The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – The Masters

The week we wait for all year is finally upon us and as usual, I have the feeling like I am studying for a massive final and no matter how long I study, it always seems like there is more information for me to burrow through in order to put together the ultimate player pool for both cash and GPP rosters this week. It is always a stressful week when the tour moves to Augusta as we want to make sure that we leave out no key pieces of information that could potentially give you the edge over your competitors. However, that said, I want you to remember one key thing going into this week: Do not let yourself overthink your strategy this week. It is easy to do, particularly around the majors when the extra noise from dozens of other writers, touts and weather experts is so loud each day in building up to the event. The temptation will be there to get crazy with leaving excessive amounts of salary cap space behind for the purposes of differentiation or in completely avoiding some of your favorite players due only to tee times or chasing some absurd Hot Take you saw on a thread on Twitter that gets picked up by one or two key people in the industry. When you find yourself on the verge of self sabotage in a situation like this, take a deep breath, close down the DraftKings page on your phone/computer, and stop tinkering until you clear your head. This is a dilemma that we deal with all too often and this week is no different.

Last season at this moment, I was packing my bags and trying to finish my column on time before catching my flight to Charlotte with my dad, a friend from work, and his father where we would then hop in a car and make the drive down to Augusta where we would spend the entire weekend taking in the 2016 Masters. If you are new to The Daily Spin or did not get a chance to read my column last year, here is my story from my experience at The Masters last year. The course is just as beautiful as you would ever anticipate. The attention to detail is like nothing you have ever seen on any other golf course and when you hear the stories about how they tend to the grass or even individual trees over the years, you begin to realize why the grounds are so revered.

Without dwelling too much on what I am missing out on this year, let’s get back to fantasy golf and everything that you are considering for the contests that you want to enter this week. I write similar things for all of the majors each year along these lines, but it is important to emphasize again, especially when everything you are hearing about surrounds that $1 million prize in the Millionaire Maker this week. What I want you to remember this week is that your best opportunity to be successful is NOT in chasing the big GPP payday. It is not as much fun to talk about cash games and grinding out small, positive wins this week, but do not get tempted into chasing events that are beyond what your bankroll can handle all in the spirit of excitement surrounding what is our biggest event of the year. The payout structure for large scale GPP events like the Millionaire Maker leave a lot to be desired as an enormous portion of the payouts are concentrated in the first few finishing positions. The difference between 1st place and 9th place is a cool, $995,000….or what will probably amount to just a handful of points.

Okay, now that I have mentioned that, I know that very few of you will be deterred from chasing fantasy sports immortality so let’s move on to discussing how you can best position yourself for a shot at the big prize. The first thing to take into consideration is the event itself. The Masters truly is unique in terms of the field that is invited and the rules around the cut. To get the full breakdown, you can reference The Field section on The Masters. What is important to note is that former winners receive a lifetime invitation to play in the tournament along with amateurs who have qualified from around the world. This is the reason you see names like Freddy Couples and Stewart Hagestad in the field this week.

The field is always one of the smallest each year for an event with a cut as this season, 95 player will tee it up this week. What this does is to effectively shrink the player pool that you should be looking at when building your lineups. This is important in that the Millionaire Maker, with over 122,000 entries is being held where the number of players you would reasonably consider in your lineups is probably capped at around 70 players. The reason this needs to be in your crosscheck is that in order to pull down that $1 million prize, you not only need to hit the lottery in terms of the team that you put together, but you also need to have it be differentiated from the other 122,000 lineups in the event which is no small task with such a reduced pool of players to select from. However, there are a few things that you can do that should help you in your quest to build the winning team.

One of the things that never fails to surprise me is the composition of some of the winning rosters in the Millionaire Maker contest. We have talked about it before, but last year really was unique as Troy Merritt managed to find his way onto the winning team, even with a 42nd place finish, one of the more unlikely players ever on a winning team. The rest of the roster was not exactly chalk-filled either as beyond Danny Willett and Jordan Spieth, there were a couple of other players that were not terribly highly owned, specifically, Lee Westwood, who came out of nowhere to tie for 2nd place and was owned by less than 3% of the field. You need to pick a few of these players to sprinkle into your lineups this week. You will not need to own a lot of shares of these golfers to be ahead of where the field is at, but you need a select few to differentiate your roster, whether it is an older player like Angel Cabrera or Bernhard Langer, or a less familiar name that made the field that does not strike you as an immediate favorite, these 2-5% owned players used in one or two lineup slots will be the key to whomever ends up winning this week.

