The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – The Memorial Tournament
We are finally getting to the most exciting part of the season as the next three months each contain a major tournament, the European Tour continues with four more Rolex Series events during the summer months and we’ll get a couple of bigger events like this week with The Memorial Tournament and also a little further down the road another WGC tournament so there is a lot to look forward to and some great DFS contests coming up. Although this week is a little slower in terms of filling up the contests offered on DraftKings due to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, do your best to reserve your entries early most weeks as the contests, for the most part, have been filling up very quickly and sometimes even 12-15 hours early. With Tiger Woods in action this summer, I am anticipating that this trend will continue, particularly if he is playing well and in contention in some of these tournaments.
Last week at the Fort Worth Invitational, we ended up with mixed results for the week. For me, the bright side was with my cash lineup of: Scott, Cantlay, Grillo, Harman, Stricker and Hadwin. I held my breath all the way down to the last hole on Friday afternoon as Ollie Schniederjans sat 98 yards out on the final hole from the middle of the fairway for his second shot on the short Par 4. A birdie would have moved the cut line up to +1 and knocked out Adam Scott and also Chesson Hadley, who I owned a lot of shares of in GPP events, but fortunately, Ollie only made par and my cash team escaped through the weekend with too much trouble helping to offset a losing week on the GPP side.
Three key players missed the cut for us last week that ultimately led to my demise for tournament play. Patrick Cantlay looked really out of sorts and was not able to hit as many fairways as normal, which then led to him missing green a high percentage of the time. It marked just the second missed cut that he has had since beginning his comeback at the start of 2017, but it is his second miss in his last four starts so it is something worth paying close attention to moving ahead. It should be interesting to watch his price fluctuate over the next few months as we are already seeing a rather large correction this week as he has dropped from $9000 last week to $7400 this week.
Webb Simpson hurt me as well last week, just two weeks after a dominant performance at The Players Championship. The common move is to typically avoid a player right after he wins an event, which most of us did with Aaron Wise. I liked the chance to get Webb after a week off, with his game in good shape and at a course where he’s typically been a nice fit. Unfortunately, Webb seemed to find every strategically placed bunker on the course in the first two rounds and never really got a lot of momentum going in missing the cut by one stroke. I am not too concerned with his miss here as I think that on the whole, his game is in as good of a place as we’ve seen it since the PGA did away with the anchor putter and I am hoping that this missed cut gives us a nice ‘buy low’ opportunity in the future.
Finally, the Nick Watney phenomenon of 2018 came to a crashing finish last week. Watney, who had made eleven straight cuts to start the season, looked completely out of sorts at Colonial. He was below 40% for accuracy, below 50% for hitting GIR and just over 30% in scrambling. You can struggle in any one of these areas and still be okay for the week, but if you are bad across the board, you have no chance. Whenever I see a result that is this poor (+15 after two rounds), it forces me to take a step back. I can understand missing the cut by a stroke or two, but when things go this wrong, you almost have to wonder if there was something more to it. We are not privy to a lot of information on players like Watney when it comes to following the tour, so it really is tough to know if there was more to it or if he was just coasting after an abysmal start. Where I would have no issue going right back to Webb or Cantlay, with Watney, I will probably take a week off completely just to make sure this does not turn into an ugly trend.
When I sat down to write my column tonight, I was not sure exactly what strategy topic I was going to write about for the week. Each week, I try to think of new or important topics to discuss to try to find ways to give you a little edge with your play each week. Fortunately/unfortunately, it looks like Twitter has provided us with just the right topic for discussion tonight. I have written ad nauseam over the years about lineup construction and specifically the way in which we would recommend you construct your teams each week. It is topic that I think is not discussed nearly enough in the DFS world. If you look over the way that different owners approach GPP events, you will see a huge spectrum of how they deploy their salary cap for the week. It is a rarity for people to discuss the number of teams that they are going to build and the number of players that they consider to be optimal for a particular number of lineups. While I do not consider there to be only one ‘right’ way to build your lineups, I do think it is important to understand what you are doing each week and how it fits into your process. The key is to develop your process over time so that it is replicable and with small changes here and there, profitable over time.
