The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – RBC Canadian Open
We had high hopes for The Open Championship going into the tournament last week and it did not disappoint. By Sunday, we had a tight leaderboard up top with Tiger Woods lurking close by and then taking the lead with just eight holes left to play. He then inexplicably double bogeyed the 11th hole and what should have been a spot to potentially have a shot at extending his lead turned out to be the final time we would see Tiger up top. He fought hard down the stretch, but ended up only being able to hold onto a tie for 6th place as his playing partner for the day, Francesco Molinari, played mistake free golf the entire round and rolled his way to a two shot win over several other players. It marked Molinari’s third win in the last couple of months and cemented his place among the elites of the game.
We have discussed Molinari’s ascension in these pages many times over the last couple of years, but if you have not watched closely enough, some of the changes in his game may have escaped you. As recently as the last few seasons, most observers would have considered Molinari to be a shorter hitter who competed by staying accurate and perfecting his mid to long iron play. However, the real story has been his development off the tee where he has become a legitimate 300 yard driver off the tee. While some of the accuracy has been lost, the added distance and continued strong approach play have made him one of the premier ballstrikers in the game. While his putting numbers on the season are not all that impressive, in watching him over his last few events, I have been very pleased by how well his putter has been for him as he’s been able to score when in position and also to save par in some tough situations. While the majors are always devoid of shottracker, I am convinced that if it were available, Molinari would have recorded some of the best strokes gained putting numbers for the week as he did not bogey a hole over the weekend.
Hopefully, you grabbed a good number of shares like I did last week and were able to convert a few of those teams into winning cash or GPP lineups. I was a bit unfortunate in that I had Molinari on a good chunk of my rosters, but was only able to get one 6/6 squad through intact in the Millionaire Maker which was disappointing. Again, I managed to have all the right players in my column last week and with the exception of Xander (who I only owned in 5% of my teams) I had good shares in place of all the golfers on the winning Millionaire Maker Lineup (Finau, Fleetwood, ZJ, Molinari, Rose and Xander). This lineup actually used the core of my cash game lineup (ZJ, Finau, Rose) and much of my initial builds that started with ZJ and Tony so that my week ended up going pretty well. Although Brendan Grace blew the cut on the final hole on Friday by missing a birdie putt, the other 5 golfers (ZJ, Finau, Noren, Koepka and Rose) carried me to an easy win for the week in what has continued to be a very solid cash game season for me. In fact, just for fun, I threw that team into the $555 GPP and it cashed there as well. Once again, it was really just the Millionaire Maker when I was down a bit for the week as even the 20 max GPP returned a small profit for me. It proved to me again that the MM is a very tough place to make a profit during the majors and that sticking with cash games or even some of the other GPP events is probably the best plan if you are looking for a solid ROI as opposed to chasing the $1 million dream! Oh well, it’s hard not to go after the Holy Grail sometimes as even I enjoyed a brief thrill on Friday afternoon as I had a team that looked like it had a shot ever so briefly before the weather patterns on Saturday flipped the leaderboard on its head.
All in all, the picks up top fared pretty well with 13 of my top 14 players making the cut with Grace as the only blemish. That allowed for a lot of teams to reach the money even though a bunch of tertiary and sprinkle plays bit the dust on Friday afternoon. I have to pat myself on the back for making the full pivot to Rory and completely fading DJ last week. I thought DJ would be my guy, but in examining the ownership trends by taking in what the industry was buzzing about, it became clear that DJ would end up being about twice as highly owned and that Rory was going to come in at single digits. It was a risk for certain, but we gained a lot of leverage on the field with that play, especially when DJ somehow missed his first cut of the season and Rory moved up the board to finish tied for second by the end of the tournament. Overall, my biggest regret is just in not getting enough Molinari into the mix. I had a nice 20-25% range that I was looking for with my lineups, but given how well he’s played this year, he really should have been a core player for his price. I got a little bit anxious with him in looking at his history too heavily at Open Championships and it knocked him down for me just enough to pull back a little bit. However, given the event and that it’s not a course or conditions that we see too often, I thought the core players that we went to battle with did well overall.
