The Daily Spin DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Sentry Tournament of Champions
It’s always funny to open up the season by ‘welcoming’ everyone back to golf. You would think think we just finished a lengthy summer vacation between semesters the way that we talk about it when in fact, it’s really only been about four weeks since we were last watching the best players in the world tee it up in the Bahamas at the Hero World Challenge. It is nice to have a few weeks away during the holidays though as we have been working away at getting the site updated for the new year. If you have not had a chance to check it out yet, take a look at our new interactive model that Aaron, our developer has been putting a lot of time into over the last few months. Our goal was to create something that can integrate many of our tools together and that is what we are working towards with the model. The web based platform will allow for real time updates so that when tee times are released, players withdraw or odds get updated, we can get those key pieces of information fed into the model quicker in order to make sure that it is giving you the best data available. We’ve done that with the Euro model and Weekend model as well so that we can automate as many processes as possible. This should lead to being able to have everything ready and in your hands much sooner each week as I envision being able to have something basic prepared and posted shortly after the weekend rounds kick off and we can work with the announced field from Friday. If we can add a day or two to your research time, it should help to take some of the pressure off that comes from when things get a little too compressed in the three days between salaries being released and lineup lock. We’re excited with the new look of things and can’t wait to share more of what we’re working on as each piece is ready to go.
In looking at a broad overview of the season, some of you are joining us here for the first time. I find that it is really helpful when approaching the PGA Tour schedule each year to sit down to look at the flow of events throughout the year and to see where the schedule builds to varying levels of crescendo and then giving us a few weeks to catch our breath. Each season, the tour kicks off in Hawaii for two events, the Tournament of Champions and the Sony Open. The TOC is an invite only event where all of those players who won on tour since the last TOC get to come play for a free paycheck as there is no cut. It’s a great spot for guys to relax and ease their way back onto the tour schedule and not a real skull crusher of a course either. It’s never easy to see who is going to show up 100% with their mental game, but if you go off of the stereotypical images of most of these players, you’ll have a good starting point. After the Hawaii swing, the tour hits the west coast for a handful of events with the CareerBuilder, the Farmers, Waste Management, Pebble Beach and Riviera. You’ll get a lot of bentgrass and some Poa courses and there are definitely certain players that shine during this stretch who have west coast roots….think guys like Phil Mickelson, Pat Perez and Jon Rahm among others (all ASU guys).
After California, we get the Florida swing for a few events, although it has been broken up to some extent with the departure from Doral down to Mexico for the WGC event in March. These tend to be tighter courses where wind and water play a big factor. We see a shift to primarily Bermuda grass so the players that grew up in the southeast and played their college golf in the SEC tend to shine, although for golfers like Brooks Koepka, there is never a water hazard that he can’t find so mentally, it can be painful to watch these events as golfers are more than capable of blowing up and entire round with one bad hole.
Once we’re out of Florida, I usually am already in a frenzy counting down the weeks until Augusta and The Masters. We have two quick stops for the Match Play event in Austin and then the final event in Houston before The Masters. The tour does return three more times to Texas, however, and it is important to adust your mindset here again as we tend to see high winds and storms around the area in the spring and have seen some of the craziest splits in terms of what one wave deals with compared to the other for the AM vs PM groups. There is a crop of Texas players that you can focus on that tend to play some of their best golf near home, but the Aussies also seem to do well during this stretch as many describe similarities between the courses they grew up with and the ones on tour in Texas. There are also a handful of Aussie transplants who have settled there so be sure to consult our player profile guide on the PGA toolbar to see if you can spot a few local connections.
After Texas, we get a quick stop at Jack Nicklaus’s home course in Ohio for The Memorial which tends to be a really strong field and is the last real tune up for most of the big name players before we hit a stretch where we have a major each month from June through August. Interspersed between the majors we’ll get a slew of smaller events where the younger players and career grinders will battle it out each week to try to change their lives with a win. Following the PGA Championship in August, we have one last regular season event at the Wyndham where players on the edge of being in the Top-125 for FedEx Cup points battle it out to try to keep their tour card. After that, it’s the FedEx Cup Playoffs and a race to Atlanta for a $10 million top prize.
So why do I bring this up here? Most of you are already familiar with the schedule at least somewhat peripherally and know where the tour events are played each year. Yet, throughout the year, from week to week, most players are just realizing where an event is taking place on Monday when they tune in to their favorite podcast or see the prices come out for the first time. I want to help you to fix this habit. The reason it is important is that I want you to be with us all season. What that means is that you want to build your own road map that starts with Kapalua and weaves itself all the way to Atlanta in the fall. You’ll notice that most of the top level players have their entire schedules mapped out at the beginning of the year. They have their favorite tournaments, the majors, the WGC events or if they are grinders, the smaller events that are not invitationals where they can play each week.
