The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Greenbrier Classic
Do you folks know just how much I value your loyalty every week? I want you to picture me as I am right now, crammed into the back row of a Spirit Airlines flight headed out to sweltering hot, Las Vegas and I am typing out my thoughts for the next three and a half hours on my computer that is currently wedged open, not quite to 90 degrees and propped against the seat in front of me. The tray table, normally a healthy eight to ten inches has been cut back to fit the discount mode of the airline and I have about four to five inches to work with. The keyboard is pressed against my slightly generous midsection as I will admit to being a little less than pool ready this season compared to other recent years. I am craning my neck at an awkward angle to try to read the words that are spilling out of my fingers so please bear with me if I happen to get a bit jumbled up. I think once I get a few cocktails to work with, everything will loosen up and the words will flow. The biggest benefit here is that I have no distractions for the next three hours. There are no Twitter messages, texts, emails or random things that pop into my brain that I suddenly need to look up online. If Jeff could recreate these conditions every week, he would be very pleased to keep me focused on getting the column out early.
But you did not come here to listen to me complain about my travels since I will very soon be landing in America’s adult playground and getting a well-deserved break after grinding away over the last few months to keep building our site into the vision that Jeff and I had in mind when we first embarked on this endeavor almost three years ago.
Before diving too deep into the tournament this week, I wanted to talk about some of the site upgrades that you have probably noticed over the last few weeks on the site. Aaron Johnson, a developer that we added last fall has done a really great job working on the site. He took the lineup generator on last fall after our initial developer failed with it miserably and within a couple of weeks, created the amazing tool that we have now. This summer, he worked to automate many of the tools on the site as well. While I know that it will take a little getting used to, I think some of the perks will be immediately appealing.
The tournament and recent form page is something that usually takes me a good chunk of time to put together, particularly if there is a PGA and a Euro event. Aaron has put it all together through a database and created a page that I think keeps all of the best elements of what I had been doing, while also adding a few nice extra features. I really like that in all of the new tools, it had become much easier to sort different areas. If you have not tried this out yet, go to the new page and click on a recent year of tournament history. Very quickly, you will have the performance of that year lined up from first to worst or vice versa. You can do this with any field and also is a great feature for the Odds vs Pricing page when you very quickly want to line up the best or worst values of the week.
Once thing that we received feedback on from the initial beta that we posted was that many of you wanted to be able to down continue to download the course and form history page each week for quick access. As a quick fix, I have continued to make the page in the traditional manner, but as of this week, if you look at the top right corner of the player search area, you will note that there is a small CSV button which you can now click to download the page into a CSV file moving forward. Also, as I just mentioned, the new page is also easily searchable. Just type the first few letters of a player’s name at the top and that player will pop up alone at the top of the page alone which should save you a little time when you can’t quite remember where Andres Gonzalez is located.
We had a busy week fighting the good fight back and forth with DraftKings over the contests being offered. In our recent Twitter poll, a majority of folks (55% to 45%, 740 votes) favored the old $3 GPP over the new version which we suspected might be the case. Jeff and I are still baffled as to why one single large MME event can’t fit into the weekly offering. Why can’t there be a 20 entry max $4 GPP and a 150 entry max $3 GPP? They could make dozens of small events at all low dollar amounts with one, three or twenty entries and all of them would fill as they do now.
For us, we like the large $3, particularly with the large $100k first place prize event that was run very successfully for many months. Although there are not a lot of players who dod 150 entries, there were plenty who did 30, 50 or 75. It just made it fun to have a shot at a big prize each week and in all honesty, there were no sharks dominating that event. In fact, with such a huge field of over 110-120k per week, 150 entries was not giving many sharks the exposure that they like to have so they skipped it entirely.
We are dumbfounded that players can’t have both types of events to choose from each week. What DraftKings has done in arbitrarily making the low limit MME $8 rather than $3 is to protect the big bankroll players. The leap from $300 or $450 up to $800 or $1200 is not small for most players, but is easily absorbed by the larger players. I mentioned this last week, but wanted to reiterate it again as DraftKings pretended this week to make an effort to listen to those of us that are not satisfied with the direction of the smaller contests.
On Friday, Jon Aguiar announced that DK would do a $5, 150 limit contest with a guaranteed prize pool of…..wait for it……$25,000….as in, that is the TOTAL prize pool. They poured salt in the wounds by making 1st prize a paltry $1000. This would mean that you could max enter the event for $750 for a shot at winning $1000. No, thank you.
What Jon did here is pretty obvious in a couple of different regards. First, he wanted to shut us down in showing us he took action. Next, he set up this contest to fail badly. It is so poorly constructed that he knows that it makes no financial sense to max enter it. He wants that to happen so he can come back to us and let us know that the demand just is not there.
