The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – The Players Championship
I have returned safely from my travels to Nashville and I had a really good time even if it left me feeling exhausted and depleted by the time I was flying home on Sunday. My old buddy, Jerry, from my days back in the Air Force invited me out for a few days to show me the town as he’s living out there temporarily for a few months. I knew that the city had become a destination spot of sorts, but I had no idea just how much they had scaled things up over the last few years. From the moment I arrived to check into my hotel where a crazy group of Canadian women hockey players were handing out Bud Light tall boys to everyone in line (something out of an Adam Daly dream), the energy was pretty electric. I owe a special thanks to everyone that took the time last week to respond to my inquiry on Twitter about places to eat, bars to check out and sites to take in.
If you ever make it to Nashville, I highly recommend checking out Kayne Prime for fine dining. By good fortune, a manager of the restaurant, Matt Ramos, is also a part of Team FGI and follows along on Twitters and invited us to check it out. The cut of wagyu I ate was tremendous, but it is really the appetizers there that make it a fun experience as we tried out the house prepared bacon that is topped with what must have been a cotton candy concoction. It was incredible. We followed that with the lobster popcorn which is made up of pieces of lobster on small spoons in a sauce with, you guessed it, popcorn over the top….another hit. Matt came by and chatted with us for a few minutes and was even so kind as to knock a couple of the appetizers off of our bill! Amazingly generous gesture and a great dinner.
On Friday afternoon, after checking out the Johnny Cash museum and trying to take in all that is Broadway downtown, I was fortunate enough to meet up with another longtime FGI subscriber, Luke Sigle. Luke has been with us for years and is just a couple of years younger than Jeff and I so he’s gone through much of the gambling boom that we have which took us from poker, to sports to DFS over the years. We went to a little speakeasy called The Patterson House across the street from my hotel. Although nondescript on the outside, the bar was high class with a large selection of premium whiskeys and bartenders who are more mixologists than drink makers. We talked about everything from the heyday of online poker to strategy for building teams and even shared some life stories from over the years which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ll never forget Luke asking me pointblank that afternoon how we did not get more frustrated with DFS golf as it can be one of the more volatile games out there. What I told him was similar to what I have mentioned here in these columns a few times over the years.
As a GPP player, you are not going to have a lot of weeks go your way throughout the season. Over 40 weeks, you may get to the weekend five times where you are in extremely good shape. If you are lucky, two of those will put you into contention for some big prizes and hopefully, one of those weeks, things come together for you and you lock in a big win. I hear from so many people who have three or four bad weeks in GPPs and are ready to throw in the towel. If you feel that way, you probably should shift over to cash games and work more towards grinding out a profit little by little each year. In order to be a winning player in GPP contest, you have to be willing to lose all of your chips in any given week, particularly in those weeks where you can only enter 20 lineups and are taking on 100,000 entries. Your goal should always be to build around a tight core so that win or lose, your teams finish in a very tight, precise pattern grouped together. When you hit, you want to win everything rather than having to rely on one magic bullet to weave its way to the win.
Of course, the great ending to the story is that as I am about to board my plane on Sunday, I am watching the end of the tournament on my phone and I see Nick Watney knock home a 60 foot putt to close out his weekend and finish in a tie for 2nd place and having sent a few DMs back and forth with Luke earlier in the day, I remembered that his key lineup needed a strong finish from Watney in order to win the big $4 GPP. Sure enough, moments later I get the message from Luke letting me know that he won the GPP and took home a $20k prize. Typically, I bring nothing but black magic when it comes to sweating teams (ask Jeff), but somehow, the good guys prevailed this time and all the patience and work that Luke has put in was rewarded. It was a great way to end my weekend. I’m always overwhelmed by how kind you all are to me whenever I am out on the road. Everywhere I have traveled in recent years I have always put out the notice that I’d love to grab a drink with any of you and it has always been a great time and allowed me to meet a lot of really wonderful people. It is what makes these late Tuesday nights so rewarding the rest of the year and I owe you all a big, thank you!