The first thing that we always try to preach is to build your lineups around a core group of players. The goal every week should be to have several of your core players perform really well and then to have many combinations of secondary and tertiary players around them in the hopes that one of those groupings hits precisely and you take down a big prize. The benefit of working off of a solid core is that when it hits, it should give you many different lineups that have a chance to win as opposed to when you have very little exposure to many or all of the players on a roster where only the perfect set of circumstances can guide you to victory.
The tricky part here is in determining two key criteria: the total numbers of players to use based upon the number of lineups in play and how heavily you want to weight those players that you have the most exposure to each week. There are plenty of schools of thought here that the top players utilize and I have always liked to study them to see what is paying off for the best DFS players in the world. Again, there is not really a right or wrong answer on this so I want to break down what options you have available and some of the pros and cons of each.
If you track a player like DaGodfather, who finds his way up to the top of a lot of leaderboards, you will see that he is very aggressive with his core. He is not afraid to go all-in on one or two players in a given week. He also tends to keep his exposure overall pretty tight in using somewhere around 20 players for maxing out the Pressure Putt ($444, usually 25-30 max lineups) and somewhere around 30 or so players when he puts 150 lineups into the Dogleg each week. On the plus side, when one or both of those 100% weighted players hits hard, he is in position to win everything in a given week. When those weeks happen, you might see him have 10 lineups or more in the Top-100 for the Dogleg and maybe more than half of his teams in the Pressure Putt are up near the top. Of course, if one of those two players should miss the cut, it can wipe you out for the week. In this instance, we have a player who does not mind the big swings and can handle the volatility during the ups and downs of the PGA season. It is an aggressive style of play and one that I admire, but it is not for everyone. You have to be very sharp to hit those 100% plays and also able to stomach some big losses in the weeks things do not go your way. Most players who attempt this sort of style tend to give up after a few weeks if they do not hit right away or lose excessively so it takes a good deal of heart, knowledge and persistence to make it pay off over time.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can stretch your core out a little flatter throughout your player pool. I see that out of stlcardinals84 a lot and he’s had a good deal of success with it in PGA the last several years. He also tends to stick to a fairly tight player pool of around 25 golfers. One of the things that I have always admired about his approach and that I have used in my strategy as well is that he never (from what I’ve seen) uses any golfer only one time in his player pool. While his highest owned player may only top out at 30-35% in most contests, the ownership dispersion is a slower decline that tends to bottom out at around 10%. This is typical for him in both the Dogleg and well as the Pressure Putt.
I have never been a big fan of only using a player one time in your player pool for the week. Now obviously, if you are using a lineup builder to construct 20 teams and you have a player set at 10%, there’s a good chance he may only come in at 5% and be on one team. There is not a lot to remedy that other than to try to be diligent in having it happen as little as possible. The reason for this is that it is really tough to get a 6/6 team each week. If you take a flyer on a golfer that is not too heavily owned and he does excellent, but is only on one team, you have to hope against the odds that the rest of that single team also hit in order for the risk to pay off. I want to give myself at least 2-3 shots on any player if I am building 20 teams and around 10 if I am building 150 teams for the week.
This strategy paid of big last weekend for stlcards as he had Rose, Na and Grillo at around 30% exposure in the Dogleg and similarly in the Pressure Putt which gave him seven lineups in the Top-100 for the Dogleg and nine in the Top-80 for the Pressure Putt. Now, not every player he owned on the high side had amazing success, but most made the cut and a few outperformed in a big way and by Sunday, he had many paths to the winner’s circle depending on who showed up and played well in the final round. This is what you want going into a GPP each week. Obviously, anytime you can get a win you should take it and run, but this is the sort of process that is both replicable and profitable if you hone your skills over time.
The tough part for the smaller bankroll players is that typically, the big prize pool for the smaller buy-in limits you to 20 lineups for $4 each and usually has you up against over 100,000 other players rather than the 13-15k in the Dogleg or 800-1000 in the Pressure Putt. In those contests, if your bankroll is large enough, you can own upwards of 1-3% of the entire number of entries as opposed to just a tiny fraction above zero for the $4 GPP. To me, this is where it becomes really important to tighten things up. I think a recent FGI subscriber, Luke Sigal, illustrated how to do this really well recently when he took down this event at the Wells Fargo just a few short weeks ago.