One of the reasons that you can get away with taking on a little extra risk this week is that the cut rules are really peculiar and I am already anticipating a lot of Twitter questions come Friday afternoon when all of the new DFS golf enthusiasts are trying to figure it out. The top 50 players (including ties) all make the cut and that gets extended to anyone who is within ten strokes of the leader at the end of the 2nd round. This will usually lead to 55-60 players making the cut each year which, if we work back to our previous number of there being 95 players in the field and probably 15 that do not even merit consideration, the percentage of owners who will get six players through the cut will be a lot higher than what we normally see from week to week so save your celebrations until the final numbers are posted on Sunday as you will not be in what is normally very exclusive company with your fully intact roster. This allows you to open up a little more with your roster selections, so long as you are not foolish. Missing the cut is hugely punitive to your rosters this week so it is important to avoid risks that are just flat out dumb that people take just to diversify their teams.

Realize you do not have to pick the winner for every roster space available. Jeff and I ran some numbers on this during our webcast this week (go there and subscribe to our channel now…if we hit 1000 this week, I’ll offer up a special prize) and we figured out that on any given roster, it is impossible to have more than one winner on any given team!! That’s the kind of hard hitting information that we strive to bring you every week. But in all seriousness, each season, you will hear people say that you cannot take certain players for your rosters since that player ‘can’t win’ the tournament. You only need to find one winner this week. The rest of your team just needs to be capable of making a run at a Top-10 finish….or Troy Merritt. Everyone knows that Lee Westwood is never going to win a major. It is just accepted by everyone in the world and probably Lee himself. However, we know that Lee contends here far more often than other players. To neglect players like this because they do not win is a serious mistake as they tend to draw less interest specifically due to this silly notion that you must pick six player you think are capable of winning the tournament. If I employed this line of thought, I would never take Kevin Na on another fantasy team…..ever ever ever again.

With all that said, you do not need to go too crazy with how you construct your rosters this week. Within your rosters, it probably only requires you to be creative with one or spots on each of your teams. Think of the winning roster last year: Willett, Spieth, Hideki, Casey followed by Westwood and Merritt. Those first four names are very straightforward. The owner needed to only get a little creative with two choices in order to differentiate himself from others. The year prior to that, in the very first PGA Millionaire Maker, the winning lineup looked like this: Spieth, Rose, Mickelson, Henley, Hoffman and Na. You would not know it from this year, but the owner needed to only get a little creative in stacking Rose and Phil together at the top, neither of which had near the form that they do this year and both of whom went underowned in 2015. Your lineup will need to be nearly perfect this week to win, but do not go so far as to build your teams in a way so that are distinct, but less competitive due to that distinctness.

The real element that is causing me to lose sleep this week is the weather. Okay, I did just take a 3 hour nap on the floor next to my computer, but I really have been pondering what to do about the weather this week. Last year, we all saw the effects of what wind can do to players on this golf course as one big name after another imploded in the first two rounds and Billy Horschel had what had to have been one of the most aggravating things happen to him mid round when the winds picked up while he was preparing to putt near the water. The gusty winds made a mess of things last year and the first two days this year are looking a little rough as well. One of our subscribers, Randy Turner, is a meteorologist down in Texas and reached out to me through e-mail with an update late last night on how the weather is looking this weekend:

Wednesday – RAIN
Rain – Begins Wednesday Morning – .10 of an inch
Thunderstorms, some severe, in the afternoon with between a half and one inch of rain, possibly more in heavier storms. Hail and highs winds possible. Isolated tornadoes possible.
The last of the rain showers should pivot through Augusta around midnight or a little after Thursday morning with rain east of Augusta by first tee Thursday.

Thursday – COLD AND WINDY
Thursday morning – 7 am – West wind 10-15, gusts to 20, temp 50.
Thursday morning – 10 am – West wind at 20, gusts to 25, temp 52
Thursday afternoon – 1 pm – West wind 25 mph, gusts up to 35, temp 59
Thursday afternoon – 4 pm – Northwest wind 25, gusts to 30, temp 62-65
Thursday 7 pm – Northwest wind 10 to 15, temp 62

Friday – COOL AND BREEZY
7 am – NW wind at 10, 45 degrees
10 am – NW wind at 15, gust 20, 53 degrees
1 pm – NW at 20, gust 25, 57 -60 degrees
4 pm – NW at 20, 60-63 degrees
7 pm – NW at 15, 52 degrees

