The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – WGC Mexico Championship
Before you do anything else this week in terms of your research, I want you to go back to last week and do a little review for yourself of the Honda Classic. It’s so key to note information down on the event so that when it rolls around next year, you’ll have a head start on your fellow competitors. Going into the Honda Classic, I knew from previous years that it is always a very difficult challenge for the players. It marks a big shift between the west coast courses which tend to play a little more to the bombers and those that are comfortable on Bermuda grass greens to the southeast where winds and water become massive factors and we start to see the players that grew up in SEC country start to stake control of the tournaments. PGA National is notorious for being one of the toughest courses that we’ll see all year and the conditions, particularly at the beginning of the event were unyielding which led to a cut line that resembles what we see more often that not on a US Open style of course, just without nearly the same caliber of field.
The end result was that a lot of high quality golfers were wiped out before the weekend. I knew immediately what we were in for as soon as I checked the scores for the first time during lunch on Thursday afternoon as the bogeys began to pile up. We had our first unfortunate break before the end of the round as Martin Kaymer withdrew from the event with a wrist injury. Injuries are a part of the game and something that we have no control over so if you played him last week, you can’t be too hard on yourself (or me) as those are the types of things we have to learn to deal with throughout the season. We can only do our research and hope for the best, although one individual took it so poorly that I actually received an email questioning how I could recommend such a ‘weak minded’ player. Always amusing to say the least.
Where I found myself being a little more critical of my picks was with Sam Saunders in my cash game write up. Now, Sam had played great coming into the event, had to nice Top-20 finishes at the Honda in his career and seemed to be turning a corner on his career this season. It all seemed to be lining up perfectly and I let myself get pulled into the vortex of using him in my primary cash game lineup which he then helped to destroy by not being at all close to making the cut for the week. My I am being a little too harsh on myself, but Sauders just is not a golfer that I should be using in cash games, regardless of how well he plays in three or four events coming into the week. If you go back to years past, you’ll see these little pockets where he pops up for a few weeks here and there and starts to get people excited right before missing six or seven straight cuts in a row. That’s just who he has always been throughout his career. Now, maybe something will be different this season and he’ll bounce right back, but I don’t want to be risking my cash game stake on him throughout the year. We can still get action on him from time to time in GPP events where we want to think outside the box and add a little more volatility for the sake of capturing potential upside, but in cash, we really want to be looking at players who have a long and well established reputation for making it to the weekend. I can live with a Kaymer withdrawal, I have to tighten my process up however, in making sure I’m not chasing after a ‘hot hand’. Of course, now i fully expect him to go on a long run of success this year now that I’ve discounted his consistency.
I did have a few interesting takeaways for the week. The biggest thing beyond another Justin Thomas win had to be the performance of Tiger Woods. I’ll be quite honest in saying that after Riviera, I did not think that this would be a great event for Tiger as he’s been all over the place off the tee and was only hitting 35% of fairways coming into the week. An yet, there he was near the top of the leaderboard on Sunday, just a few shots away from being a legitimate threat to win the tournament and on a course that really is not one that would normally be suitable for his game. Like other big hitters, he clubbed down to hit more woods and irons off the tee and boasted his accuracy to almost 60% which of course allowed him to execute better approach shots where he hit 67% of greens in regulation. Just changing the dynamic off the tee allowed him to be much more in control of where his ball was going and with the way he has putted this season, if he’s hitting greens, he’s going to be scoring as he’s currently ranked 16th on tour in SGP, although it measures only twelve rounds. All of this should be enough to get the biggest Tiger fans all lathered up for what is ahead. My thought here is that Tiger will play one more event in March, probably the Arnold Palmer Invitational in a couple of weeks and then he will head down to Augusta to gt himself fine tuned for what is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated Masters tournaments in many years.
The other big takeaway from the Honda should be obvious by now, it’s an event where you need to be very careful with your DFS bankroll. In looking at it over the last two years, I feel like there is some opportunity to profit, but it’s a tournament that probably works best for GPP play, as even if the conditions look okay, things can change in a hurry to make it frustrating in a hurry. It’s a particularly good event for outright or Top-20 bets. When you know that the carnage will be widespread, it’s much less painful seeing one or two good players get wiped out where as in DFS, the weeks you are most profitable are usually based upon how your worst performing player that you own the most of ends up playing in a given week. In previous years, I’ve developed similar feelings for a few other events on tour that somewhat mirror the Honda Classic. The Valero Open is always one that I keep a close eye on although it moved from March to mid April in recent years. It’s another course where when the wrong conditions hit, it can turn into an absolute bloodbath in a hurry for players of all levels. I anticipated that the Honda Classic would again be tough when talking to Jeff in the podcast last week, and while it was probably one of the more extreme years, I will probably be tempering my exposure to this event in future years.
