The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – The Shriners Hospital for Children Open
Another Halloween in the books for the little ones. As always, it is one of the more enjoyable nights of the year in getting to watch my little ones get all dressed up and then go out around our neighborhood and my neighborhood from my childhood where Jeff and I went door to door as kids. Many of the families are still living in the area and it is always fun to bring the kids by to see them and to get a moment to say hello and catch up. As always, Jeff brought it in a big way in full ninja attire this year while sipping on a cocktail in a tradition that we picked up from The League a few years back. As always, we closed the night back at Jeff’s childhood home where sloppy joe’s and cupcakes are always waiting for us whether it’s for Halloween or our annual playoff fantasy football draft each January. It’s one of the nights each year that I most look forward to and now I am ready to do a little writing as I watch Halloween and Halloween II in the background a couple of times on the DVR. Halloween II is the unquestionably the best of the Halloween movies and although Jeff insists the films after Halloween III helped to bring the franchise back on track, I am not interested in breaking tradition tonight. I’ve watched the Rob Zombie remakes a couple of times over the years, but that man is so dark and twisted that even my stomach turns when I watch his work.
The only part of my night that has not been so enjoyable is that I have come down with a cold that I managed to get from being around the little ones over the last few days. While I fully intend to put forward my best foot tonight in terms of my column, it may get cut a little bit shorter than normal so I can get some rest. The tournament this week marks the fifth week of seven for the fall golf swing and a return to the U.S. The fall portion of the season always goes by quickly, but we did receive some very exciting news this week that once again, Tiger Woods is preparing for a return to the tour. He announced on Monday that he will be back at the end of November for the Hero World Challenge, an event he hosts each year down in the Bahamas. If you are new to the golf schedule this year, the HWC is a small event, held the first weekend in December each year with a field of 18 of the best players in world. Typically, it’s a fun event on a course that allows for a lot of scoring. The field will include:
Tiger Woods
Dustin Johnson
Brooks Koepka
Jordan Spieth
Justin Thomas
Hideki Matsuyama
Rickie Fowler
Jason Day
Justin Rose
Matt Kuchar
Alex Noren
Marc Leishman
Tommy Fleetwood
Francesco Molinari
Patrick Reed
Charley Hoffman
Kevin Kisner
Daniel Berger
Although it’s a small field, we’ve always had good success here from a DFS perspective and it will be very interesting to see how Tiger handles himself this year. Last year, he sparked some excitement by posting the most birdies for the field, but fell back over the weekend and finished just a couple spots off the bottom of the standings. After that, I watched him miss the cut at Torrey Pines and then he went overseas to play in Dubai where he withdrew after just one round before eventually deciding to have surgery on his back in April. He’s had a number of comeback attempts over the last couple of years, but the wear and tear on his body has always been too much and eventually worn him down. While I am ambivalent on Tiger in general as far as being a fan, I am hoping that this time his body holds up and he can return and be competitive again. The game of golf is just more exciting when Tiger is around and while we are seeing an incredible surge in talent on the tour where it appears that the US is moving into an era of having one of the best crops of young players that we’ve ever seen, something has been missing the last couple of seasons without golf’s greatest player of my lifetime on the sidelines. It would be a lot of fun to see Tiger have a sort of late career renaissance along the lines of what Jack Nicklaus was able to do in latter portion of his career. While the growth of DFS golf has been happening very quickly without Tiger, I can only imagine that his return would provide an even bigger boost in interest in 2018.
What makes this development even more exciting is that I am again planning to be a Torrey Pines at the end of January for the Farmers Insurance Open. If history is a guide, and things go well for Tiger at the Hero, I would anticipate that we will see him again at the Farmers making his return to a full field event. I am not sure how many big the Team FGI contingent will be for the tournament, but it should be a good time. We’ve always had a great time meeting members and I am sure this time will be no different. If you live in the area or are interested in travelling to the event, please shoot me an email or a message on Twitter. We’d love to have a big contingent of FGI folks out there to join us. If we can get enough people together, we’ll try to put something together where we can all meet up somewhere nearby for drinks after one of the rounds.
Also, before I get down to business, I also want to mention that I will be in Washington DC next week as I have business in the area, a couple of meetings during the middle of the week and then will be headed to see my Vikings try to start the second half of the season off on the right foot as they take on Redskins. While I still feel deep in my bones that the Vikes will ultimately be a 9-7 team and just miss out on the playoffs, my inner fan requires me to play the role of the innocent, Charlie Brown who still believes that he is actually going to kick the football each time Lucy holds it, regardless of the inevitable heartbreak at the end of each season. I reached out to Kenny Kim who is in the area and we’ll be grabbing drinks one of the nights I am out there which should be a lot of fun. If you’re up for a shot and want to talk a little PGA DFS, let me know and I’ll let you know where I’m hanging out.
So now that we’ve concluded with the intro tonight, we might as well talk about a little golf this week and see what is happening down in Las Vegas. Whenever an event is held in an area where I know that many players have ties, I always I to start my research by consulting our Player Database. If you sort it by the third column, it will sort by where the golfer went to school and if you sort it by the last column, it will sort by where they make their residence. The first look pulls up these names for the week of players who either make their residence in the Las Vegas area or who went to school at UNLV:
Alex Cejka
Charley Hoffman
Ryan Moore
Kevin Na
Nick Watney
Chad Campbell
You’ll notice that each of these players has above average form for the course and most have had some notable finishes over the years. In one of the best stories of the week, Charley Hoffman, who went to UNLV and who resides in Las Vegas, was so moved to donate 100% of his purse this week (or $20,000 if he misses the cut) to the victims of the Las Vegas shooting last month. It’s an incredible gesture and one that I am sure will give him that much more motivation to play his best. I suspect this week, more than most others, we’ll see an extra push from the local guys on tour to put forth an amazing effort during this tough time for Las Vegas.
For the weather this week, we should see sunshine for all four rounds of the tournament. It will be a little windy during the first two rounds with winds peaking on Thursday afternoon between 13-15 mph and Friday afternoon at 16 mph with gusts as high as 22 mph. It would appear that from a winds perspective that the Thursday PM/Friday AM tee times will have a bit of an advantage. Obviously, wind is not the only factor to look at in terms of building your rosters, but if you are mass entering some events this week, it certainly would not hurt to do 20-25% of your lineups around the optimal tee time, 5% around the opposite and the rest a nice mixture among both sets of tee times. Remember, when you do this, you’re not just grabbing names from the early or late times. You want to build your player pool first through your regular research process, then look at who has what tee time from within your group of preferred players, and finally going through and organizing a few teams from that group based upon the tee times. You’re never doing this to stretch to put players in your pool that you normally would not select, just organizing the players you already would play anyway into a few optimal groups to leverage one potential additional advantage.
In looking at the course itself, TPC Summerlin is the home of the Shriner’s Hospital for Children Open, but has been hosting an event by one name or another going back to 1983. The course is a Par 71 and plays at 7,255 yards with three Par 5’s and is played at an elevation of 2700 feet which will help everyone get a little more distance than normal. It’s not one of the more challenging courses on tour as the winning score tends to get to minus 20 or lower which means we will need to roster a lot of birdie makers this week. The fairways a little narrower than normal, but it is a desert course which means that typically the rough is on the short side. Approach shot are not difficult and will be made to large, bentgrass greens that play slower than normal which tends to negate some of the issues among those who do not putt as well. The key stats for the week from our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics are as follows:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Average Proximity: 15%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%
Scrambling: 5%
Driving Accuracy: 5%
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