The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Arnold Palmer Invitational

We finally got another exciting finish last weekend at the Valspar Championship. After Saturday when Adam Hadwin looked like a cold blooded killer cutting his way through the field to a four stroke lead, I thought we would end up having another quiet Sunday watching him cruise to his first title on tour. However, as most of you know who listen to my podcast with Geoff Fienberg each week, we were both invested in an Adam Hadwin victory, with myself holding a ticket with him at odds of 100-1. When he went into the water on 16, my heart sank. After watching Patrick Cantlay charge back all afternoon it seemed like this was the moment to start panicking. Fortunately, Hadwin kept his composure and scored a par on 17 and 18 and Cantlay hit an errant approach shot on the last hole which ultimately led to a bogey and a one stroke loss. Both golfers really played fantastic on Sunday outside of Hadwin’s one terrible mistake. I have had Hadwin in my core group for so much of this season, that it felt great to finally see him get the win, particularly after stumbling at the CareerBuilder after he shot a 59 in the third round, but was overtaken by Hudson Swafford in the final round.

I firmly believe that if you have not tried betting on golf, that if you are an experienced DFS player, you have a real advantage if you are the type that has been doing a lot of in depth research each week and follow the events obsessively on shot tracker the way that I do from Thursday to Sunday every week. While most average golf fans are seeing the final finish position each week, as a hardcore DFS player, you really do get to see the parts of certain player’s games that are working, broken or in Hadwin’s case, improving year over year. Although we were fortunate in getting the win, I do not feel like it was lucky on our part. We could see quite clearly that Hadwin had improved immensely in a few key areas, notably in his approach game, which when taken with his elite putting skills, makes him a contender on a lot more courses on tour each season.

These are the types of things you see as a DFS fan each week by observing all of the little details that tend to get lost when looking at a leaderboard. Now, I am not going to say that we are going to hit 100-1 winners every week. That type of win takes place maybe once a year or once every few years. However, given the close attention we pay to the small details, I do expect us to continue to have these types of players in the mix and in position to contend throughout the season. If you have not tried it yet, start small, maybe $2-3 per unit with your bets, so $12-18 per week if you do a full six pack. It is a great way to hedge your DraftKings picks during the season as some weekends when things go sideways right from lineup lock on Thursday, you still have a rooting interest that keeps your attention throughout the weekend. Plus, I think slowly, but surely, Geoff and I are starting to gain some rapport making it a reasonably fun listen when one of us does not having a screaming baby or cameras being set up for a webcast…whoops.

A lot of you did really well last week and I was proud to see a lot of green screen shots come Sunday. I myself, made a nice profit in GPP play, but probably only broke even in cash games. I had an excellent opportunity to win the $3 Birdie over the weekend as I went into the 3rd round in 5th place and entered the final round in 21st place. Unfortunately, the wheels came off the wagon for Charles Howell III over the last two rounds and I was not able to finish with the perfect roster required to defeat such a large field. I was very close to having an absolute monster week as seven of my eight core players made the cut, but Steve Stricker was an ugly miss and I owned a lot of shares which sent many good teams downward in the standings. However, I was pleased with the way core plays like Stenson, Henley, Dufner and Hadwin performed so I feel like we are very close to having a really big week where everyone hits and we dominate the biggest GPP fields. We actually ended up having 5-6 subscribers in the Top-100 of the Birdie last weekend so we are right on the cusp here. Hopefully, the big weekend comes for us this week as DraftKings is running a massive $4 entry GPP with a 1st place prize of $100,000. We have had a few subscribers hit these big paydays over the years and nothing makes me happier than to see a member of the FGI team up at the top.

Before I get into coverage of the event this week, I want to make you all aware of the fact that we are also covering FanDuel this week as it launched a PGA product after finishing up the beta testing over the last month. I am a going to try to not be too negative about it for now and hope that it ends up being a lot of fun with a bit of a twist to it. We know that many of you will be wanting to give it a shot over the next month so we wanted to make sure that we were able to offer quality coverage immediately. Erik Dantoft, the man many of your know as Statboy, will be our newest edition to our great team of staff writers and will be providing a strategy piece each week that is FanDuel specific. He is going to show you how to weight the model when selecting your players for the first two rounds and then how to adjust the weightings to help you select your golfers for the final two rounds as there are definitely some differences in the types of players that you will want to highlight for each part of your roster.

