The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – WGC HSBC Championship
We learned a lot last week at the new CJ Cup at Nine Bridges in South Korea. I think the PGA did a great job in adding this event to the swing season as the course is truly immaculate and when the weather is a factor as it was last weekend, it plays much like some of the tougher courses that we see year in and year out at The Open Championship. I think that adding the third event to the Asian swing of the fall season also makes a lot of sense in that it allows for the players to get much more acclimated with the time change than if they were simply headed over and then right back to the states. This gives them a chance to play in two or three different events and allows the players to get exposure in one of the fastest growing markets for golf around the world. It will be interesting to see in the years ahead if more players begin to make the trip to Korea ahead of the WGC event given the beauty of the course, the incredible prize pool and the opportunity to get their body in tune for the WGC HSBC Championship the following week.
To recap last week, I felt great about the analysis after the first round. We had a lot of shares in players like Marc Leishman, Tony Finau, Chez Reavie, Luke List, Lucas Glover, Kyle Stanley, Nick Taylor and of course, Xander Schauffele. When I looked at the forecast going into the tournament, the winds looked like they’d be a factor in determining the results, but my read on it was that they would not start to really pick up until Saturday and would not be really tough until Sunday, I thought we would see one or two tough rounds with high winds, but unfortunately, it turned into three. It really hurt some of our bigger hitters like Tony Finau, but especially Xander. I am not really sure why things got so bad so fast for Xander, but he took a rather precipitous fall in the standings on Friday after shooting a whopping 82.
One of the more frustrating aspects of these small field, no cut events is what happened with Xander last week and I have written about this in my columns previously for WGC events. What we tend to see when players fall back in the standings is that they tend to make very little effort to really battle their way back. The paycheck is pretty well settled and with scoring conditions being so tough, they seem to lose their focus once they fall into the bottom 15-20 slots in the standings. The 82 did this to Xander as he was certainly capable of better over the last couple of days. Much of this I think can be chalked up to fatigue as the rigorous schedule and travel wears these guys out at certain points throughout the year. Even Justin Thomas spoke about it during his interview after the third round in mentioning that he was completely exhausted and was looking forward to taking some time off to just relax and do nothing for a while.
I would liken this to what we see in boxing when in the middle rounds of fights you see certain fighters take a round or two off where they try to lessen their movement to conserve energy for the later rounds. I never try to read too much into performances like that which are so out of character from what we’ve seen of late from Xander unless we hear about an injury or something specific in that player’s universe that would account for such a dramatic change. Xander had a rough second round, the conditions remained tough and he wanted ‘tool a couple of rounds off’ would be how I would describe it. Situations like this pop up a few times a year where a heavily owned player really disappoints in an event and you see the flood gates open the next week and ownership for the player plummets. Try not to get sucked into that trap. It is really easy to get discouraged in golf during these instances, but in reality, if is an opportunity the following event when they return to the field. If you liked a player like Xander last week, you probably do not think that he is going to shoot +17 again each week moving forward. In fact, you probably believe he is one of the premier young players on tour.
Now, I am not necessarily saying that you should move all of your chips in every time on players like this as we always want to do quality research on the course and the types of players that excel in a given tournament, but I cannot stress enough the importance of not allowing recency bias to dominate your thinking, especially in golf when the buildup to each tournament lasts so long and you have all weekend to sit and stew about it when a particular player guts some of your best rosters. I find it much easier to brush aside a bad outing from a player in NFL or especially the true daily sports like NBA or MLB where the seasons contain so many games that over the long run, you get a better sample size thus making projections a little more reliable.
Entering our third week in Asia, the tour stops in China this week at the Sheshen International Golf Club for the WGC HSBC Championship. After the last two weeks, you should be feeling pretty good about how these types of events work. We again have a field of 78 players, most of which are top players from the PGA Tour that have qualified for the WGC events throughout the year as well as many European Tour and Asian Tour players who qualify on their respective tours as well. Again there are some intriguing names from each of these tours that are in play this week.