Saturday – VERY NICE, COOL, LIGHTER WIND
7 am – NW at 5, 40 degrees
10 am – NW at 10, 53 degrees
1 pm – NW at 10, gust 15, 62 degrees
4 pm – NW at 5, 65 degrees

Sunday – LIGHTEST WIND OF THE WEEKEND
7 am- N at 5, 47 degrees
10 am – SE at 5-10, 63 degrees
1 pm – SE at 5-10, 68-70 degrees
4 pm – SE at 5-10, 70-73 degrees

As you can see, starting late morning on Thursday and then again on Friday, we are in line for some nasty, gusty winds. Some weeks, this can play to our advantage if we can chart a clear path around it. However, while it will be a little less gusty on Friday afternoon than Thursday afternoon, the tee times do not really give us a clear path around the winds for most of the groups that have the top players. For most PGA events, there is an AM/PM split with half the field going out in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. In the second round, the schedule flips. At The Masters, the players who start the earliest the first day, do not start at the end the next day and likewise, the players that start at the end of the first day are not first up the second day. I think much of this has to do with television ratings as ESPN does not want to see DJ or Spieth hit the course at 8 AM when the audience is not so big. Usually, I would just point you to the tee times, but it is important enough to reference right here:

8 a.m. Thursday/11:07 a.m. Friday: Daniel Summerhays, Russell Henley
8:11 a.m. Thursday/11:18 a.m. Friday: Trevor Immelman, Brendan Steele, Jhonattan Vegas
8:22 a.m. Thursday/11:29 a.m. Friday: Mike Weir, Billy Hurley III, Scott Piercy
8:33 a.m. Thursday/11:40 a.m. Friday: Larry Mize, Brian Stuard, Stewart Hagestad (a)
8:44 a.m. Thursday/11:51 a.m. Friday: Soren Kjeldsen, Kevin Chappell, Jim Furyk
8:55 a.m. Thursday/12:13 p.m. Friday: Sandy Lyle, Sean O’Hair, Scott Gregory (a)
9:06 a.m. Thursday/12:24 p.m. Friday: Zach Johnson, Louis Oosthuizen, Adam Hadwin
9:17 a.m. Thursday/12:35 p.m. Friday: Tommy Fleetwood, Gary Woodland, J.B. Holmes
9:28 a.m. Thursday/12:46 p.m. Friday: Adam Scott, Kevin Kisner, Andy Sullivan
9:39 a.m. Thursday/12:57 p.m. Friday: Francesco Molinari, Daniel Berger, Thomas Pieters
10:01 a.m. Thursday/1:08 p.m. Friday: Fred Couples, Paul Casey, Kevin Na
10:12 a.m. Thursday/1:19 p.m. Friday: Russell Knox, Rickie Fowler, Hideki Matsuyama
10:23 a.m. Thursday/1:30 p.m. Friday: Branden Grace, Brooks Koepka, Jeunghun Wang
10:34 a.m. Thursday/1:41 p.m. Friday: Jordan Spieth, Martin Kaymer, Matthew Fitzpatrick
10:45 a.m. Thursday/1:52 p.m. Friday: Phil MIckelson, Rafael Cabrera-Bello, Si Woo Kim
10:56 a.m. Thursday/2:03 p.m. Friday: Brandt Snedeker, Justin Rose, Jason Day
11:07 a.m. Thursday/8 a.m. Friday: Rod Pampling, William McGirt
11:18 a.m. Thursday/8:11 a.m. Friday: Mark O’Meara, Hudson Swafford, Roberto Castro
11:29 a.m. Thursday/8:22 a.m. Friday: Ian Woosnam, James Hahn, Brad Dalke (a)
11:40 a.m. Thursday/8:33 a.m. Friday: Ross Fisher, Pat Perez, Byeong-Hun An
11:51 a.m. Thursday/8:44 a.m. Friday: Jose Maria Olazabal, Ryan Moore, Webb Simpson
12:13 p.m. Thursday/8:55 a.m. Friday: Ernie Els, Jason Dufner, Bernd Wiesberger
12:24 p.m. Thursday/9:06 a.m. Friday: Danny Willett, Matt Kuchar, Curtis Luck (a)
12:35 p.m. Thursday/9:17 a.m. Friday: Vijay Singh, Emiliano Grillo, Toto Gana (a)
12:46 p.m. Thursday/9:28 a.m. Friday: Angel Cabrera, Henrik Stenson, Tyrrell Hatton
12:57 p.m. Thursday/9:39 a.m. Friday: Charl Schwartzel, Steve Stricker, Mackenzie Hughes
1:08 p.m. Thursday/10:01 a.m. Friday: Charley Hoffman, Chris Wood, Yuta Ikeda
1:19 p.m. Thursday/10:12 a.m. Friday: Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, Shane Lowry
1:30 p.m. Thursday/10:23 a.m. Friday: Bernhard Langer, Alex Noren, Patrick Reed
1:41 p.m. Thursday/10:34 a.m. Friday: Rory McIlroy, Hideto Tanihara, Jon Rahm
1:52 p.m. Thursday/10:45 a.m. Friday: Marc Leishman, Bill Haas, Justin Thomas
2:03 p.m. Thursday/10:56 a.m. Friday: Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson, Jimmy Walker

