The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Greenbrier Classic
Happy 4th of July! I hope that this Independence Day finds you all well and getting the chance to spend the day with family and friends…unless you are in Canada, in which case, have a great Wednesday. It is always a little tricky whenever a holiday falls on a Wednesday as people are never too certain which part of the week they want to take off. In most cases, it becomes so confusing for some that the entire week just goes out the window. I had the conversation at the gym today that it seemed so much quieter than normal and I think that the mid week holiday was the obvious culprit. It’s so challenging when you want at least two days off around the holiday not to just turn it into three, but if it’s three, you may as well connect it to a weekend and then if you were only going to get one workout in during the week anyway, maybe you just give yourself the week off to rest up (drink and eat) and recover.
I have a feeling that this is the dilemma that most of the players on tour went through this week when deciding whether or not they wanted to tee it up for the Greenbrier this week. I’m not going to use the longer, less flowing name of the event so know that it is an event with some military connection, which is important this week, but I’m not going to type out a six word title every single time I refer to the event, thus henceforth, it shall be known to you simply as the Greenbrier, or OWC (Old White Course), a name that screams of the era it originated in back in 1914. The field for this tournament is even weaker than last week as many of the better European players have begun to make their way back east in preparation for The Open Championship in two weeks. Be sure to tune in for the Irish Open this week and the Scottish Open next week. Both of those events will have strong fields with plenty of familiar names, but you are also going to need to study up for The Open as there are going to be a lot of names that you are not yet familiar with that you will need to know if you are going to be playing big that week. Even if you were to just upgrade your subscription for this month to get Pari and Ryan’s insights on the events and players, it will be worth the extra dollars to go back and sift through their columns from the last couple of months all the way leading up to the big event in two weeks. There are not many sites that offer extensive coverage of the European Tour so take advantage of the resources that we have available.
Here in the U.S., my thought this week is that the timing of the event makes this one of the lower attended events among players each year. Most players come into town and have a very set routine during the week of the tournament. With the 4th falling on a Wednesday, it really disrupts that preparation which I think leads to players electing to pass. Notable names like Bubba Watson and Phil Mickelson are here which should come as no surprise in that each of them own a vacation home in the area and will be able to spend extra time with their respective families this week. I actually think that might not be something that works in either player’s favor here s they may well be more focused on getting some rest and taking time to be with loved ones over going out and really competing for a win. It’s similar to what we see with Jason Day each year at the Memorial where he never is able to contend year after year. It’s a unique situation that is worth a little thought as we do tend to emphasize a home course advantage or give a little bump to players that are on a course near where they grew up. In these cases, we have players who own vacation homes or a home that has no real connection to where they grew up (Day). I think this tends to lessen any real advantage that we would normally associate with certain players who have local connections. When I look for a local advantage, I want it to be due to grass type, layout and how often a player may have golfed the course over the years. That is typically why I’ll look for more of a regional tie as opposed to simply someone who may casually spend time in a certain location.
Off topic for a minute, before I move on to the tournament this week, I want to talk a little bit about the new lineup generator that Aaron built for us and set up this week for your use. As with anything, I know we are going to be inundated with questions about how it works or why some people cannot seem to get it to work right. Before you fire off that e-mail, please take a little time to read the instructions under the settings tab. It walks you through everything that you need to know to make it work. However, I want to talk you through it here as I know most of you stop by for my column so let this be a quick jump off point to help you out.
The first thing you need to know is that the bones of the improved generator are the same as the old one. In other words, the engine running each that does the computations is exactly the same. If you were able to use the old generator, then the new one will be no problem. The only difference is that you need to get your numbers at least somewhat in the right range in order to get the generator to run properly. The first thing you are going to do is to click on the settings tab (the little square tab that looks like a gear next to the ‘generate’ button) and select your parameters. For the week, I am making 100 lineups to start with and I’ll have my salary cap initially between 49,300 and 50,000. Later on, some of the adjustments I make will take me a little lower than 49,300, but I am okay with that. Next to that, you will see the Minimum and Maximum Ownership boxes. Those are for setting the parameters for the minimum and maximum total ownership of your lineups (if you add up the projected ownership for each of the six players in your lineup). Go ahead and set your range. I typically will set mine to be between 60-100 or so to start with and then I’ll take a look at the outputs on the lineup page to see how much I want to tighten it up to get a fair amount around the sweet spot. The ‘Help’ tab is up at the top in the left corner next to the ‘Settings’ tab and that will give you the info on the generator again if you need a quick refresher.