When you take a look at the recent history of some of the Asian players, they really jump off the page. Be a little careful about going too overboard on these guys. Yes, there is a chance that you could strike gold like some did back in 2015 when Hao Tong Li made a run at the title in his home country as a much lesser known player than he is now and finished in 7th place. There will be a couple of these players that do really well this week, especially as this tends to be a course where players can really score which tends to level the playing field to some degree. That said, you don’t need to be massively exposed to these players even if they are worth a play this week. Most of these players will only be owned by 1-3% of the field. To be overweight the field, all it takes is 5-10% exposure and you should be fine. There is not a lot of need to take on a ton of risk for golfers that you have little intel on and are really only going off of recent form on the Asian Tour to make a pick. That’s not to say that it can’t work out as these are certainly capable players, but this field is much tougher than any that they’ve previously encountered during their strong recent play so it should not be a surprise if they finish closer to the bottom of the pack rather than the top.
For the course itself, the weather does not look like it will be in play nearly as much as it was just one week ago in Korea. There is no expectation for precipitation throughout the weekend. Winds are not going to be an issue at all on Thursday or Friday. By Saturday, in the early afternoon, when the players are beginning to finish up, the winds will peak at around 13 mph with potential gusts up to 17 mph. Sunday is when things are going to get interesting as the winds are really expected to pick up and I would imagine that this will be the round where scoring will be the most difficult and with 11 holes having water factored in, I can definitely envision certain players getting wet and posting some double squares on their scorecards. Here is a link to the winds page that I look at every week. I am sure it will change again once I post my column so go ahead and take a peak again before lineup lock and while you are at it, just bookmark it for reference throughout the season. While tee times are all very tight within a two hour window this week, throughout the season, there will be three or four events where we can gain a significant advantage over the field by weighting our lineups towards the better draw when one set of tee times is less affected by the weather.
The course plays as another shorter Par 72 at 7,266 yards the course is described as featuring well placed bunkers throughout the course, deep collection areas, making missing the greens more penal than usual, water features that come into play on 11 holes and smaller than average, undulating greens which are again bentgrass this week which is noteworthy in particular for a lot of the players on tour who grew up playing on bentgrass and thus have putted far better on it than other types of grass (Tony Finau and Xander Schauffele come to mind). Consider some of the players as well that grew up on courses where water was a big factor. Many of the courses down in Florida have a lot of water hazards to deal with so if you can find players who have a certain comfort level in playing around the water, this will help you especially if the winds do pick up.
As I look at the course and some of the key factors for the week, the first thing that stands out is that the typical winning score is usually somewhere in the -20 or lower range. This means that scoring will be huge this week, but it also opens up a lot of options. Where last week I was mistaken in thinking that we would get plenty of scoring, it led me to weighting a player like Tony Finau more heavily than if I had known the winning score was only going to be -9. At -9, there are not that many birdies being scored and usually a few more bogeys as well so the players that we look at to post a lot of points, but not necessarily finish as high in the standing are much less appealing than when the winning score is going to be -20 or lower and there are a lot of birdie and eagle opportunities. We should see plenty of scoring chances again this week which means that those par makers who grind along are not quite as valuable as a week ago and the players that lead the tour in birdie or better percentage became even more valuable than normal.
What stands out for me beyond the numbers and the stats are the players that have consistently performed really well here over the years. You can really see some strong patterns when looking over course history this week that are not always as apparent for other events. Here are some players that to me, really stood out when I did my initial look this week:
Hideki Matsuyama
Dustin Johnson
Marc Leishman
Henrik Stenson
Paul Casey
Ross Fisher
Francesco Molinari
Adam Scott
These guys are all second shot specialists that are really strong in their approach game. While some might be classified as bombers, these players are perhaps best described as ball strikers. That’s not to say that the pure bombers can’t succeed as we’ve seen Bubba Watson win here just a couple of years ago, but it appears that those who position themselves well off the tee and who can throw daggers at the greens are often times the best types of players to target for this tournament. It was not surprising to see the weighted stats that Fantasy Golf Metrics published this week as the most important to look at and had a higher than normal number for strokes gained tee to green with a lot of emphasis on proximity and Par 5 scoring.
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 35%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Strokes Gained Putting: 15%
Proximity: 15%
Par 5 Scoring: 10%
Scrambling: 5%
Follow Us