Our goal here is not to do anything to players who casually want to throw in a few lineups each week and I give DraftKings a lot of credit for creating a lot of really good events that focus on letting players buy in without having to worry about professionals jamming in a ton of lineups. All we are asking for is that the other half of players out there voicing another perspective not be ignored. Much like we value your feedback to us and do everything we can to make improvements to the site when we are able to, we would like to see the folks at DraftKings do the same. We are committed to being advocates for all of you in this and appreciate all of the feedback that has been provided. We want a healthy community that serves the demands of all players without simply telling one faction or another that they need to just suck it up or, ‘that’s just the way it is now’. (end rant)
The cocktails have now arrived and although I rarely drink Bacardi, it’s a little better than I remembered it from years past. Now I am ready to talk some golf this week. Last week proved to be a real challenge and I applaud the large number of you that navigated it successfully. While the Traelers went really well for me personally, the Quicken Loans was a bit of a disaster. Despite owning a large amount of many of the players near the top of the leaderboard – Kyle Stanley, David Lingmerth and Rickie Fowler, there were some real ugly misses in Brendan Steele and Adam Hadwin. Potomac played a lot like a US Open style course so even if some players made it through the cut, the course demolished a lot of them by Saturday or Sunday so players like Ollie Schniederjans and Grayson Murray were reduced to rubble by the time things wound up on Sunday afternoon.
There are some lessons to be learned from this experience as I feel like I could have done a better job in advising you on how to play last week. First, in a field that week, it’s always important to cut back on your play. There is a much higher amount of volatility. Cash games should be limited in these instances. This is compounded by the course being extremely difficult and also brand new to most of the field. All of these signals should be like bright red warning flags for you at the start of the week. When you start to see players getting priced up significantly beyond their normal range to compensate for a weak field, you need to adjust your play. I bring this up since we have a similarly weak field ready to tackle the Greenbrier Classic this week.
There are a few key differences from this week to last. The course is a known entity this week. The Old White Course (yeah, still sounds recist) has hosted this event for many years now so there are plenty of players that have experience to work with. Furthermore, the flooding that wiped out the tournament a year ago forced major renovations to the course which meant that many trees were removed making the already generous fairways even easier to hit. While I would not put this course into Kapalua territory in terms of easiness, it should play much easier than Potomac and we should see a winning score somewhere in the low to mid-teens like we have seen in recent years.
The field is as uninspiring as last week with no true superstar to anchor the tournament this week. Patrick Reed is the top name and while he has improved since a rough start, he’s hardly contending every week so I anticipate that we have another wide open event where a hungry young player could capitalize.
Looks to play things a little lighter this week. This tournament tends to be a little bit of a break for players as there is always much ado about the various types of entertainment offered at the resort for players and their families. Both Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson own property around the course although familiarity with the course may not be a great reason to own shares of either of them.
The course itself plays as a Par 70 and is around 7,200 yards. The fairways are wider than average and players should not have a tough time getting into good position off the tee. Mid to long range iron play on the approach shot is going to be key this week with players who dominate in the 175 yard and up range to be in position to make a lot of birdies. It makes a lot of sense that the defending champion, Danny Lee, is just the type of player who excels from this distance when his game is at its peak.
I will be looking for players this week with a solid approach game as well as players that can scramble and get up and down. You’ll need to be able to do at least one or the other really well to stay in contention this week. I want players this week that have shown strong recent form and who appear to be hitting their peak much in the same way as Kyle Stanley last week. A lot of these guys are still trying to qualify for The Open Championship in a couple of weeks so every last stroke courts (just ask Spencer Levin who lipped out a putt in the 18th hole Sunday that cost him a trip to The Open Championship). We want ball strikers who can handle bentgrass greens and we also do not want to get too bogged down in overweighting the most expensive players. Most of these guys are just tuning up for The Open so if they happen to get into contention, it is a nice bonus, but I have a feeling we may not see greatness from the best players this week. Past winners include such notables as Danny Lee, Angel Cabrera and Scott Stallings among others so it should be wide open.
In looking over the weather this week, it appears that there is a good chance of storms on Thursday afternoon with a chance of storms on Friday afternoon as well. I will be monitoring this closely as we get closer to tee times, but there may be a slight advantage to the AM/PM wave from how things are setting up right now, but not for certain. Fortunately, winds do not look to be a factor on either day so that should not be an issue for the week.
The key stats for the week as shared with us by our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics are as follows:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Scrambling: 15%
Proximity 175-200 yards: 10%
Driving Distance: 5%
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