Jeff’s Hardcore Core- WGC Bridgestone

The WGC Bridgestone kicks off an outstanding stretch of golf over the next couple of months as we have The PGA Championship next week and then the FedEx Cup Playoffs start in three weeks.  Outside of The Open Championship we have only seen a handful of the best players in the world in the events over the past month, but now we will have a look at the big guns from now through September.  We will dive into the WGC Bridgestone, but let’s review last week briefly and the Canadian Open.  There were basically three names you had to have on your roster to give you a chance at winning a large field GPP and those were Dustin Johnson, Keegan Bradley, and Ben An.  The $5, $44, and $444 GPP winners on Draftkings all had these three players in common.  This makes sense because of the lineup build.  At DJ’s price, your remaining salary left was in the high $7k range for each of your remaining players.  I ended up having around 50% exposure to Dustin Johnson, because I felt like I needed that much to be 1.5X-2X overweight.  I knew he would be popular, but he came in at 32%, 37,5%, and 44.4% respectively in the $5, $44, and $444 GPPs, which was even higher than I was expecting.  Notice how his ownership got progressively higher as the buy-ins went up?  Generally, the higher the dollar amount GPP, the sharper the players (although not always the case), but you can see that DJ was expected to do very well by the large part of the sharp money.  Having 50% put me where I wanted to be in the big $5 GPP with DJ.  With the pricing the way it was last week, it allowed us to stack DJ along with Niemann, Watson, Finau, or even Koepka.  Unfortunately two of the world’s hottest/best players (Koepka and Watson) turned in a lame duck performance and screwed about 30% of my teams by missing the cut.  I took a real contrarian attempt on Sergio Garcia by having a 15% share.  I felt like he was going to be owned by like 5% of the field, which was correct and if he were able to get his putter working, it could help us get ahead of a huge share of the field.  He started out really strong in the opening round, but absolutely collapsed in the second round and missed the cut by a stroke.  It was a risk that clearly did not pay off.  I still feel like it was the correct move to make and the reward was high for such little risk.  Some of the guys who did pay off their price included Joel Dahmen, Harold Varner, Kevin Tway (although he choked bad on Sunday and fell back), and Tyler Duncan.  I had a nice outright on Kevin Tway at 110-1 odds and things were looking promising after Friday’s round when he had the lead and even after Saturday’s round when he was a part of the four way tie.  On Sunday however, he was not mentally in it from the get go.  Missing a 13 foot birdie putt on 1 and then about a three foot birdie putt on 2.  Before you could blink he was three strokes back of DJ and it was pretty much over after that.  The cutline was harsh to us last week with aforementioned Sergio and Koepka, but also Bubba, Ollie, Burgoon, Harkins, and Champ slicing away a good share of my teams.  I only had about 10-15 teams that had 6/6 rosters make it through to the weekend, which was higher than the average, but not enough to get me into position to have a block of teams in contention.

This week we go back to a small field, no-cut event, which is always interesting.

Best of luck this week Team FGI, let’s get on a roll here now with the best fields we have seen all year for an extended period of time.

Jeff’s Strategy & Hardcore Core- WGC Bridgestone

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