Too often during the year, I see people get into the bad habit of chasing week after week. They have a good week or two in events they enjoy, but inevitably, they have a bad run of a couple of weeks. Rather than adjusting and picking the best spot to get back in to make a move, they go big in whatever the next event on the calendar is, which may or may not present any real opportunity for success. If it ends up being another tricky field with tighter pricing and a high degree of variance, they may just end up lighting a larger chunk of their bankroll than intended on fire for no other reason other than the fact that they got a little too impatient with the process.
Unlike other fantasy sports, fantasy golf really has to be played over an extended period of time before you can be comfortable saying one way or another that you are a winning or losing player. It is the most volatile fantasy sport on the market with a lack of volume being a weekly surprise for those players who fail to make the cut. It’s not like the NFL where your running back can be the worst on the slate all day, but then rip off a long TD at the end of the game to salvage his day. In golf, if you’re not in the Top-70 by Friday afternoon, you pack up your stuff and head to the next event and plenty good players will hurt you during the year so you have to be patient with it.
The first thing that I do every year is to set out a list of my favorite events on the PGA DFS golf calendar. If you’re curious, my early season favorites are at Torrey Pines, the Phoenix Waste Management Open and the Genesis Open at Riviera. These events tend to bring out high caliber players on courses that are a lot of fun to watch. You always get great fields for each which means that I usually do not have to go out of my way to build a reasonable roster for cash game purposes. These tend to be courses where the bigger hitters excel, but they do also create some trouble for errant shots. Weather can come into play, especially at Torrey or Riviera, but with only a few exceptions, it is usually not the dominant factor in who plays well. In essence, I like events where there is a full field on a reasonably challenging course where there is plenty of depth to the field and my options are open for both cash and GPP contests.
In a similar vein, as the season wears on, I always want to be able to keep some extra funds in my bankroll for when the majors come around. While folks are just now returning to golf or checking it out for the first time, most of the interest in the initial month or so is going to come from other hardcore golf fans and lovers of PGA DFS. There is still enough juice over in the NFL for a couple more weeks to sustain most football fans until the Super Bowl ends. It really is not until those NFL DFS fans tune in to bowling on a Sunday afternoon in February that they really start to worry about what to do with their time for those spring months ahead.
Once to majors arrive is when we start to see the sites really start to promote golf with larger contests and Millionaire Maker GPP events. This is the time when I really want to go heavy on cash games. If you are the type who likes to shoot for big prizes and are not worried about winning or losing a few bucks, the Millionaire Maker is perfect for you. However, those contests, while being a lot of fun, are also very top heavy in terms of a payout and hard to be profitable on over an extended period if just playing a handful of entries. If you really want to make money, double or triple your normal weekly allotment from your bankroll and hit the cash games hard those weeks. While the novice players come for the big contests, they stat for the cash games and it’s a great spot to pick them off as you will have been tuned in all season while they are just getting to the party. This is not 100% foolproof, but it’s been a spot where we’ve had great success the last three years.
I also want you to go through the events this year and pick out a few where you struggle or just a few that you do not like that much. What I want you to do is to mark those as weeks you plan to take off during the season. That’s right, I am actually going to tell you that you should not be playing all the time!! Okay, maybe you throw in a couple of dollars in a cash lineup or tiny GPP just to stay a little tuned in with what is going on, but it’s so important to take some breaks during the year so that you don’t find yourself getting burned out. With golf contests being a constant from now until the Hero in December, what I see happen is that players get a little complacent with their process and start to feel an obligation to play rather than a desire. When you hit that point, you lose your focus and your process begins to suffer as a result. When you sense this is happening, take a week or two away to let your mind recover until you are really excited to play again. This is actually really easy to do once the majors arrive as they take place each month so you always have something on the horizon to look forward to which will help you to get excited again. Remember, it’s a long season. Prepare for it the same way that the golfers on tour do it and build yourself a game plan to work your way through it so that you can put forth your best effort whenever you do decide to put your hard earned money at risk.
Quickly, we’ll look at the course this week before hitting a few recommendations. The Plantation Course at Kapalua is a Par 73 with four Par 5 holes and only three Par 3’s. It always offers plenty of scoring opportunities which forces players to keep up with the leaders rather than other events where holding ground is key. The course is full of hills and extreme elevation changes which makes for some beautifully scenic holes along the coast with fairways that are the widest that we will see all season. It plays at close to 7,500 yards, but the Par 5 holes are not that long, with the single outlier being the 663 yard 18th, but it’s downhill which tends to shorten it up and it actually plays as only the third toughest of the Par 5 holes. As it rather easy to hit fairways, we’ll see players with a driver in their hands all weekend and few will find trouble. The only defense for the course is when the winds pick up, and they are expected to be a factor this week so be sure to get a good wind check before lineup lock. With everyone hitting their second shots from the fairway, those players who are best with their wedge and mid range irons will be in the best shape to perform, which is why we see players like Jordan Spieth dominate. The greens are huge and use Bermuda grass so while players can really jack up their GIR numbers, that number alone will not be helpful to look at without also factoring in proximity.
The key stats that I looked at for the week are as follows:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 15%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Par 5 Scoring: 15%
Proximty over 200 yards: 7.5%
Driving Distance: 7.5%
Scrambling: 10%
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