The salaries are updated within the model and all of the other tools are updated outside of the lineup generator which is going to take a little bit of time to get developed on the FanDuel side given the way the events are broken down into two parts. The extra moving pieces will make it more complex, so please be patient as we want to make sure we deliver a really great product when it is ready. However, I do think the current lack of lineup building tools for FanDuel throughout the industry presents a nice opportunity for some overlays this week in many of the multi-entry contests over there. Nearly all of the professionals rely on models to construct their teams each week and most do so many sports that they may not want to take the time to build out their teams by hand this week. If you look at the numbers, most of the bigger contests are only 10-15% filled right now. This is probably as good a time as ever to give their new product a try.

This week, the tournament moves just a couple of hours east to Orlando for what should be one of the more somber moments of the season at the Arnold Palmer Invitational where for the first time in many years, Arnold will not be there at the end to shake the hand of the winning golfer. The field is filled with strong players at the top as only a few notable folks elected to skip the event this week. The course itself is a little more open than what we have in the other two Florida events each season and plays as a Par 72 at over 7,400 yards with the classic setup of four Par 3 and four Par 5 holes. There are plenty of bunkers around the course and water will come into play on about half of the holes. The weather so far looks like a non-factor which should lead to a reasonable amount of scoring as we have seen over the last two years. The greens, as you would expect, are Bermuda grass so be sure to look closely at those players who tend to be either better on Bermuda grass than normal or to track down those players that struggle and avoid them. The Par 3 holes are all of a pretty similar length ranging between about 200-230 yards and none of the Par 5 holes are nearly as long as we have seen in recent weeks which should provide a few more eagle opportunities for those who are talented with their iron play from over 200 yards.

In terms of strategy, there are a couple of things worth noting when constructing your rosters. This is an invitational event, the first of a handful and one additional wrinkle in planning out how to build your teams. Invitational events typically have between 120-125 golfers in the field, but the cut rule stays the same (Top-70 and ties). In a normal event, we might see 150 players in a field and with the Top-70 and ties getting through, we usually end up with around 50% of the field going to the weekend. With the invitational format, we’re likely to see roughly 60% of the field get through the cut, so hold off on celebrating on Friday afternoon if things look good because they are probably looking pretty good for more owners than usual as well. So, in order to take advantage of these numbers, you should allow yourself to be a bit more aggressive than usual in constructing your GPP rosters and probably a bit more conservative when building your cash game teams as you just cannot afford to make mistakes with more rosters getting higher numbers of players through the cut.

The pricing this week is pretty reasonable at the top and meets my expectations. However, there is again a lot of opportunity in the low $7k range and upper $6k range this week. You can easily build rosters with one or even two stars at the top and still have room at the bottom for some notable players. Given the upper level talent at the top of the field, and the many players that are a relative bargain near the bottom, this definitely has the makings of a stars and scrubs week for building rosters this week in GPP events and even cash games to a lesser degree. Do not get too careless with how you build your teams this week. Although there are some noted advantages to getting more players through the cut, I have seen a lot of weeks where Invitational events get just as messy as normal weeks given the higher level of talent meaning that some good players just are not going to make that cut.

Here are your key statistics for the week as brought to us by our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics:

Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Proximity 100-125 yards: 15%
Scrambling: 10%
Birdie or Worse Percentage: 5%

I love weeks like this where we have a big tournament along with a big GPP event with a six figure prize. Please be sure to let us know if you are in the hunt for a big payday this week. It is always a lot of fun to have other FGI folks to cheer for, especially if my top lineups go a little sideways so make sure you shoot us a message of Twitter if things are looking good and I will do my best not to apply my dreaded curse to your team!
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