The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Houston Open

Bubba Watson continued his ascent this season last weekend with another incredible performance as he demolished Kevin Kisner in the finals of the WGC Match Play event last weekend down in Austin. It was one of the more anticlimactic finishes to any event in recent memory as Kisner looked exhausted by the final match and was roundly destroyed 7&6 and it could have been worse had it not been for Bubba missing a short putt midway through the match. It marked Bubba’s second win of the year and sends him into Augusta as a player to keep an eye on as we start to build our rosters next week. He had such a strange season in 2017 where he seemed out of sorts all year, battled undisclosed health issues and lost a lot of weight. Bubba is an interesting character and if you’ve ever listened to interviews, you know that he suffers from anxiety and struggles in many social situations as a result. Obviously, as a tour professional who is constantly in the spotlight, this cannot be easy to manage so when he talks about last season and that he did in fact consider giving up the game completely, it makes the turnaround this season all the more remarkable for what he has been able to achieve.

Unfortunately, for myself, I did not give Bubba enough credit for his recently found form and as a result, I did not own him last week. Since last week was out first experience with any sort of match play event on DraftKings, there was a steep learning curve in play that forced us to try to learn as much as possible within a very short amount of time. While the edge may never be as high as it was for the skilled player in the years to come, there are some very key takeaways that I want to impart before we move on so that when this event arrives again next year and is even bigger than it was this past go around, you will have the tools ready to recall what took place and what you will need to do to be effective with the next opportunity.

We tried to keep the flow of information tighter than normal last week. We knew players would make obvious and foolish mistakes that would eliminate their teams as soon as lineups were locked. The most glaring error of the week was in seeing the number of entries with two players from the same group. I believe that when it was all said and done, just over 20% of teams had players from the same group. That means that all of those rosters at best were going to be down a player going into the Round of 16 and highly unlikely to be able to win a GPP. By simply examining each lineup with a bracket in hand, you could have avoided this obvious error and given yourself and immediate edge. The next mistake that players made was in building lineups that did not have exposure to each quadrant. I saw countless teams that were built to get a maximum of only two to three players into the Final Four last week. While it was not impossible to win some money in these scenarios, it was certainly not optimal. While few very few lineups were able to piece together a Bubba/Kisner/Noren/Thomas group, ideally, you do want to have a shot at getting four players into the semi-finals.

If you noticed the leaderboard for the $5 GPP event on Saturday night, you would have seen that the leader for the week at that point had all four players going to the semis, which meant, for all intents and purposes, the sweat was over as there was no scenario which would take place on Sunday whereby he could lose his lead. That might have been one of the few weak spots within the contest structure that DK could consider improving for next year. Perhaps by that point, they will feel comfortable inserting a bit of bracketology into the equation and allowing for players to select potential finalists and a winner from each lineup built where they could accrue extra points along the way. I can see a scenario playing out very similar to this each year that the contest is run if no adjustments are made. This year it was especially difficult to get all four of the semi-finalists with Kisner only being owned by around 1.5% of lineups, but if a chalkier group made it, you might see much less movement at the top of the board each day which makes for a somewhat dull Sunday.

Given the time constraints, our developer did a really nice job making adjustments to the lineup builder in order to avoid building teams with stacked groups. In talking with Aaron, he believes that by next year, he will be able to make the necessary adjustments to the model so that group overlap can be avoided as well as assuring representation for each quadrant within a lineup and no more than two golfer per quad. I also recommend weighting each quadrant out in an equal manner when building your lineups. While it is nice to have representation in each lineup for each, you also want to make sure that those last two players come from an equal dispersion among the four quads. In looking back, I think building your player pool to have around 150% of your total ownership from each quad would go a long ways towards optimizing your chances of having teams alive near the end. I tended to go very heavily with Rory and DJ last week and while I owned other other players in those two quads, it was minimal overall so that when they were eliminated, I was toast. Now, there is some merit to just sticking to your guns and being all-in on two players like that on each side, but the reality of the pricing made it tough to go over 50% for each of them within the player pool so it was not realistic to try to make that play and then stacking the other quads. It was nearly impossible to imagine a situation where they both made the finals AND two other huge underdogs made it to the semi-finals so knowing that you could not really make a playable team where both made it to the end, we should have been looking at options for one or the other getting there and giving ourselves enough exposure on the opposite sides as potential upset candidates. It’s a lot to think about, but fortunately for us, we have a full year before this type of event will be back for us so I am not going to devote too many brain cells to it under next winter when we begin preparations for the 2019 season.

