The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Quicken Loans National
We had quite the up and down performance last weekend at the Travelers Championship. By Friday afternoon, carnage was strewn all over the leader board and left a lot of chalk outlines for many of our rosters. Heavy ownership of Brendan Steele, Webb Simpson and Ryan Moore on our GPP rosters left us without many shots at a payday. In fact, for me personally, I had zero 6/6 teams out of 100 in the $5 last weekend. Normally, that would mean a pretty terrible week, but we did have solid exposure to Paul Casey, Russell Henley, Grillo, Cantlay, Bryson and of course, the winner in Bubba Watson so we did manage to have a few teams limp into the money. Fortunately, last week was a really good week for cash games for me which helped to turn the tide enormously.
I laid out a very easy to follow game plan for the week in cash games. We built our base around Steele, Henley and Grillo. That looked like the perfect group to start with for much of the first two days. However, Steele managed to bogey three of his last five holes in a spectacular blowup and wound up just one shot below the cut line which hurt us, but he was a fairly chalky play so it did not kill us. At the top, I hope you were guided to the three players that I liked best that fit within the remaining salary parameters in Cantlay, Casey and Webb Simpson. Webb did not work out at all for us which continued his pattern of crumbling when he is one of the chalkier players on the board, but fortunately, we got big points out of Paul Casey, and even with his collapse on Sunday, we had great finishes from our four guys who made the cut which easily took us into the money for any cash game contest last week.
Interestingly enough, I was slow to jump into the 50/50 contests last week which meant that most had filled by the time I was looking them over in the early morning hours last Thursday, but whenever that happens, I never worry about finding a game as I am always more than happy to jump in against one of the many big bankroll players who are always ready and willing to provide liquidity all the way up until lineup lock. Most of these guys will play one lineup across the board whether it is in a 50/50 contest for $5 or the Thunderdome for $5300. If you know the styles of ho these guys play, you need not be overly fearful in going up against them in cash games. There are a handful that play a wildly aggressive style in cash games that just makes no sense at all and this was the case in my matchup last week.
The player I went up against elected to pay up for Justin Thomas last week in a heads up game. This was a dumb idea for a couple of reasons. First, Thomas has not been coming close to paying off his salary for most of the season. Outside of a runaway win for DJ at the St Jude, we have not seen many cases this year of the top guy on the board delivering value for his salary on a consistent basis. It does happen and sometimes even if they do not deliver the expected points they can still be effective, but it then leads to the next big problem that you have to face in paying up and that is in having to go dumpster diving on the low end for a punt play. In this case, the my opponent opted to go with Pat Perez whose previous six starts provided finishes of: mc, mc, mc, T42, T70 and T36….not the most inspiring run of golf when trying to zero in on a cash game play that is reliable about making the cut. The rest of the lineup was not bad as there was nothing egregious in his other plays, but that move alone ended up being enough to sink him. Even had Perez made the cut, he was not going to have generated enough points to make it a close contest, which considering his lackluster results for much of 2018, was no surprise.
The point that I am making here is not that I am some wunderkind cash game player when it comes to PGA DFS. I had a 4/6 lineup for the week so it was far from a perfect effort. What is important to emphasize out of this is that with cash games, you can be extremely successful by avoiding mistakes, which is what I did here. You are going to have guys like Steele or Simpson miss the cut on you and that is out of your control. Both guys have had nice seasons and each has enjoyed a lot of success at TPC River Highlands. There really was not a lot to see that would steer you away by the numbers or their respective salaries. Those are guys where if they blow the cut the way that Steele did, I just have to shrug and move on. He was well positioned to be in good shape for the weekend and perhaps a Top-25 finish and instead blew up out of nowhere. It is frustrating when that happens, but I am fine if that is how things play out. What I less likely to be happy about losing with is when I take a big risk on the highest priced player and then end up having to cross my fingers that a punt play works out so I don’t get burned. Where the goal of your lineup building efforts for GPP events should be towards maximizing potential upside, your goal in cash games should be about reducing and keeping risk to a minimum. If you can distinguish between the two, you can be very successful in each, but if you struggle with it and construct rosters that lean way too far in one direction or the other, my suggestion is to focus on the area where you are strongest and do not try to force yourself to play both styles of contests.