If we look back at the breakdown of Luke’s player pool, he owned 20 total players with exposures of 40% or higher for his top five players and 30/35% for the next six. At the bottom, he had one player owed at 15% and three at 10%. One of those 10% players was Nick Watney which meant that he was only on two lineups for the week. One of those lineups had Alex Noren who missed the cut that week leaving that team out of contention. Fortunately, for Luke, he made sure to get Watney onto a second lineup which proved to be the winner for the week. He did a beautiful job of constructing his lineups with a tight core which left him plenty of teams in the mix over the weekend and he had enough combinations of secondary and tertiary players mixed in that when the right one clicked, he took the contest down. To me, it was a textbook way to play this sort of contest, although even Luke will tell you, it takes time, patience, bankroll management and adhering to the process over the long haul to get to the big payoff in these large field, 20 max entry contests.
Finally, we get to the most recent controversy of the week, which involved Jeff taking a deeper look at the winning lineup for the Dogleg this past week. With my GPP teams crumbling early in the week, I did not follow along the top of the contest all that closely so I really did not know much about the result until we discussed it for the week on Monday. The winning player has a solid track record so I absolutely do not begrudge him in the least for his win as taking down a big prize in DFS golf is no small feat so whenever someone is able to pull it off after much effort, it’s certainly something to be proud of. Of course, Jeff wanted to provide a little analysis of the lineup overall so he dove in as he usually does in trying to see what the process looked like for the week and if there was something there that he could learn from to improve his own process. At FGI, as many longtime subscribers are aware, we are always interested in taking a deeper look at winning lineups (we post the winning GPP lineups and results each week here on the site) and for nearly a year, we devoted a full column each week to how the top players in the game were constructing their rosters so this is nothing new for us by any stretch.
What caught Jeff’s eye this week about the winning lineup was just how fortunate this particular player had been to hit the winner as it was a really unusual set of circumstances that came together to get his team to the winner’s circle. Of the 30 lineups that he owned, he owned Justin Rose on two, Kevin Na on two, Bill Haas on two, Stewart Cink on two and Emiliano Grillo on three. The other player on his winning roster was Brooks Koepka who he owned at 20% (6 teams) and was tied as his 10th highest owned player for the week. That this team even came together is a bit of a surprise as you would usually expect to see players only owned a couple of times on 30 teams mixed in with those core players at the top rather than all together on their own. Perhaps it was constructed by hand with the specific purpose of being contrarian to all of his other teams, although that’s just a guess. In all, he used 47 golfers in his player pool, which is probably on the high side for my taste for 30 lineups as 21 of the players were owed just once or twice overall, but it’s not terribly unusual either as there are owners who prefer a larger player pool. It just makes it more likely that you are going to have a much wider range of results from your teams each week from top to bottom in a given contest and more likely that you will be relying on one team that is playing really well in order to be successful. This can offset some of the volatility that goes with playing a tighter core as there are times, obviously last week, where that one lineup takes off and performs fantastically.
What Jeff was looking for in analyzing the lineup was whether or not there was something teachable about it that could be passed on. One of the things we always try to focus on here is not just walking you through the course and players that we like each week, but also how to think about the game so that you can start to improve your own process over time by observing what is going on each week in the various featured contests. There are so many variables to PGA DFS that it makes it one of the more challenging and interesting sports on the market. Every time you start to get a little bit comfortable, you have a week or two where you get knocked on your ass and have to reevaluate what you are doing. In this particular instance, Lady Luck seems to have played a little larger roll than usual, which takes away absolutely nothing from the player or the win. Given the exposures that he had for the week it’s fair to say these were not the players he had the most confidence in by far overall. Based upon the construction of the player pool, could we impart anything in particular to you, the subscriber, about how the winning lineup came into being? Probably not, but that’s okay.
