The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – CJ Cup
The tour heads to Asia this week for a three week stretch which means that I need to get my columns out faster than normal. Statboy beat me to the punch rather easily this week proving that it can be done so I will work to emulate his efforts next week. However, this is one of my favorite stretches of the season each year as I love being able to watch these events after getting home from work and without a cut, so long as there are no ugly WDs (though there almost always seems to be one), you get four full rounds of golf from your players so that you get to avoid that potential drop in your stomach on Friday night that tends to ruin weekends before they even begin. I also love these events as beginning this year, we have three really good courses with the addition of Japan next week. With the popularity of golf growing throughout Asia and many incredible up and coming, young Asian players on tour, golf has truly ascended to the world stage in popularity. Let’s just hope nobody asks any of the players about Hong Kong over the next couple of weeks…
Last week, the Houston Open was really successful for me. I did play one cash game team in the $250 double up and of course, after explaining to all of you that it was a poor week for cash, I won rather easily with Lanto Griffin, Mark Hubbard and Cameron Tringale all coming through nicely to lead my 5/6 team to a great finish. I’ll discuss cash games more in depth below, but I plan to stick with them throughout the season, though less so for the no cut events where I feel our advantage is slightly lower.
GPP contest went well for me in Houston. I had a few contending lineups in play going into the final day, but as usual, could not get all six golfers on each team to play well and fell back. It was a weird week among the high salary golfers with Stenson and Berger both blowing the cut for me. Even had I pivoted above $10k, there were not any players that did much at all. We hit a lot of the key players up top with big shares of Lanto, Hubbard, Tringale, Zhang, Ortiz, Cauley, Burgoon, Redman, Hossler and even a few shares of Scott Harrington. Had either Stenson, Berger or both made any noise at all last week, it seems likely that I would have had a lot of lineups finish near the top. In any case, I managed to be profitable which I will take any week in GPP play. My goal each week is to win my cash games and then just give myself a chance in the GPP event so that most weeks, I will be up or down a little, but a few times each year, I will have a big sweat on Sunday. Hopefully, this will be the season where it clicks for me and I finally hit that $100k payout some weekend.
I remember in 2017 when doing my research for the course that I did not see the tournament playing out as one of the tougher events of the year. In looking at the course, it is a shorter, Par 72 setup that is around 7,200 yards with several Par 5 holes that should not be all that difficult to score on. The fairways are rather wide and players really did not have that hard of a time hitting greens either. As I watched the first round that year, I felt vindicated in my prediction of plenty of scoring as the field got off to an excellent start and the average score was well under par. However, things began to change during the second round as the winds became a big factor for the rest of the weekend and players really had to fight to stay below par. Justin Thomas won the tournament at -9, making Nine Bridges the fourth toughest course on tour for the season.
Last season, it was a totally different story for this event as the winds held off and the course played about as I would have thought originally with a lot more scoring and the winning score hitting -21 for Brooks Koepka and many players getting to -10 or better for the week. Much like the events over in England, Scotland or even in Hawaii, the winds and overall weather are usually the biggest impediment for the players to deal with when battling to make birdies. Also, as with those events, you would be well advised to take a late, last minute check of the weather before submitting your final lineups on Wednesday evening. Island weather forecasts can change dramatically by the hour so look for any open windows if the winds do start to pick up in the next day or two. So far, I have seen nothing in the forecast that would indicate a rough weather week with mild winds expected, but this is a spot where staying ahead of things will be beneficial.
I will be focused in on ball strikers this week overall, more off the tee play than normal as the wide fairways are forgiving. I will not change much with the players I select up top and will stick to looking for who is playing well, and how they’ve handled starts here in the past. When it comes to picking golfers on the low end in the low $7 to middle $6k range, that is where I will focus more on the bombers this week as those are the players that will likely be able to breakthrough if they are only good in one particular area which is often the case that low. I will not touch the 10-15 Korean players filling out the bottom of the field this week. I am sure at some point one of them will have a big week at this event, but until it actually happens or until they do something at an event of some significance, I will skip all of those low salaried guys in the lower $6k range this week.
KEY STATS
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Proximity: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
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