Once you have input your settings, it’s time to go through and built your player pool. In order to do this, you need to understand the data in the grey bar above the generator. Three columns are particularly important for you to monitor as you fill out your exposures for each player. With 100 lineups, that means that I have a total of 600 roster spots to fill. In the far left column, you will see: Total Roster Spots and below that, Total Players Used. You are not finished with your setup until you have provided enough inputs of player exposure so that the bottom number equals the top number. However, as you also know, you only have so many dollars available to spend on 100 lineups which is $5,000,000 ($50,000 x 100 lineups). In the second column, you will see: Total Salary Available and below that, Total Salary Used. In order for the generator to work properly, you MUST be sure that the Total Salary Used does not exceed the Total Salary Available. So if you have $5 million, be sure to leave $10-20k or so behind to help make the calculations run smoothly. Finally, some of you may be wondering, how do you track this while you are inputting your exposure data so that you do not blow through the salary cap? For that, you are going to look at the column labeled: Average Salary Used/Player and then below that, Average Salary Remaining/Player. Before you put any ownership percentages into the generator, your average salary available per player is $8,333. If you start at the top with Tony Finau and put 40% into the target exposure, your average remaining salary drops to $8,108, which means that for the other 540 roster spots, that is the average of what you can spend. If you are loading up too heavily at the top, your average remaining salary will drop quickly and may make it impossible to finish your build if you get too top heavy. Be sure you have enough players in the lower ranges in order to stay under your total salary cap.
If you do these two things: Total Players Used = Total Roster Spots, Total Salary Used < Total Salary Available, you will get a full output of lineups to work off of without any problems. If you don’t get close on either account, the generator either will not allow you to run a calculation or it will post an error message. Once you have generated your player pool, you can now make adjustments to your individual lineups on the site that you were previously not able to perform. You will have a good idea of where to start based upon the colors of the generated exposure column. Once I have generated my lineups, I generally like to sort that column from highest to lowest so that it shows me just the players I want to use and lets me start by seeing how close I am to my selected weightings for the players that I want the most exposure to. I always start with any red boxes that pop up in that column. That means that I am overweight by more than 10% of my target number. To reduce that back to the weighting I want, I will type that player’s name into the search box and then click on the lineups tab. This will bring up only the lineups that player is a part of which makes it very easy to work through. Click on that player’s name in any of the individual lineups and a menu will pop up which will allow you to switch that share to another player based upon how much salary you have available. You’ll have the option of only seeing players which would keep within the parameters you set within the settings, or you can see all available players.
In some cases, it will be necessary to make more than one adjustment to a lineup if you want to pay up for more than what you have available. For instance, say I need more shares of Tony Finau but the player I want to swap out plus whatever cash is remaining, is not enough to get me there and stay under $50k. I may have to first substitute in Finau, and then go back into that lineup and reduce salary from another player in order to make it a legal lineup. If you exceed the salary cap on a lineup, that row will turn red. Before you export your lineups, always sort the salary column on the lineups tab to make sure you don’t have any remaining lineups that exceed $50k.
On the low end, if a player you have allocated shares to has a blue box around generated exposure, that means you are more than 10% too low. You will want to find a few players around their salary who have excessive shares and make swaps from that player. If you see a yellow box, that means you are plus or minus 5-10% from target and if you see no color, that means you are within 5%. It takes a little practice to get used to everything, but within 20 minutes I was able to build my lineups exactly to my specifications laid out in my column to where I was only off on a couple of players by 1-2% at the most. Obviously, the bigger the player pool and the more your exposures are spread evenly throughout, the easier it becomes to manipulate, but even with just building 20 lineups, this was really helpful and much easier than having to go through DraftKings to change on my own later on which I forget to do half the time as it is.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s hit the high points for the tournament this week. As stated above, we are on the Old White Course this week which is just under 7,300 yards and plays as a Par 70, like last week. There are only two Par 5 holes and one is nearly 620 yards long so there are not ton of easy scoring opportunities in terms of those holes. Where players are going to have to do well will be on the shorter Par 4 holes, five of which are between 388-415 yards. The fairways are wider than what we have seen in recent weeks which should allow for the bigger hitters to use driver again, but a recent looks at the winners shows that you hardly need to be a bomber in order to prevail. Rather, short to mid range approach play proved to be the biggest factor for those who went on to win. While Xander certainly fits into the bomber category, it was really his iron play that sealed the deal for him in 2017. For a deeper dive into the course, check out Adam Daly’s First Tee column here.
Key Stats:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 15%
Proximity: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
Driving Distance: 10%
Prox 175-200 yards: 5%
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