The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – CareerBuilder Challenge

I love the way that the NFL and golf seasons compliment each other so well. Just as one starts to rev up, the other begins to wind down. These first few weeks of the PGA season each new calendar year feel a lot like the NFL preseason for me in terms of my approach. I’m watching and taking notes, but not jumping in a whole lot as the players ease themselves back onto a regular schedule. The Hawaii events are fun and the Sony Open generally attracts a similar field from year to year with a course that lines up with enough other comparable courses so that I feel good about my cash games there each season, but we do get an interesting mix of winners which can make GPP play a little more challenging.

This week, the tour heads back to the continental US for the CareerBuilder Challenge which takes place in La Quinta and Palm Desert, California. At the beginning of each year, we get a few little curveballs thrown at us which can throw off new players if you are not prepared. The CareerBuilder has a couple of interesting quirks that are notable and need to be discussed right out front. First off, there are three different courses in play this week and the cut does not take place until AFTER the third round. The first thing you should think about here is that this makes the weekend golf contests much more intense and totally different in terms of the type of strategy you want to use for those events. Typically, we are monitoring for an MDF which can shake things up, but in this case, the whole field will be in play on Saturday. The cut rules are the same with T70 or better getting to play on Sunday, but there is also one other caveat where if MORE THAN 78 players  do get through, then the cut drops down to the top 60 players left in the field, an instant MDF of sorts where those others will be credited with making the cut and get a check, but will not tee it up on Sunday.

The next consideration this week is that this is a Pro-Am event. Now, most weeks, there is a one round Pro-Am event before the actual tournament, but this event and Pebble Beach in February take things up a notch and carry out the Pro-Am DURING the first three rounds of the actual golf tournament. Obviously, the PGA does not want the amateurs to come off looking too foolish over the three rounds that they are out there which means in turn that the courses and the setups are going to be purposefully easier than what we will see on other courses throughout the season, thus leading to some of the lowest scores that we are going to see all year. Weather was an issue last year the first couple of rounds and yet it was still easy enough for Adam Hadwin to fire a 59 on his way to a 2nd place finish behind eventual winner, Hudson Swafford, who then saw his streak of 19 cuts made in a row snapped the following week as I followed him during the second round of the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines.

This is another one of those events where I try to tread a bit lightly as I consider it to be the last week of what I would term the preseason for golf each year. With three courses in play, a Pro-Am and the scores being out of control to the low side, it opens up the potential list of winners much wider than usual. The three round cut rule also throws off our normal strategy to some degree. With the ability to score a lot over the first three rounds, you do not need to be thinking about the cut quite as much as normal for cash game purposes. Obviously, you’ll still more than likely need a clean 6/6 for GPP events of any size in order to win. We can certainly still remain profitable this week, but with the key difference and the weaker field, I would just as soon save my bigger buy-ins for next weekend.

Following this week, we will get a nice strong field at Torrey Pines and the following week is the Waste Management Open, both of which are great events with fun courses and plenty of star power. In February, we’ll also hit Pebble Beach and Riviera so there are some great events ahead once we get past this final tuneup. As a reminder, I will be out at Torrey Pines next weekend for the Farmers Insurance Open and will be joined by Erik ‘Statboy’ Dantoft as well as our website developer, Aaron ‘Juice’ Johnson. If you are planning to be in the area, please let us know so we can grab a drink and follow a group or two around the course, preferably not our core guys as I usually bring the black magic with me even on the road.

I want to provide a quick recap for last week as it proved to be a pretty easy week for me in cash games and reasonable, but not great results in GPP events. The core players that I built around in cash games all fared well. If you simply took the lineup I laid out for you of ZJ, Webb, CHIII and Woodland at the top with Dufner and Stanley anchoring at the low end, you would have cruised to an easy win. I want to talk a little bit about the process of building cash games as I received an email today from a subscriber who asked me to look over a couple of lineups and give him my honest analysis of what happened with the two lineups that he put into play last week. Here are the two lineups that he sent me to look at from last week: