Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Waste Management Phoenix Open

From one of my favorite events of the year with the Farmers to another one of my favorite events of the year, the Waste Management Phoenix Open this week. Having the end of the tournament lead into the Super Bowl makes Sunday one of the best sports days all year. We will of course dive into strategy for this week and the core of players that I will be using, but first let’s recap the Farmers Insurance Open.

What went right? It was again another week with more than one course the first two days and we took advantage of it yet again. I received a ton of emails and tweets from FGI members who took my advice and played the Showdown slate and crushed both cash games and GPPs alike. I was slightly profitable in the main slate last week, but I won a lot of money with the showdown slate. I think the showdown slate presents us a good opportunity most every week, but those weeks with split courses have proven to be outstanding.

As for the main slate, I talked about wanting to make sure we had top tier players in our core, because I felt like it was going to end up being a major championship type leaderboard in the end and that is exactly what it looked like. My main two guys up top were Justin Rose, which obviously worked out really well and Rory McIlroy who was good for us for the second time this year posting a T5. I mentioned Jon Rahm being a good option, but decided to go with Rose and Rory instead, because of perceived higher ownership (which I will talk about shortly). If you chose to own Rahm you did just fine as well as he finished tied with Rory in 5th. Finau was one of my two guys that I owned in the $9k range and he disappointed a bit. Although a T13 is never a complete disaster, especially for somebody at $9,900, I really thought he had a chance to win or at least snag a Top 5. You can bet I will still be heavy on him at Riviera in a few weeks.

Deciding to own those guys at the top did not leave me much room for $8k guys, but I am glad that I decided to stick with my Crystal Ball guy Hideki Matsuyama despite some shaky play over the past few months. This is not the first time an elite talent in the world like Hideki has gone through some struggles and it will not be the last. Usually that means depressed pricing and that is what we got last week with his $8k price tag. Anytime, we get what I consider a Top 10 player in the world with that type of ceiling, I like taking a shot in GPPs and it paid off this week. Several others in the core made the cut, but the only other spectacular performance came from Joel Dahmen who played great all week and provided us with a T9, which was excellent for his $6,800 price. He was the only player that I had as a core player in the $6k range and he complimented some nice Rose/Hideki stacks for me.

What went wrong? The cut was painful to me again last week as I seemed to find a grenade on most all of my teams, which sucked because I had so many top finishers. We have talked about it before, it does not matter if you have great performances from five of your guys on a roster, if the sixth blows the cut.  You might cash in a large field GPP, but you won’t be winning one. The most painful cuts for me included Patrick Cantlay and Abraham Ancer. If you were watching, both found excruciating ways to miss on Friday. Abraham Ancer was first and needed a birdie on the par 5 18th hole to make the cut and stuck his approach to 3’ 10” at which point I breathed a slight bit of relief. The feeling did not last long as shotracker informed me that he had missed the 3-footer and thus he missed the cut and sank some teams that would have had 6/6 and a shot at some big money. The disgruntled feeling continued as Patrick Cantlay needing a birdie on his final hole, drilled his approach shot, and actually so well that it hit the flag stick and rebounded back toward the front of the green by about 40 feet. Sometimes it would just be easier for these guys to just suck bad the first two days and never give me such high hopes all the way to the end of Friday. Of course we did have a couple of guys who did just that and sucked bad and never gave us any hope, we are looking at you Kyle Stanley and J.J Spaun.

I don’t really regret any player decisions last week, but what I was most upset by was that I was so far off on a couple guys ownership, most notably Jon Rahm. It did not turn out to bite me because Rose and Rory did so well, but had I known Rahm would have ended up being owned by 10% of the field or lower in GPPs, I would have owned him. My process is very thorough as Zach and I listen to a ton of podcasts and read articles throughout the industry to get a feel for who is being recommended each week and thus who will be popular. Jon Rahm was mentioned a ton throughout the week and generally when that happens, we see at least 20% exposure, sometimes more. Although we are extremely accurate most of the time with our predictions, it just goes to show that we are wrong sometimes as well. You folks are all very sharp and if you every feel like we have a situation like last week where you believe that someone who is believed to be highly owned, will end up ignored, I ask that you let us know and give us your reasoning. As you know by now I am happy to share every ounce of data, information, opinions, and experience that I possess with you to help you be a successful player. I am also open-minded and willing to listen to make sure we don’t miss something either. We have such a great community of folks with FGI and we can benefit from each other as well.

Enough about the Farmers, let’s dive into the Waste Management, best of luck this week my friends!

Jeff’s Strategy and Core- Waste Management Phoenix Open.
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