Nearly all of the big names are going to have to contend with tough conditions at some point in the first two days before things settle down over the weekend. I really do not see a way around it. Thursday morning start times may have an initial early edge, but how much of an edge is tough to determine. My player pool is largely unchanged from when I finalized it last night, however, I will explain below exactly how to build your teams in order to factor in the winds, but also in a way so that if they end up factoring in equally to all players, you will not have overdone your roster builds in one direction or the other.

The course itself is laid out over 7,400 yards and plays as a Par 72. The elevation changes cannot be overemphasized at Augusta National. What you see on television simply does not do it justice. In walking with a couple of groups during the first round, I had to eat about five sandwiches and drink two beers just to make sure that the health benefits I was receiving from walking did not pose a threat to my physique. Old people marveled throughout the day at the number of steps they had taken on their Fitbits. It is a really nice workout to walk the course which only makes the portliness of certain players that much more amazing to me.

Players will need to do most of their scoring on the Par 5 holes which are the easiest on the course and present a lot of birdie opportunities. The fairways are wide and the rough is not long. This helps to explain why bombers have tended to do really well each year as they do not tend to be penalized as much for the occasional wild tee shot. Most players will not have trouble hitting fairways, but there is trouble for those who get wild as there are plenty of trees and vegetation that are tough to work around throughout the course.  The approach shot is where things get tricky. The bentgrass greens are heavily protected by bunkers and/or water, and the undulation on them makes shot placement extremely important. As I sat on the 7th hole for much of the tournament last year (from there you can see the approach shot on the 2nd hole, tee shot on the 3rd hole, approach shot and putting on the 7th and tee shot on the 8th), I could finally understand just how difficult these greens play. Depending on the pin placement, some of these holes play out as if created by a demented circus clown designing a mini golf course where hitting it near the pin would often lead to having the ball roll to the opposite side of the green or off the edge of the greens which are shaved down forcing players to choose their shots carefully. Seasoned players, like Phil Mickelson, who know every contour of every green have a distinct advantage over those seeing the course for the first time. When combined with the winds, these fast greens can be an absolute nightmare for players. This putt from Justin Thomas is the type of thing that can put a player on tilt in a hurry and something that first time players are particularly susceptible to this week in these conditions. I was both amused and horrified in watching this type of thing happen again and again over the weekend.

Players are going to need to play a balanced game this week to be successful. The key stats that we have to work with this week are taken over a many years, but I do suggest looking at a few of them a little closer than the initial weightings suggest. Being that high winds are a factor this week, less players are going to be hitting the green than normal. Ball strikers will still have the advantage, but scrambling and strokes gained around the green have to have a little more emphasis than usual this year. These greens are difficult enough to work with under normal conditions, but getting up and down this week in an event where the winning score could be in the same range as last year (-5) is going to be the key to staying competitive in the first two rounds.

The key stats as presented by our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics are as follows:

Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 25%
Scrambling: 15%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 15%
Par 5 Scoring: 10%
Driving Distance: 5%

As always, keep us informed of your progress in the Millionaire Maker this week. We will be giving away some FGI gear to the person who finishes the highest in the Millionaire Maker standings this week who ALSO uses the FGI logo for their DK avatar. That makes it very easy for us to track who the winner is and also lets us know that they are an actual subscriber. If you find yourself struggling to complete your lineups, I probably will not be asleep for next few days so feel free to shoot me an e-mail or check out my Periscope tonight. If we get 100 retweets or 1000 people in the room all at one time, I will randomly award a few free months of memberships to people who retweet the link for the show. If you missed my appearance with Dr Roto this morning on Sirius/XM Fantasy Sports (Ch. 87), you can listen on demand for some additional pointers and as always, Jeff will be on with Tommy G and Jeff Mans this afternoon some time between 1-3pm.

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