I’m really excited this week to be testing out Aaron’s (our developer/support/jack of all trades savior) newest project which is a massive upgrade to our lineup generator. For the last couple of months, he’s been grinding through the small details of adding some new features that I think really will really elevate it and make it even better than before. For starters, the display is going to be cleaner to use and all of the columns are now sortable. This will save a ton of time when you want to build all AM or all PM teams as you can quickly sort from early to late or late to early and build quickly from that rather than having to top and start and search for the times.
The next thing you will see is that there is a column where our projected ownership is displayed. For the last few years, I have been studying and writing about ownership trends for winning lineups and how total aggregate ownership fits into the picture of building your lineups. While I am sure the concept made sense to you, it was probably something that was a little too tricky to implement on a practical level. However, we’ve now built that capability into our lineup generator. You will be able to input parameters for total ownership in the settings box and by using our own numbers (or inputting your own), you’ll now be able to build teams that are as chalky or contrarian as you like!
Finally, I know that after generating your lineups that it can be frustrating when you have way too many shares of some players and then not enough of others. We wanted there to be an easy fix for that and so we built in a system for being able to substitute players in and out of lineups to help even out the numbers before your download and export your lineups. Aarons color coded the boxes to highlight players that are within range or way out of range to make it easy on the eyes and the generator is searchable so when you need to reduce shares of a specific player, you type in a part of their name and it will pull up just those specific lineups. It will take a little practice to get used to everything, but within about 10-15 minutes I had it mastered and by last night, I was able to build perfect player pools that matched the allocations that I was looking for so this is a nice upgrade and should help to give us a lot more precision in how we go about building our lineups each week.
And now we get to talk about an event that I know all of you circle of your calendars each and every year, the Quicken Loans National. This tournament took its toll on the field a year ago and I am guessing that is one of the reasons that there are not many big names in attendance this week. If you are newer to golf, then you know that traditionally, this is the time of the season when players like to rest up and direct their focus towards preparing for the next major tournament. Usually the elite players will fit one event in between majors once the US Open hits, but the time between the US Open and The Open Championship is usually the most barren in terms of overall star power. Many players, like Justin Thomas, have already begun the trek overseas and since the course in France this week also plays host to the Ryder Cup in September, the real stars are out in force over on the European Tour this week.
The goal over the next few weeks is to begin our own preparations for The Open Championship. As I stated at the start of the year, as a DFS enthusiast in PGA, you need to map out your schedule at the beginning of the year for how you want to attack the season. You will have your big events circled, a handful of off weeks to rest up and certain weeks where you are over or underweight your normal bankroll exposure. This week is one where I will be underweight compared to my normal buy-in each week. First, this is a week where I would avoid cash games. The soft field puts pricing pressure on the low end which means that players that we would normally see in the low $7k range are now in the $8-9k range and there are not a lot of players with super consistent cut making abilities compared to what we see most weeks. Where last week, we could get Grillo, Steele and Henley in the $7600-7700 range, this week it’s Si Woo Kim, Matt Jones and JT Poston. Any team that I would build for a cash game could just as easily be put into play for a GPP contest and my expectation for the range of possible finishes would be much wider than I am comfortable with for a cash team. I know a few of you will not take this advice so I will try to guide you towards a couple of solid plays, but overall, I plan to keep my focus on GPP play for the week.
TPC Potomac is another Par 70 course that plays at just over 7,100 yards with two Par 5 holes, one of which is well over 600 yards so there are not going to be a lot of scoring opportunities for the week. In fact, last year, the cut line came in at +4 so it was one of the more challenging courses on tour last season. The players will be working with narrow fairways this week which means that once again, driver will get left in the bag more often than not. Be sure to understand that this will shake up driving accuracy numbers so do not immediately scratch off the bombers simply due to the fact that they are wild with their driver. Most will be hitting woods or even irons from the tee which means that they should have a better chance of keeping the ball in play. Approach shots will be the key this week. With players clubbing down to stay out of trouble, mid to long iron play will be our focus for the week. We will target in on the top tee to green players this week, but with less emphasis on scoring and more than normal on avoiding big mistakes. With scoring not likely to go too low, par golf is winning golf for the week so a lot of those tee to green marvels that we tend to overlook some weeks due to their inability to score are definitely in play this week. In fact, Kyle Stanley’s win here last season provided a perfect illustration of that exact point. For a more thorough look at the course, head over to read The First Tee by Adam Daly. It’s the best place to start your research each week and gives you a great idea of what to expect both from courses old and new.
Key Stats
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Driving Accuracy: 15%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 10%
Birdie or Worse Percentage: 10%
Proximity: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
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