The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – John Deere Classic
The summer PGA doldrums are almost over. We are only a few days away from being able to kick off full scale coverage for the third major of the year and one that I particularly enjoy as it falls well within my nocturnal hours of wakefulness for late night viewing. The field is stacking up nicely and the prices were released earlier this week so do yourselves a favor and start getting to work on your research now. The course rotates each year so getting a head start will certainly be a key to success. Also, be sure to start looking closely at the weather. I cannot emphasize this last point enough, especially to our new players this year. The weather at The Open Championship can be as big of a factor as any when it comes to selecting players and thus, I would highly advise that you wait to start constructing lineups until we get a good look at the weather and tee times for the tournament. Two years ago, Jeff made a huge haul at this event based upon our read of the weather and stacking of tee times in a live final qualifier (yes, DK did have one glorious live final for golf). In the three years that I have played in GPPs around The Open, weather has always been a factor and with so many newer people playing next week, it is a great opportunity to take advantage of the situation.
Before we get too far, I should mention that we had one of our best weeks of the season last week at the Greenbrier Classic. Xander Schauffele was a player that we has slowly warmed up to in recent weeks and he popped so much in the model last week that he made it into our player pool as one of our top secondary plays of the week which along with several other writers on our staff recommending him, helped to propel a few folks to some four and even five figure paydays in the GPPs last week and many others were able to win many multiples on what they entered. He was also one of my cash game plays which helped out immensely if you happened to stray too far off the list. The only real dud for me last week was Kevin Kisner. Kisner has had a real up and down year where he is either locked in and contending for a title or completely lost out on the course. He is becoming a bit of an enigma for me as statistically, his numbers are dynamite and yet there are weeks where he absolutely doe not show up. Hopefully, he was not the piece of the puzzle that ruined what was otherwise a very healthy week for the FGI team.
Moving on to this week, we have one of our final weak field events for the year. I had a chance to sit down for lunch in Las Vegas with longtime subscriber, Ron Van Elsis on Saturday and he brought up an interesting question about some recent struggles in trying to attack some of the events week to week on his own. It was an interesting discussion and it made me think about how we should be setting ourselves up to play throughout the season. PGA DFS, unlike the NFL, is a far different animal from week to week. Nobody looks at the NFL schedule and worries about the different between Week 8 and Week 10 (although depending on bye weeks there could be some minor strategy shifts). Generally, you play your bankroll the same all season, and adjust it up or down based upon its growth or drop off. There are not a lot of weeks where you know going in that scoring is going to be really easy or really hard for the week.
In golf, things could not be more different. The strength of the field varies so much from week to week that amateurs and Web.com players can make up a larger percentage of the field when the top names decide not to play. Furthermore, the course can be very easy some weeks and incredibly difficult in others. This would be like if in certain weeks, the size of the NFL field were only 60 yards instead of 100. What that means is that each week, while the game overall is still the same, the conditions and strength of the field vary so much that it makes certain events much more predictable while others, like the Quicken Loans two weeks ago (new course, weak field) much trickier to make accurate projections on.
In order to combat this important issue, you really need to come up with a game plan at the start of the season and stick to it as the year moves along. Much like Jordan Spieth plans out his entire year in advance, you should do the same for each golf season. By doing this, you accomplish a couple of things. First, you avoid chasing after events where you know it is not optimal to play your regular amount. Next, it primes you to be ready for those events where you know you have an advantage and should be dialing things up (the majors). Finally, it will help you to determine your mix of Cash Game versus GPP exposure from week to week. A quick example of how a season might look would be something like this:
Fall Season
Lighter bankroll exposure for stateside events with weaker fields with more exposure to GPP events. Cash games can still be lucrative as the staff here at FGI will have you well prepared for the new players coming onto the tour after earning their cards on the Web.com Tour, but many of these players will still be a little unpolished and thus, the biggest benefit to the Fall portion of the season is in getting the chance to scout these players out while the novices are immersed in the NFL season. The events I would include here:
Safeway Open
CIMB Classic
HSBC Champions (No Cut WGC Event) – Can expand bankroll exposure slightly, but with no cut, limit cash games
Shriners Open
OHL Classic
RSM Classic
Hero World Open
Strong Play Events
These are the events where we want to be able to have a good amount of exposure with stronger fields where the event is held consistently at the same course year in and year out. With a stronger field, players will be priced more appropriately and you will not see quite the big swings for certain names being up or down thousands of dollars to make sure the salaries are spread out enough. With these events, we get a nice course history to use as well as a good understanding of what players will need to do to be successful and what can trip them up. Normally, the pricing tends to be pretty reasonable although DK shifts so much that prices, by and large have gotten softer over the last year. I would weight cash games slightly higher than GPP contests in this grouping. Since the field is stronger, you are going to be able to naturally build better caliber teams overall which should allow you to take advantage of players that are careless in cash games that build lineups that chases streaky players or upside overall unnecessarily. These also tend to be the types of events I most enjoy tuning in for from start to finish throughout the weekend. The events I would include in this group:
The Farmers Insurance Open
Waste Management Phoenix Open
Genesis Open
Arnold Palmer Invitational
Wells Fargo (normally at Quail Hollow)
The Memorial
THE MAJORS
These are always great places to make some cash, but not so much from the Millionaire Maker contests. The GPP payouts for many of these contests is now so steep that you need to beat nearly 90% of the field just to double your winnings. Cash games are king for the majors and if you can get yourself to stay in cash for these, you’ll have an incredible ROI. However, what fun is it to just win a little here and there when there are such big prize pools to dream about for these weeks? Of course you are going to play in GPPs, but I am telling you now, do not sleep on cash games here as we’ve had incredible success during majors. The reason cash games are so much more lucrative is that the pricing is much softer than normal in order to make newer players more comfortable in being able to build strong teams. However, many of these players will still make big errors in how they put together their rosters and it is your duty to teach them the error of their ways. Just keep your cash teams boring and filled with consistent players and you will succeed far more often than not.
