The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – WGC Bridgestone

We are now officially into the home stretch of the PGA season. After Johnny Vegas knocked off Charley Hoffman in a playoff on Sunday to win the Canadian Open for the second straight year, it leaves us with just one more filler event on the calendar with seven tournaments left for the season, that being the Wyndham Championship which takes place the week following the PGA Championship. Even the Wyndham has a feeling of being an important event with so many golfers playing to try to keep their tour card by qualifying for the FedEx Cup Playoffs the following week. It always makes for a very exciting finish to the season, even if the majority of fans begin to turn their attention elsewhere….which leads me to a quick special announcement this week.

Once of the trickiest parts of the year for us here at FGI is in keeping folks interested in the site when the king of fantasy sports returns in full swing in September, that being the NFL. The fall season for golf is a lot of fun, particularly when the tour heads off to Asia for a couple of events that make for great late night viewing. However, we know that folks start to shift their focus towards the NFL and the glory that is watching football for 10 straight hours while only having to endure commercial breaks during NBC’s coverage at night. It’s an amazing experience and one that I look forward to just as much all most of you.

Rather than trying to fight this trend each year, last season we decided that we would simply try to incorporate some extra content into the site by adding a little NFL and MMA coverage. We do not want to lose subscribers during the quieter time of the year, but we understand that many of you want to put additional focus on football while the PGA puts on events with a lot of young new faces making their first foray onto the tour. I started writing a column each week covering my favorite cash game plays each week for NFL and it ended up becoming fairly popular and reasonably successful. Including playoffs, the cash game team that I put out each Sunday ended with a total record of 12-7 for the season. In leading up to this season, we have received a lot of messages from subscribers asking if this coverage would continue on into this NFL season and we are pleased to announce that it will. In fact, we will actually be expanding on our offering this fall. We are really proud of the team that we have in place and are determined to add as much value as we can to your subscription on our site. Look for additional columns, tools and podcasts to be coming your way this NFL season.

Now, just because we are going to do some extra coverage for the NFL does not mean that we will be slacking off on golf. In fact, just the opposite is true. This past Saturday night, a few FGI team members convened to watch UFC 214 and to talk about some of the new tools that have been in development over the last few months. Aaron Johnson, our incredibly talented and motivated developer is far enough ahead of schedule with them so that he thinks within a week or two, we should have the beta version ready for what he has been working on this season. We’ll be rolling it out for you to have a look at very soon and will be looking for feedback this fall on ways that we can improve upon it as well as all of the other offerings that we have on the site. The fall season is always a lot of fun for us as it really gives us a chance to make big improvements to the site which we then always offer during that time in our basic subscription packages so that those folks who stick with us get to take the new tools out for a test run before we decide where to include them in future subscription options. This fall is going to be really amazing in terms of what our site will be offering so be sure to stick around all the way through the year and you will not be disappointed in the value we will provide as a site.

The Canadian Open ended up being a really strong week for most of what I put in play. I hope that you took my advice on the four core cash players in Reavie, Campbell, Ollie and Tway. While they were all highly owned and each fell back over the final two rounds, they were all strong pieces for me in starting out great and winning cash game rosters as I had plenty of room up top to select my other two golfers. In GPPs, I had some really strong teams out of the gates and into the weekend, but with a couple of key chalky players fading, I did fall back, but did still manage to cash with a lot of lineups. Seeing Vegas win was a little surprising. While Glen Abbey is definitely his style of course, his form had been so abysmal since The Masters that I just could not picture him suddenly putting it all together in such dramatic fashion.

Once again, Charley Hoffman came up just short, but continues to impress me this year as his midsummer fade has not arrived yet and does not appear to be on the horizon. His only real issue on Sunday was his inability to get most of his putts to the hole as he left several late efforts short on the back nine. The rest of the big plays held their own with Finau roaring back late in his usual manner for a 4th place finish. DJ played well in finding the Top-10 for the first time in a few months. Ian Poulter continued to play great golf since a last second discovery of missing FedEx Cup points saved his tour card. He worked his way up the leaderboard for a 2nd place finish which was a nice bonus as he usually is not known for being much of a scorer.  Other notable big plays for us included James Hahn, Keegan Bradley, JB Holmes and Seamus Power. Anytime the full group of core players (8/8) gets through the cut, we are going to be in position to have a big week so hopefully, there were not too many landmines along the way outside of that to trip you up.

However, we do not want to rest on our past successes for too long. A lot of you had huge success in contest both big and small, but the big paydays are coming up as there are usually a lot of very nice contests to end the season with some huge guaranteed prize money. This week is no exception as the tour travels to lovely Akron, Ohio for the WGC Bridgestone Invitational. For the next folks with us this week, this event is a little bit different than what you have gotten used to throughout the summer. This is a no cut event and a much smaller field of players than normal with only 76 players teeing it up.

