The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview Weekend Edition – The Open Championship

Did you survive the first two days? The weather, as usual for this tournament, proved to be difficult to navigate once again. I am not too certain that chasing one wave or another would have been enough to save you since good players from each wave cratered intermittently. Our core group was solid, but has not made a full push yet with Fowler, Matsuyama, Sergio, Noren, Casey and Kuchar all carrying the torch for us into the weekend. Much of our staff also recommended Spieth although I did not pull the trigger due to worries about price and accuracy, but largely, it did not seem to bother Spieth that he was not hitting fairways or even greens much of the day. What Spieth did do over and over was get up and down and he made it look easy. A couple of sloppy bogeys did hurt him late, but it really is his tournament to lose now that he has entered the weekend with a two shot lead.

As for weekend golf, I know many of you had your hearts broken over the last two days as players who had not faltered all season suddenly appeared to be out of sorts in the first two rounds Weather was certainly an issue for players all day on Friday with heavy rains hitting the course at various times of day and with the winds howling, holding serve and making par become the goal for each player if they wished to remain relevant over the weekend. Fortunately, the rough weather created some amazing opportunities for us in weekend PGA DFS.

If this is your first time playing in weekend contests, I want to breakdown our strategy for you so you understand why so many FGI folks have been able to win weekend GPPs throughout the season. Many of the basics of your research process still apply to the weekend slate, but the key difference here is that position points are no longer a part of the scoring equation which means that we can totally focus on scoring. This means that we can eliminate those players that are not going to make enough birdies to score the points we need to win big contests. This really helps to elevate that we may not have liked before the weekend due to fears about them missing the cut, but can now play without worry with only two rounds available for each golfer. We want to focus on Birdie or Better Percentage, Strokes Gained Tee to Green and to a lesser extent, Strokes Gained Putting.

The next area we want to take a look at is the weather. Is there a time tomorrow where a certain group is going to have the best of the action in comparison to their competitors. This is an important factor in the opening two rounds, but even more critical with just two rounds of play if one wave has a clear weather advantage. For tomorrow, the weather looks really good. I might lean slightly towards the afternoon players tomorrow as the winds are going to be in the 8 mph with gusts to 13 mph early in the day, but by late afternoon, they are supposed to drop to 3, gust 5. It probably will not be an enormous advantage, but just one more item to consider in the overall weighting of your rosters.

Finally, and here is the real key to winning GPPs each week, it is in selecting players that have largely underperformed in the opening two rounds who are then expected to play better over the last two rounds. Now how do we measure such an important characteristic? We keep it simple. We look at where every player is currently positioned in the standings and then contrast that with every player’s real time odds to win the event now, which gives us a sort of projected finish metric. We build a table to show which players are anticipated to rise the most in the final two rounds and we work that ‘metric of change’ into our model for the weekend. This is a powerful way of building your roster, but it is in line with every great investor going back to the beginnings of the stock market. In most instances in DFS weekend PGA events, we want to buy low and sell high. This allows us to pick up solid golfers who have underperformed in the first two rounds for whatever reason, and more often than not, are set up to bounce back. This should be the first place you start your research each weekend. Look at the bottom of the leaderboard and start scoping it out for the most talented players.

Obviously, there are going to be some cases where players who are doing well may still be in play for the weekend. When the tournament is really easy to score at and I can project the winner score to a strong extent, I am still comfortable going after the players who are near the top. I know that there is still a lot of scoring ahead after Friday so I do not have to worry about who is ahead and if they will slow down after two good rounds since scoring should still take place at a strong clip the last two days. This week I am also grabbing a few big names at the top due to their fit for the course. Certain players this week are just undeniably better than other in this layout. We have already seen that the rough here is not too penal. Players like Jordan Spieth with a super strong short game provide a lot of upside as he is always able to find ways to score even if he still can’t hit a fairway while others are constantly having to scramble to get up and down. With that, let’s get on to our player pool for the weekend.

Sign up for an FGI account today to see the rest of this post.