This week we head back down to Florida for the last time this season to one of the most exciting and unpredictable events of the year, The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. This will be the final time that the event is played in May so enjoy the good weather this year as next year, in reorganizing the schedule, the tournament will be moved to March with the PGA Championship to be held around this time in May moving forward. It is not a terrible move in that it gets the season off to a faster start and should help to wind things up a little earlier so that the FedEx Cup Playoffs are not overlapping the beginning of the NFL season, but from a fan perspective, there are going to be some issues as the winds and storms of early spring (which is why the event was moved in the first place) will make an already tough course that much more difficult and if you have taken a good look at course history, you will see that even the most elite players in the field have had their hands full here over the years. The renovations to the course after the 2016 event made things much more challenging last season and the additional weather concerns moving forward will continue to make this one of the trickier events to handicap from year to year.
In taking a look at the course, it’s a Pete Dye design so the obvious comparison course is Harbour Town from just a few weeks ago. You’ll notice that there are not a lot of big hitters that go to Hilton Head each year as the style of course is not all that accommodative to their game. Dye likes to force players to get away from their driver and play more for position off the tee to set up the approach shot. His courses do not tend to allow players to miss big and then rally back with iron play, even for those players who tend to be elite in that category. This is why we have seen players like Phil Mickelson, Jordan Spieth and Bubba Watson struggle over the years, while those players who are comfortable either clubbing down or who can consistently hit fairways with their driver like Sergio, Stenson, Molinari and Hideki have found success here year after year. Water is also a big factor this week and will come into play on many holes, including the most famous, Par 3, 17th hole, Island Green (okay, it’s a peninsula, but island sounds cooler). A lot of good scorecards can turn ugly in just one or two wayward holes so we want to really focus on those players who tend to minimize mistakes. I will be heavily favoring players this week who are ballstrikers, but specifically those who gaining the most strokes through accuracy and hitting GIR. There is no perfect path to success here this week, but that’s where I want to start.
This is a great week to really open things up on the model and move some numbers around. Obviously, Strokes Gained Tee to Green is a great stat, but it combines so many different pieces without really emphasizing some that should stand out. I tried to take it apart this week to see how things would shake out if I broke it down a little more than usual. I manipulated it to add a little more emphasis on SGAPP, DA, GIR and also specifically a couple of approach range distances for proximity of 150-175 and 175-200 yards, areas where most players are going to need to excel this week. When you really take the time to parse things out, you start to get a better picture for who should play well. In echoing the podcast, I would also say to take your weight down for course history this week to the 5-10% range. No course on tour has fewer ‘course horses’ than TPC Sawgrass. Jordan Spieth, Phil Mickelson, Matt Kuchar and even Rickie Fowler have missed cuts or finished way back of the leaders. If the most elite players are not able to get a consistent feel for the course, then you know it is always going to be a battle.
Even the conditions on the course can change in the middle of the tournament. I remember two years ago, in the first two rounds, players were absolutely tearing up the course and we were all joking on Twitter that the John Deere Classic had broken out (incidentally, the JDC Twitter handle will fire back at times if you lob ‘easy course’ jokes around that include its handle). However, once Saturday arrived, it was a totally new tournament as those in charge of the course, in an effort not to be embarrassed, shaved down the greens to the dirt and didn’t water them, creating some of the fastest surfaces imaginable. It was like flipping a switch and the scoring immediately stopped. Out of the rubble, Ken Duke managed to shoot what was maybe the round of the year (along w the final round of Sneds at Torrey in Jan) posting a 65 when the average score ended up being just under 76 for the round. What this goes to show you is that those who run this event are not afraid to make some changes if they feel the course is not playing the way they would like it. I have extreme doubts that they would pull a stunt like this on a Friday as that would create a huge advantage for one wave over the other, but you should be aware that it could happen, especially those of you who like to dabble in the single day contests.
The course is a real test of golf IQ each year. It contains a mix of shorter Par 4 holes with three that are below 400 yards and five that over 450 yards. We’ve already discussed the Par 3, 17th hole, but the Par 3, 237 yard 8th hole is also very challenging. Players will need to hold steady along the Par 3’s, take advantage of the risk/reward Par 4, 12th hole and then do their damage on the Par 5’s which are not nearly as challenging as the other holes and typically reachable in two shots. It’s no wonder how a player like Francesco Molinari has had success here in recent years as his accuracy and incredible long iron play set him up much better than those spraying the ball all over and finding the water in the worst spots.
Key Stats:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Strokes Gained Putting: 15%
Proximity: 10%
Scrambling Prox: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 10%
Driving Accuracy: 10%
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