The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – WGC Match Play

We have to make this one fast and furious this week as the WGC Math Play event begins on WEDNESDAY morning this week rather than the normal Thursday morning start time. We had a mixed week at the Arnold Palmer as most of our key players did really well with the exception of Jason Kokrak and had Rose, Tiger and especially Stenson all in the mix come Sunday, but were stung a bit by a resurgent, Rory McIlroy, who found his putter in a huge way all weekend and especially on Sunday as he drained everything on the back nine on the way to his first win on tour since he took down the Tour Championship back in the fall of 2016. It ended an ugly four start streak on the PGA Tour where nothing seemed to go his way, his iron play looked off and he was not making any putts in missing the cut in two of those starts. It is making the build up to The Masters that much more exciting as we have had three winners in the last three weeks that will each generate a fair amount of buzz in terms of building rosters for the event.

If you were unaware, the salaries also came out last week for The Masters on DraftKings and FanDuel so if you have not had a chance to peruse those, go have a look one you have locked in your rosters for the week. With the Shell Houston Open coming up next week, I always like to play a little lighter than normal as it is never easy to gauge how focused the players are who show up for the event. You can almost feel them pushing those close putts just off to the edge of the cup if they are close to the cut line down the stretch. With weather being a little unpredictable in Texas this time of year, the last thing anyone wants who is playing at Augusta is to miss out on a practice round or any of the pageantry that goes on during the week so if things look at all iffy in terms of finishing on time, I definitely don’t want to be left hoping that certain players stay motivated.

This week, the tour heads to Austin Country Club for the third year in a row where the WGC Match Play event takes place. If you’ve never checked out match play before, you are in for a treat. The competitive nature of a one on one challenge on the golf course really helps to amplify the viewing experience with each match being so important. You just cannot take any holes off along the way so the level of intensity will be high immediately on Wednesday and we won’t be waiting until the weekend for the usual cut sweat. The way the event will work is that there are sixteen groups of four players. Each group was seeded from 1 to 16 with DJ getting the top seed and then working down to the 16th best player in the field based upon the OWGR. The tournament organizers then drew names from all the 2, 3 and 4 seeds for each group and then the brackets were set. Each player will play against all three other players in their group with the top player moving on after Friday. In the event of a tie, the players will go to a playoff, playing a hole at a time until a winner is determined.

This is the first year that DraftKings has run contests for the Match Play so this will be the first time I have had a chance to write about it. After thinking about it for all of a couple of days, I am still not totally sure about the absolute best possible strategy, but I do have a few key ideas to pass on. Obviously, if you are building rosters, you are going to want to avoid stacking players from the same group. It will be key to get as many players as possible through to the round of sixteen so losing one just based upon poor roster construction will kill your team. The next thing to consider is who do you want to focus on as your Final Four contenders. You are not going to be able to roster more than two stars on any team and even two is a difficult so you need to be very strategic in ho you want to build your rosters. For me, the decision really boiled down to selecting my favorite big gun from each side of the bracket and splitting my shares between each. I may have one or two teams where I can afford both players, but  some pretty massive upsets would need to take place in order to get them both to the finals along with two very low seeded players.

The other issue that you will have is that you just can’t afford to spread yourself too thin if you’re only playing 20 lineups. It would be great to roster DJ, Rory, Rahm and JT in your player pool, but if that means you only own 25% of each, that’s just not going to give you many bullets to work with if one of those players wins. My thought is that you are going to want to load up on a couple of higher priced favorites at the top and fade the others. To further leverage this play, I want you to have extra shares of those players that you would anticipate upsetting those higher seeds. So if you are going to take a lot of shares of DJ and Rahm, you should be loading up on the players in JT’s quadrant with the best shot of upsetting him and advancing along with the cheap players available in Spieth and Hideki’s quadrant that could knock them off. Also, for your DJ rosters, if your other stud is Rahm, be sure to include a cheaper player from his group. If it ends up with Rahm/DJ in the Final Four, well, the best anyone is probably going to get is three of four anyway so don’t worry about trying to be perfect. I would not go out of your way to stack every possible combination of DJ/Rahm in this scenario as it’s bound to be a losing play with so few lineups. Even if you had hit those two on the head last year in the final, your odds of picking both Bill Haas and Tanihara as the other semifinalists would be terrible with only 20 rosters to work with.

Now, if you are going to do 150 teams, things open up a lot more. Perhaps you can now incorporate a third high priced player into your player pool and work angles on 50 lineups for that player as well. While I still don’t like the idea of trying to chase down too many permutations or having a really large player pool, I think it’s a workable strategy. You just want to really be confident about the mid level players you are working with an expand your player pool by 4-5 players so that in those groups where it looks like it could end up being a coin flip between a couple of different players, you now gain some shares. I would not try to own a few shares of every player as again, you’re going to need the winner on your roster so having one or two teams with some surprising #4 seed probably will not give you just the right combination with the rest of your roster. Think back to our normal roster construction rules where we want to use each player 5-10 times when building 100-150 rosters. With the rule changes and group play involved, this has become an event where the best tend to rise to the top so without single elimination involved, it’s just not worth trying to chase down too many long shots.

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