The other decision that I look back at and shake my head on is that I opted to swap my Tiger shares over to Jason Day before the event. As the tournament approached, I sensed that Tiger would again be very popular and was hoping that by switching over to the lesser owed Day, that I would have a chance to gain a little edge on the field. It looked like that would be the case early on with Day getting to -3 midway through the second round, but he could not maintain his position and slipped back to 17th by the end of the weekend and Tiger outscored him by 10.5 DK points. Overall, I am still okay with the process as Day had less ownership by around 4-5% and very easily could have been up near Tiger with just slightly better play. With the rough not being as penal as it could have been in wetter years where it grew thicker, Tiger was able to avoid trouble off the tee which gave him the edge he needed, but I do not mind taking this kind of chance as it only turned out to be a minor disappointment. I really like what we continue to see from Tiger and with him qualifying for the WGC Bridgestone next week, we will get another shot to own him on a course where he has been dominant throughout his career and where there is no cut. I will be very interested to see where his salary is next week and also for the PGA Championship in two weeks.
Moving on to the RBC Canadian Open, I was again very pleasantly surprised to see a solid field for the third time in a row after a major this year. This will likely not be the case after the PGA Championship heading into the Wyndham so let’s take advantage while we can. Given that RBC is the sponsor and that they have a lot of players under its umbrella, it’s not terribly surprising to see many good players out for the event. I always like seeing good players in events where the sponsor of the tournament is also a sponsor of many top players. I am always looking for situations where I think a player could have an emotional letdown, but seeing that money is a huge motivational factor for any athlete, the last thing that these guys want to do is to lay an egg in front of people who pay them to represent their brand. It’s not a fun trip on a Friday afternoon to go to shake hands with attendees from RBC when you’ve just boned up the cut in brutal fashion so I think you’ll get a nice effort from players that made the trip this week. It’s also important to note that a few missed the cut at Carnoustie last week so they should have arrived a little earlier than expected which hopefully gave their bodies some extra time to acclimate for the week.
I enjoy Glen Abbey when the tournament is hosted there as it has been frequently over the last few years. It’s a nice contrast from the links style courses where we’ve seen the elite players over the last month or so in the two major tournaments. This week, we have a course that is much more open to players going low for the win and with a lot of great scoring holes on the back nine that will give any player within a couple of strokes of the leader a chance to get really aggressive to make up ground. It is a Par 72 course that plays right around 7,250 yards and has four, shorter distance, Par 5 holes with three of those coming over the final few holes. The fairways are average in terms of width, but the rough is never very penal so the bigger hitters can pound away with their driver off the tee without having to worry about the normal repercussions of missing the fairway which should give them an edge coming in. However, as there is never any one right way to play a course, also realize that many players who do not fall into the bomber category have had some of the greatest success over the years in terms of tournament history. These are the players with precision approach play from short to middle range distances around the greens who always put themselves into position to score. Outside of a few holes with water in play and a handful of greenside bunkers, there is not a lot of defense for this course and I would guess that the winning score would be around -15 to -18 for the tournament. For further review of the course, be sure to check out Adam Daly’s weekly preview, The First Tee.
One of the things that I referenced on the podcast this week was player type, as in looking at bombers from the top of the salary chart all the way down to the bottom. I am going to make a concerted effort to choose some of the bigger hitters from the top all the way down when building some of my lineups. If the course really does play towards the bombers and those that can be in position for eagles on the Par 5 holes, I want to have full teams of players that fit this profile which means that I may need to go in by hand to fit some of those rosters together. I’ve talked about this idea with a couple of our subscribers who inquired about roster builds and I think its an interesting idea worth sharing.
A lot of weeks, we do not know exactly how a course will play, but we have some inclination. By the end of the weekend, we can give a quick glance to the leaderboard and see what type of player was most well suited for the course and what type of style worked out best, whether that emphasis was on short game play, approach play, driving distance or birdie makers. It’s our job as players to try to identify the style of play going into the week that we think will correlate to the best results. It’s a little bit like stacking tee times in that we are looking to overload in an area where we think we have an advantage. It’s not going to be something that we ever use in excess and as I mentioned above, there are always many ways to have success on a course, but I think stacking players based upon their style of play is a very valid approach to consider, especially when we have a few strong indicators for how a course will play based on historical results and the overall setup. It does not have a fancy name, but perhaps calling it a ‘style stack’ makes sense. It certainly rolls off the tongue better than my Russian doll analogy on the podcast. If you build a lot of teams this week for the $5 GPP, take 5-10% and just try this technique out. You can even do it in a contrarian manner in trying to anticipate how most players will overload (bombers this week) and try to build more around those with precision approach play for a few teams. It’s just one more tool for your toolbox when it comes to roster construction and in trying to leverage any little edge that we can get our hands on in a given week.
Key Stats
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better %: 20%
Proximity: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
Driving Distance: 7.5%
Driving Accuracy: 7.5%
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