Before you get too excited about there not being a cut this week, let me walk you back one year to this same event. Daniel Berger stepped up to the first tee, hit one shot and then promptly withdrew from the tournament. Twitter was set on fire immediately. What Berger had taken advantage of in the rules was that just by showing up and hitting a single shot, he was guaranteed a paycheck for at least last place which was around $50,000. Although unprofessional, he was well within his rights to do this and walked off the course with a nice, quick payday. As if that was not bad enough, later on in the opening round, Brooks Koepka suffered an ankle injury and also withdrew from the event. Whether or not either of these injuries were really all that painful to deal with, I cannot say for sure, but withdrawals happen routinely at WGC/no cut events. Henrik Stenson crushed a lot of people at the WGC event in Mexico this past spring. I can also recall Danny Lee withdrawing with a blister on his hand in the fall of 2015 as well as Jim Furyk withdrawing from the BMW Championship in 2015. The WGC events are important to players, but they are aslo usually close to other big events on the horizon. With the PGA Championship being held next week as the final major of the year and with the playoffs close at hand, it would not shock me in the least to see an ‘injury’ or two pop up during the first two rounds of play that cause someone to withdraw. It’s one of the reasons why I am now forever careful in my approach to WGC events.

In terms of your strategy for the week, keep most of your exposure in GPP contests. The pricing is actually somewhat tight this week and with there being so many unplayable golfers near the bottom, options in the value range are fairly limited. We win in cash games every year with the consistent players that we select to anchor our teams in terms of making the cut. While others take silly risks here and there, we’ve largely been able to limit our own mistakes and have come out ahead on the year, but it does not come easy. It’s even trickier in weeks where there is no cut to work around. Now those errors that others make are minimized by getting four full rounds of play so the margin is smaller and you really need your golfers at the top to not just play well, but to be very good relative to the field. With ownership more crowded around a smaller group of players, cash games just are not going to be as profitable overall. While I am not telling you to avoid them completely, you should realize that our advantage overall is smaller than what I would normally like to see.

In GPP’s this week, we are going to need to find the winning golfer in our picks in order to have any chance at a big payday. Fortunately, in looking at this event over the years, one of the things that really stands out is just how well the best players in the world tend to perform here. Shane Lowry surprised many with his win two years ago, but outside of that, it’s usually the best players in the game that have had the best showings. As you are building your rosters this week, the temptation will exist to pack way too many golfers into your player pool as this is an event where most of the best players in the world show up. Be sure to avoid this mistake, particularly in GPP’s where you only get to play 20 teams. I used a sniper analogy with a subscriber earlier in answering his questions on player pool size and I want to share that again here. With only 20 teams to work with, we can’t afford to shotgun our player pool and spray our entries all over the field. If we  do that, we are turning our entries into lottery tickets and hoping that one random lineup will hit.

Our goal each week with GPP’s is to find a way to finish near the top. A bunch of minimum cashes do not help us out in any meaningful manner. In order to make it to the top, we want to have a handful of teams that are fighting for position among the masses in the final round. As this will require you to have many of the same players on each of those teams, it illustrates the importance of a heavily concentrated core group of players. If you have a small enough core where you are only rotating in and out one or two players on each roster, you will be in great position when that core group hits big. The sniper analogy that I used with one of our subscriber positioned lineup building in the way that a sniper fires at a target. While most folks with a weapon are going to aim for the head, I want you to be like a sniper who is aiming for the mole above the target’s eyebrow. Aim small, miss small. Be precise with how you build your rosters for these 20 max events. In events with tens of thousands of entries, you need to be aggressive in your roster choices. The goal should be to get all of your entries clustered as closely together on your phone as possible so that it becomes difficult to distinguish them individually.

The course this week is one of the more challenging courses each season. The scores do at times reach the low negative teens, but last year, Dustin Johnson was able to win by finishing at just six shots below par. It’s a long course at over 7,400 yards for a Par 70 and has only one Par 5 that can reasonably be reached in two shots. There’s plenty of trees and bunkers to make things difficult off the tee and players will need both length and accuracy in order to excel for the week. Given the many lengthy Par 4 and 3 holes, players who are strong with their long iron play are going to be at a premium for the week. When the key stats arrived from the guys over at Fantasy Golf Metrics, we saw a few surprises this week. Par 4 scoring was very heavily weighted as was GIR. While intuitively this makes sense, we do not see them often in the key stats which really emphasizes to me that approach play overall is really important this week.

Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Par 4 Scoring: 20%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Greens in Regulation: 15%
Scrambling: 10%
Driving Distance: 5%

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