The Masters
The US Open
The Open Championship
PGA Championship
Limit Exposure
Now, you do not have to stick to what I lay out here, but it should at least start to help you in terms of understanding where to slow down. There is no one reason to limit exposure. Perhaps the field is really weak. Perhaps the event is being played on a different course for the first time. Maybe an event is known for having terrible weather. And of course, it is always smart to pull back a little bit the week prior to a major, with the exception being the WGC-Bridgestone this year which is the week prior to the PGA Championship. In these events, I am playing more GPP events as the fields are filled with more volatile players making it tougher to project who will make and miss the cut, thus taking away some of the advantage of cash games. Here are a few of the events that I would put into this category for the 2016-2017 season:
Puerto Rico Open – weak field
Shell Houston Open – event prior to The Masters
Valero Texas Open – crazy winds and weather patterns
Dean & DeLuca Invitational – weak field
FedEx St Jude Classic – week prior to US Open
Travelers Championship – weak field
Quicken Loans – weak field, new course that plays tough
Greenbrier Classic – weak field
John Deere Classic – very weak field, easy course, played the week prior to The Open
Canadian Open – weak field, plus many players are tired from making the trip back from The Open
Wyndham Championship – weaker field, last event before FedEx Cup
Problem Event
There are always going to be events that for whatever reason, we just do not do very well. You can probably name the event if you have been around long enough. For me, that event is The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. The leaderboard each year is as tough for to predict as any on tour and bounces around so much from year to year that there are barely any players on tour that have a consistent course history to work with. Each year, I think I finally have it nailed down and then along comes Si Woo Kim and I get chopped to bits. If you find that you have a course that just throws you off all the time, put it in the category and cut way back on your play or even just take the week off (gasp).
The Players Championship
Now, I did not hit each and every event. I will say that early in the year, I like to work slowly into the schedule to get a feel for things in January and February. I play a little lighter in the Tournament of Champions, The Sony Open, CareerBuilder and Pebble Beach. I work my way up to my normal exposure with my plan being to play up a little for a few events, but waiting mostly for the Florida swing to start to open up a bit. The WGC events I tend to play less than normal and more GPP than cash as the lack of a cut is frustrating and also due to the potential for the dreaded WD as players still get paid even if they do not finish and as a consequence, we’ve seen many players quit mid-round in the last two seasons (Berger, Koepka and Stenson just to name three that burned me). Finally, at the end of the season, during the FedEx Cup, I gradually wind down my play, starting with my normal exposure in the first round and cutting it little by little until The Tour Championship where with a 30 man field, I just do not get that excited to play.
Hopefully, after sitting through this little exercise, you can start to see some value in charting out a path through the year. I really think this would help many of you who get a little frustrated with the ups and downs of the season. Breaking it down into smaller pieces and knowing ahead of time how much you are going to put into play and where will help to smooth things out and also keep you from making the mistake of playing more after losing for a couple of weeks in events where it will be tougher to catch up.
Onto the course for the week. TPC Deere Run is probably the easiest course on tour all season. The Par 71 course plays out at around 7,250 yards on bentgrass greens. The fairways are not normally too challenging to hit, but wild players can get into trouble as there are trees around them so the bombers can get into trouble, but it’s not easy to do. The winning score will probably be lower than -20 so making birdies is going to be very important this week. Bombers will have no advantage here and a quick scan of leaderboards tends to reveal that players who are accurate off the tee, have a solid approach game and can putt well enough to keep up with all of the scoring of others are the players who will have success. Recent winners include Steve Stricker (x3), Jordan Spieth (2x), Zach Johnson, Brian Harman and Ryan Moore.
The key stats for the week from our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics are as follows:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Driving Accuracy: 10%
Prox 150-175: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
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