The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am
Are you shaking yet? Are you feeling the tremors now that the NFL has disappeared from our lives for the next seven months? Let that sink in for a minute. Seven months. It used to feel really painful getting through February and trying to get excited about sports until March Madness arrived and guided us gently towards The Masters at the beginning of April. Fortunately, a friend of mine pointed me towards fantasy golf when it was in its infancy and my Sundays are now filled throughout the year with the travails of DFS life. While every weekend is not going to be quite as exciting as what we had last weekend in Phoenix or the weekend prior in La Jolla, the PGA Tour is growing stronger each season and the quality of the players is improving. The young crop of players that we have right now is almost enough to keep our minds off of the endangered species, El Tigre, who withdrew with an ‘injury’ last week in Dubai after a poor first round knocked him well out of contention.
The Pebble Beach Pro Am is one of the most beautiful events on tour each season, even if the weather does not want to cooperate with us in the first two rounds this week. Be prepared for a lot of interviews, a lot of television coverage of the celebs in town playing in the event, and a few interviews with good old, Clint Eastwood. The composition of the field this week is interesting in that we have some very strong players at the top, but very few of the strong middle level players that filled out the events over the last two weeks. Initially, I felt a little nervous about this as I thought it would be tough to build my lineups, but the pricing is actually quite reasonable this week and I feel like I have one of the strongest player pools of the year.
Once again, the salaries neglected to reflect the odds once they were posted on Monday. I am still unsure what the motivation of DK is from week to week in looking at player pricing, but there are a few very obvious mistakes that really helped us to fill out our rosters for the week. Although I am very excited about the players that we get to build around this week, I must caution against putting too much of your bankroll at stake this week. There is going to be rain on both Thursday and Friday with high winds, particularly on Thursday. Saturday and Sunday, the weather is expected to clear up and sunshine will return with the winds dying down. Unfortunately, there are three different courses to deal with this week so the changing weather patterns are going to make this a very interesting week.
Typically, Spyglass tends to play the toughest of the three courses. Normally, this would lead me to build my rosters around players who will have the best conditions on the toughest course meaning that those playing there on Saturday would be in the best spot to produce the best scores. However, the players who are on Spyglass on Saturday are also on Pebble Beach on Thursday which will be much tougher than normal in the high winds. So what are we going to do about this dilemma? Well, we are really fortunate in that we have a lineup generator that can help us out so that we do not have to make a choice to be all in on one tee time or another. With weather, nobody really knows how things are going to play out until the moment is upon us and the winds are howling and the rains are going sideways. Sometimes, things work right in line with what is reported. Other times, things do not quite go according to plan. If we plan too closely around tee times this week in favoring one much more than any others, my fear is that either the weather will not play out as advertised or even worse, that we see delays the first two days (seems like a reasonable expectation).
The way that I am going to play out the tee times this week is to build about half of my lineups with little regard to the weather. I will use my core group of players and build around them and trust that most have the skill set required to navigate through the wind and rain. However, I will also be putting together rosters around each of the other three starting times as well. If I end up with 150 teams, 75 will be a mixture, 25 will start at Pebble Beach, 25 will start at Spyglass and 25 will start at Monterey Peninsula. Since I am a little in the blind as to which group will fare best (if one tee time truly does end up being more favorable), I want to at least have some exposure to each of the starting courses if one emerges with better scores than the others this weekend.
So now that we have a game plan for attacking the event this week, let’s take a look at each of the courses. With there being three rounds prior to the cut, you can get aggressive this week as having a player miss the cut will devastate your lineups less than normal so that if you can add an extra player or two at the top that can contend, it will be beneficial in both cash games and GPPs. Pebble Beach Golf Links is a Par 72 course that plays at just over 6,800 yards. Spyglass Hill is a Par 72 course that plays at just over 6,950 yards. Finally, Monterey Peninsula is a Par 71 course the plays at just over 6,900 yards. All three courses use Poa Annua greens so be sure to check out the putting splits for those players that really excel on Poa. Of the three courses, Monterey tends to play the easiest of the three. Spyglass Hill has been the toughest in recent years, but Pebble Beach can be a struggle when the winds pick up.
It should be noted that Pebble Beach is also a US Open course and hosted the event back in 2010. There are two types of players that tend to excel at this event. On the one hand, there are the players that dominate on US Open style courses like Dustin Johnson who are long ball hitters that nail greens and can score at will on the Par 5 holes. The other type of player that has success are those who have dynamic short games who dominate around the greens, players like Brandt Snedeker and Phil Mickelson. With the winds on the high side this week, scrambling could play a larger role than normal in determining who goes into the weekend in the best position to do some damage. The greens are small this week so proximity will be important and the winning score should be somewhere in the -15 to -18 range this week so players will also need to be able to capitalize on their birdie opportunities.
The key stats for the week are as follows:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Par 5 Scoring: 10%
Proximity: 10%
Scrambling: 5%
Follow Us
