made the cut, but there were of course some grenades as there always are. Garcia, Piercy, Cook, Wise, and Watney blew up a bunch of my teams. Unfortunately, I had a bunch of Rory/Van Rooyen/Walker teams along with Willett or Munoz that were sunk by Watney and Wise. Bubba Watson was also a major disappointment for me and although he made the cut, didn’t accumulate nearly enough points to pay off his price. I really thought Bubba would have thrived on Hamilton. The course was actually very much like we were planning on coming into the event, so I feel really good about our analysis and preparation for the course and targeted the correct type of players.

Overall a very good week for us and hopefully we can keep the momentum going into this week’s US Open where there is a ton of money up for grabs in GPPs this week.

Good luck Team FGI!

Jeff’s Strategy & Core- U.S Open
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