It’s time to get back to the business at hand this week in preparing for the Houston Open. If you are new to PGA DFS this season, weeks like this require a little more thought than your average week. The Masters is like Christmas for the player who get the opportunity to tee it up at Augusta. Whether it is the first time a player sets foot on those hallowed grounds or the 30th, there is something really special about the course and the whole week of events that leads up to the tournament. I was incredibly fortunate to cross off a bucket list item two years ago as my dad and I attended the tournament with some friends of ours. We did the full package for the event, arriving at a home in Augusta on Wednesday night, taking in all four days of the tournament and staying until the very last on the 18th hole and then watching the ceremony as Danny Willet won an improbable come from behind victory, defeating Jordan Spieth, who melted down in spectacular fashion over the back nine holes. I spent a lot of time recounting my experience and will repost the column I wrote about it once things get going in Houston this week.

Last season, as the tournament in Houston was approaching, players began their normal preparations for the week in earnest. However, by the middle of the week, the forecast in Houston started to look pretty nasty with rains and high winds over the weekend that threatened to push the finish of the tournament to Monday. Now, normally, this is not that big of a deal. Players will shrug that off in most circumstances, especially the stars who do not play every week. Things are a little different the week prior to a major and particularly so the week before The Masters. There is a whole calendar of events that takes place for the players that week with practice rounds on Monday and Tuesday followed by the Par 3 Contest on Wednesday before the tournament begins on Thursday morning. Time is limited and while most veterans have been there many times, it is always key to see exactly how the course is set up and how it is playing before teeing off.

With the weather looking less than ideal last year going into the weekend, it really did not surprise me that a number of high profile players ended up missing the cut: Jordan Spieth, Henrik Stenson, Matt Kuchar, Rafa Cabrera Bello, Adam Scott and Patrick Reed all managed to somehow collapse to miss the cut. Now, was it as bad as the tanking we see late in the season in the NBA? Absolutely not. Do I think that in the back of their minds that they really were not worried about missing the cut if they were not going to contend? Yes, I do think that many thought there was little reason to stick around if they were not in contention so that the level of regret for missing the cut was low and if it meant avoiding a Monday finish, even better.

The other concern that does come sometimes in the week leading up to a major is the fear of a marquee player withdrawing early from the tournament. Now, this does not happen all that often so I would not obsess over it, but the most famous case of this was with Dustin Johnson back in 2015 at the St Jude Classic down in Memphis where the tour stops every year before the US Open. DJ had been playing well that season, was solid on that track, but after shooting +3 over the first nine holes, he elected to WD and said he had an ‘illness’ and was not feeling good. Of course, he hopped on a plane immediately and headed off to Chambers Bay to start preparation for the following week where he recovered fairly quickly and went on to a 2nd place finish. Although this seriously stung my cash game lineups and left an indelible memory, it’s not something that pops up too often. Most of the time, when you see players in a field the week prior to a major, it is due to the fact that they actually like to play in a tuneup event. That is the case with Phil Mickelson, who you will routinely see playing in events the week prior to a major. When you notice this with players, it is something that you want to store in the back of your mind. Obviously, the course history stands out when you start your research, but it just lets you know that a particular player is trying to lock in their focus early and will not blow off the cut on Friday.

Fortunately, it looks like the worst of the weather this week will be contained to Wednesday and Thursday morning this week in Houston with the rest of the week looking like weather should not be a major issue. The only thing that may pop up are some gusty winds early Friday morning. Be sure to get a good weather check on Wednesday night in order to verify, but right now would be to build about 25% of my teams stacked for Thursday AM/Friday PM tee times and only 5% the other way around. As always, I must include the disclaimer that we are not reaching for players here, but simply doing our research, building our player pool and organizing some rosters based upon those players that we already were planning to play for the week so this is never a desperation sort of move, just a more efficient way of attacking a potential edge that could develop for us. In most cases, we won’t gain much ground, but in the few cases where we do, it can be incredibly significant.

As far as the course this week, I am not going to regurgitate everything that Adam has already stated so succinctly and so well in his column this week. The key takeaways are that it is a long, Par 72 course that models in some of the features of Augusta in order to attract quality players who are looking for a good tuneup event before next week. The greens are Bermuda, but overseeded with rye and bent grass to mimic what players will see at Augusta and they will be very fast. The edges of the greens are shaved down as well so that shots that lack proximity to the pin could be sucked off the green and down into collection areas forcing players to scramble out of trouble. Given the length of the course, the bomber should rule the day and with the precipitation expected, should give them an even bigger edge than normal. The rough is cut fairly short so missing the fairway typically is not all that punitive. Mid to long range iron play again will be important here and although the greens are usually fast and firm, the extra moisture should help to soften them up on Thursday which should help to make putting a little easier, at least initially before the sunny days from Friday to Sunday dries them out again and they firm up.

The key stats for the week are as follows:

Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Stroke Gained Putting: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 15%
Proximity: 15%
Scrambling: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%
Driving Distance: 5%

 

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