Now on to the business at hand for the week as the tour makes a sharp turn to the south and heads just outside of Mexico City for the WGC Mexico Championsjip which replaced Doral in the tour schedule last year for political reasons. I am not a fan of the way the PGA shoehorned this event into the schedule. It unnecessarily breaks up the Florida swing of the tour as it shifts from Florida, to Mexico and then back to Florida. Because of that, we’re missing a few big names at the top like Jason Day, Rory McIlroy and Henrik Stenson among others while Brooks Koepka is also out due to injury and Hideki Matsuyama is trying to rest a wrist injury before returning for the Arnold Palmer Invitational in a couple of weeks. As long as the event is held in Mexico, I think we’ll see a handful of bigger names skip it each year. The motives are not political at all, but the toll on players travelling from one country to another is tougher than some would imagine.
Think back to last year when it seemed like half the players in the field became ill during the tournament. Now, a part of that is the Mexican cuisine and how it is prepared, but a lot of it is just your body adjusting to an entirely new environment as most people are simply not going to acclimate within a day or two. The other issue with this event is that it is payed at an altitude of 7,500 feet above sea level. If you’ve never taken a trip to a city like Denver or anywhere else at elevations similar to this, you just can’t fully appreciate what the human body goes through to adjust to the lower levels of oxygen. It can cause fatigue and headaches for many days or even weeks depending on the physical condition of an individual. It always amazed me upon returning home after going to school in Colorado Springs all semester just how far my lungs would take me when I went on a run during the week or two I would have off. Instead of running for 4-5 miles and being tired, I could do 10-12 and not even be breathing hard at the end. There are going to be players each year who decide just out of avoiding wear and tear on their bodies to skip this event.
In keeping with the thoughts here on altitude, this is one of those weeks where I do believe that fitness will be a factor for players. At 7,500 feet, these guys are naturally going to wear down fast than normal. If they are not in great physical condition to begin with, by the time the weekend hits, you will see some of these player really start to slow down. Now, in looking at the vast majority of the players i this field, that is not going to be a problem, but if you do happen to look at a couple of players who maybe are not jogging or lifting weighs to keep themselves toned up, I do think that exhaustion could kick in and limit some upside. Be watchful of social media and any reporting this week on the health of the players. When these stomach viruses hit, it tends to happen very quickly and we do not get a lot of time between the news and lineup lock. Given that the field is smaller this week, tee times are not until late morning on Thursday so I implore you to get a quick look at any chatter going on over Twitter about ANY news at all that is filtering out before the start of the tournament.
Finally, let’s take a quick look at the course for the week. The Club de Golf Chapultepec is a Par 71 course that plays at over 7,300 yards with three Par 5 holes, a couple of them that are over 600 yards. However, as noted above, the elevation is 7,500 yards this week which will actually make the course play like something closer to 6,500 yards. There are not really any other courses that are even close to this elevation so the experience that players gained a year ago should be very helpful as opposed to those playing here for the first time. It is going to take more than a practice round or two to develop a good feel for club selection here. The fairways are tree lined, but accuracy should not be a major issue for the players as the bombers will again be able to club down to use irons and woods off the tee which should keep them out of trouble for the most part. The grass this week is kikuya and the greens Bermuda so Riviera is a decent comparative course although it plays much longer and the fairways are not quite as narrow and Riviera has a lot more troublesome bunkers to work around. Given that the course plays shorter than the yardage might indicate, some may naturally think that the shorter, more accurate hitters would have a more even playing field this week. However, what we saw last year showed us exactly the opposite with the bombers dominating the top of the leaderboard as the key area to watch for was strong mid to long iron play. Brandt Snedeker was the only non-bomber to manage to find his way into the Top-10 in 2017.
Key Stats:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 30%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Proximity: 15%
Scrambling: 10%
Strokes Gained Off The Tee: 5%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%
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