Having a little luck is a part of the game and mentioning it does not make it disparaging. I’m sure when this particular player had success in previous weeks that the path to victory was much more observable based upon his core players and overall strategy for the event. If I examine the player pool for stlcardinals84 and see how he built his teams, is there something I can take to pass on to you? I think there is and I have noted it for you. There are many different ways to win at this game and as I have said many times, there’s no perfect solution. All we can do is observe what our opponents are doing each week to see if there are ways of approaching the game that can improve our process and thus, our chances for success. As I closed the segment of Jeff’s analysis on the winning player, he won $100k for the week and we did not so we tip our hats to him respectfully and move on.
This column is starting to remind me of the old days when I would hammer away 5000-7000 words each week, but I do not want to do there here. My dad is getting old so I do not want to wear him out. Plus, he usually finds two to three errors along the way so I want to be sure to try to keep things tight the rest of the way. Let us now move on to The Memorial, one of the better events of the year. You could potentially call it the 6th major, but you would immediately annoy anyone else sitting near you so try to avoid the temptation. It’s a loaded field as most of the players here this week will use the tournament as a tuneup before they head out to Shinnecock in two weeks for the US Open.
There are a few key things to keep in mind for the week with this event. First, it is an invitational which means that only 120 players are in the field, much like last week. However, the normal cut rules apply to the event so the Top-70 players and ties will make it to the weekend. What this means is that rather than around 50% of players making the cut, the number will climb to somewhere closer to 65% for the week. Do not let that allow you to get too complacent though, as even these invitationals have been know to knock a lot of chalky player off before the weekend so nothing is ever assured. Last season, both DJ and Rahm blew the cut and the year prior to that, Hideki exploded as one of the higher owned players. It is a challenging course so everyone will need to be at their best to stay in contention. If you look over the course history for even the elite players, you will notice that many have a few missed cuts here over the years to go along with some strong finishes.
Also of note this week is that with such a strong field teeing it up for the week, there is a fair amount of price compression among the players. I have mentioned the Kuchar Spectrum in many of my columns and it is apparent again this week. For a major, where pricing is naturally soft, he can drop as low as $7,600, but when the field is on the weaker side, it is not unusual to see him approach $11k. While certain players always tend to hover around the top or bottom of the salary tiers, Kuch is always one to keep an eye on. In having dinner with our developer, Aaron, and columnist, Erik on Saturday night, we actually engaged in a fairly spirited debate about Kuch and where we like to own him. Aaron tends to see ownership trends well and has a contrarian eye so he does not mind owning Kuch at a higher price if it keeps his ownership numbers in check. Erik and myself prefer to own Kuch on the low end as he’s not usually a contender, but does tend to produce a lot of Top-25 finishes, which means he rarely disappoints at a lower price. Aaron ended up running some numbers on this which I will share below, but what this usually tells me is that when we get compression in pricing like this that cash games are a little more appealing than normal as higher quality players are available at a lower price which should theoretically give us a better shot than normal at putting together a 6/6 roster.
Muirfield Golf Club, located in Dublin, Ohio, is a Jack Nicklaus design and plays as a Par 72 and is around 7,400 yards in length. Players will need to do their scoring on the four Par 5 holes this week which are all at a manageable distances. However, there are seven Par 4’s this week that are above 445 yards which will again place a premium on approach play from mid range and the four Par 3 holes all average over par and as Adam Daly noted in The First Tee, two were among the 50 toughest holes of the year in 2017. The fairways are wider than normal, but do narrow out the further you go, making it somewhat more optimal to club down on some holes to work for position rather than distance off the tee, although the rough tends to be fairly short in the first cut. This should play out a little bit like Augusta where players do not have a lot of trouble hitting the fairways, but face more challenging shots on approach where the bentgrass greens are small, have a great deal of undulation and play very fast. While some may see that as a reason to target elite putters, the greens tend to neutralize even some of the better putters on tour so like Augusta, it’s a secondary concern for me this week. A quick look at the last four winners (Dufner, McGirt, Lingmerth, Hideki) illustrates that you do not necessarily have to be a big hitter to win here and that being accurate off the tee and hitting greens can be a good formula for success even on a course that is on the longer side. For a more comprehensive look at the course, check out Adam’s column here as it is the first and best place to stop each week to get a thorough overview of every course.
Key Stats:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Strokes Gained Putting: 15%
Strokes Gained Off the Tee: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
Prox 150-175 yards: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%
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