The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Genesis Open
Raise your hand if you had Ted Potter Jr winning last week at Pebble Beach. I did not manage to pick through the data to find him and what made the victory even more improbably was the fact that he was able to do it in a runaway fashion over Dustin Johnson in the final round, showing very little nerves in the process. It was a remarkable win as the only other time Potter had crossed my radar this year was after a strong first round showing at Torrey Pines which I dismissed out of hand as an aberration when he fell down the leaderboard over the last three rounds.
The great news was that one of our subscribers did in fact play some shares of Potter and in doing so managed to take home a $100k first place prize in the Drive The Green GPP last weekend. It really impressed me that not only did this player (Gloryhog) use Potter, but he used him on 6 of 20 teams for a total exposure of 30%. It’s remarkable in that I am sure that some of his other Potter lineups crashed and burned with golfers missing the cut (although he did also snag 6th place as well), but he gave himself enough opportunities with Potter so that the lineups where he did get 6/6 through the cut had a shot to win. It reminded me of the initial Millionaire Maker contests from three years ago when folks in the industry began to build lineups. You’d hear about people building 100 teams and you’d ask about player distribution. This was during the dark ages before there were any publicly available lineup builders out there on sites and you’d have to do them all by hand and through spreadsheets. I’d hear people discussing their lineups and mention that they’d put a player on one team of 100 which always seemed funny to me. Not only would that one player have to do really well, but you would then also have to hope that the lineup he was a part of did well so that his efforts were not wasted. My takeaway from that was that you need to give your darkhorses a chance to perform, which means getting them into multiple lineups. This is incredibly tough to do when you are limited to only 20 lineups in a large GPP like last week and yet our boy, Gloryhog made sure to have him represented enough so that when it hit, he had several opportunities to hit the nuts and take down a huge win.
As for the rest of us normal folks who did not quite take down a six figure prize, we had some good and some bad last week. I tried to take advantage of what appeared to be a big pricing discrepancy with Austin Cook at $7000 who had a win and had not missed a cut all season and used him plentifully in GPP games in an attempt to be overweight the field. Obviously, missing the cut wrecked many of those teams and created some issues in cash games, but did not ruin your chances overall if you were able to work in a lot of the other recommended plays. If you went with Cook and Rafa Cabrera Bello to start your teams, you easily could have afforded to go up and grab shares of DJ at the top and still have room for a few other solid plays like Chez Reavie or Kevin Streelman. Obviously, there were a couple of surprise missed cuts in there with Patrick Reed and Kevin Kisner crumbling over the weekend, so overall a mixed week to work with. The three course rotation events are always tricky as there is usually one group that has more favorable conditions than the other two so it’s never my favorite type of event to play, but as we’ve seen now again, weekend contests on the three round rotation is beautiful for our bankroll. I want all of you to make a couple of notes to yourself for next season when the CareerBuilder and Pebble Beach return that you should be emphasizing weekend play around those events as the strategy should be relatively easy to understand, but there are still going to be enough players out there who do not think about it enough so that our edge is larger than normal.
This week, we are back to a normal event held on one course over four days with normal cut rules where the cut take place after the second round on Friday. The course is challenging to say the least, required both length and a fair amount of accuracy to stay out of trouble. The course is set up to play at over 7,300 yards and is a Par 71. The fairways are narrow and there are plenty of eucalyptus trees to cause problems for those that get wild off the tee along with numerous strategically placed fairway bunkers. There are six Par 4 holes that come in at over 450 yards so those who are strong with long iron play will have a decided advantage as hitting greens will be at a premium this week. This course has a few memorable holes as well which always make it a lot of fun. The first hole is a very short Par 5, that plays just a few yards over 500 yards, one of the best places to score on the course. The 6th hole is a Par 3 with a bunker in the middle of the green creating the potential for player to either have to putt around or chip over it. The drivable Par 4, 10th hole is only 315 yards, but surrounded by bunkers forcing players to decide on whether they’d rather go for the green or set up a short approach shot.
The fairways are kikuya grass, one of the few times all season that players will see it and if you did not get the chance to read over Adam Daly’s course preview, here’s a quick link for his description of how that grass will affect play this week. The greens are poa annua once again, typical for what we see on the west coast each season so be sure to consider that players from the area typically have a little better time on poa than their fellow competitors from the southeast. If you are looking for a list of players with local ties to the area, check out our player database which will let you know where certain golfers played their college golf as well as where they make their residence today. Southern California is certainly well represented this week so a great way to add an edge in GPPs is to search out one or two players that grew up in the area, but who might get overlooked for one reason or another this week. Finally, one other little factoid worth looking at is that the 2012 NCAA Men’s Golf Championship was held here at Riviera and featured several notable players in the field this week. Thomas Pieters was the winner, Justin Thomas finished tied for 7th, Patrick Cantlay tied for 4th and Patrick Rodgers finished tied for 9th.
For our strategy this week, I really think it behooves you to focus on cash game lineups. We’ve had really good success at events with start studded fields on challenging courses this season and this is no different. Given such a huge amount of talent in this event, we again have a situation where players that we would normally see above $9k are now prices in the middle to low $8k range and many players that had previously been in the middle to upper $8k range are stuck in the upper $7k range this week. When we have the opportunity to roster players who consistently make the cut, but at a discount to their normal price, it makes putting together strong cash game lineups much easier than normal. I’ve used a few examples before, but let’s consider Marc Leishman this week. I realize that me mentioning him firsthand puts a curse on him, but let’s just use him as our example. Over the last five weeks, his salary has been: $11,300, $9,000, $11,100, $9,200 and $9,700. This week, we can get him at $8,500. Now, I realize he has missed the cut here a couple of times in the last three years, but he’s also elevated his game a great deal over the last year and the year in between those missed cuts, he finished 5th here. We have a situation where the field is incredibly strong and a couple of players have solid course histories, but overall, the pricing here is nothing more than a reflection of Leishman’s odds to win the tournament. Do we need a win out of Leishman to make us happy in cash games? Nope. At just above the average player salary, making the cut and not finishing near the bottom is probably going to get the job done.
DraftKings uses a pricing algorithm that does not allow for two players to share the same price from $8,000 up to $12,000 which creates a lot of spacing at the top. You can pick these guys off in our Odd vs Pricing tool. They are not going to be the most mispriced golfers, but when you see players in the mid $8k and high $7k range who are +5 or higher, you can start to assemble a nice core of players to start drawing your cash game players from each week. These are great weeks to lock in on cash games where we have dependable players at many pricing levels rather than just a couple. When the John Deere Classic rolls around, I will be suggesting more of a GPP focus as the field is a little more wide open and the top priced guys aren’t as likely to win as a week like this where so many good players are in the mix and the course really challenges players in a similar manner to what we’ll see at courses that host majors.
Key stats for the week:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 15%
Par 4 Scoring: 15%
Prox 150-175: 10%
Scrambling Prox: 10%
Driving Distance: 5%
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