The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Zurich Classic

We have reached the part of the season that is nearly all filler. A few top players show up at these smaller events, usually spurred on by some sort of sponsorship or obligation while the majority of the top level players rest on the sidelines in preparation for the next big event, which is The Players Championship coming up in couple of weeks. Until then, our dosage of daily fantasy golf is enough to get us from weekend to weekend, but just not nearly as satisfying as the high that comes from the best events when all the top players come together to compete.

The last couple of weeks, we have seen very few top players in the field, but this week the tour will shake things up and we will have three of the best players in the world leading the way into New Orleans…along with a collection of wily veterans, upstart youngsters and a handful of Web.com players chasing a dream. When I put it that way, it almost feels like we are about to embark upon a magical tale. It’s not that the Zurich Classic is a bad event, it just has the misfortune of falling right during the period of time when most players are setting their sites on the big events that will populate the calendar from now until the end of the season in September.

In a top heavy field like Zurich, it is best not to get too excited about putting up a big chunk of your bankroll. When it comes to fantasy sports, and in particular, DFS golf, you need to have a plan throughout the season for how to attack events each week. Typically, the stronger the field, the better of a chance you should have of being profitable. The reason behind this is simply it becomes easier to predict who will make and miss the cut. Obviously, some of you might be shaking your head at this point and thinking back to what happened to a few of the top players at Augusta who collapsed early and then often on Friday afternoon. However, over the lat few years, our best results have always come from the bigger events where focusing on cash games and taking few risks has always paid off for us. Even at The Masters, both optimal lineups cashed so I want you to be saving the majority of your bankroll for those events coming up soon before putting too much on the line.

The reason events like the Zurich Classic are difficult is that although we still have a full field of players, the pricing structure remains the same as most other weeks. As the players who would normally fill the $8,000 and $9,000 range disappear, the players from the high $6k and low $7k range are moved up to fill those salary slots. These players are still the same, troubled, inconsistent players as before, just dressed up now with a fancy new price tag to go with them. It places enormous pressure on cash games as the middle range that is really reliable in strong fields is now a mine field. This is the time of year when I start to cut back my total bankroll exposure and also play equal weights of GPPs and cash games as the types of lineups that I am building are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

The main difference between your cash game lineups and your GPP lineups for weeks like Zurich should be in your attention to perceived ownership levels for the week. For cash games, you can disregard ownership, but in the case of GPP events, its importance cannot be overstated. This is an important point that I wanted to reiterate from the webcast on Monday. Be sure to hold off on building your lineups until Wednesday night if possible. Last week is a perfect week to look in terms of dodging some of the highest owned players and having an advantage as players like Phil Mickelson, Jimmy Walker, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau all missed the cut while being heavily owned. If you took the time to explore ownership trends, you might have skipped these type of players for your GPP events. Remember, your lineups do not need to be devoid of all chalk plays, but you do need to find 2-3 players that help to distinguish your team in order to have a chance to win those bigger contests.

In taking a quick look back at the picks from a week ago, the highlight was obviously Charley Hoffman, who after many painful Sunday meltdowns, finally put it all together last Sunday to win an emotional victory for himself and for my cash games. I also felt good about dodging both Jimmy Walker and Brooks Koepka who inexplicably missed the cut last week. I have never been a big Jimmy Walker fan and find that even his strong results usually come as a result of three average rounds and one amazing round. Unfortunately, for Walker, his big round was supposed to have come on Saturday last week. Brooks and I have been estranged this season after he found his way into my write up almost every week last season. He is priced at a premium now, but his game has not caught up yet and the results just are not there right now to support a 10k price. He will be welcomed back to The Daily Spin with open arms just as soon as his price slides back into the upper 8k range again.

My most painful miss of the week came from Andrew Loupe who started off poorly, finished the first round in terrible fashion, and did not find his footing until the last nine holes on Friday when his fate had already been decided. The entire 6k range of players last week was an ugly mess and there just were not the usual golfers around 6800-6900 to go to for most of my lineups. I feel okay about highlighting Loupe initially as a selection last week. With a 4th place finish there two seasons ago and with him always being a threat to jump up and challenge for a Top 10 finish, Loupe made sense as a GPP option. My biggest mistake with Loupe was in plugging him in too early to too many of my lineups. By Wednesday night last week, it had become abundantly clear that Loupe would be heavily owned, a huge red flag for value picks and sleepers. Those are the most dangerous players to own each week. The crowd drags down their value and there is also the opportunity that you miss to fade a risky player. Although I had him overweighted in my lineups which would have delivered value had he performed well, the clear play should have been to fade him and look elsewhere, even if I did feel good about Loupe. In the weeks ahead, Jeff and I are going to make a very concerted effort to include information on predicted ownership, not just through our ownership predication tool, but also in our e-mail each Wednesday night so that we can note the trends that we see developing throughout the industry that week.

Before I get to the picks this week, I want to take time to mention that I am going to do things just a little bit differently with my write up for the week. Typically, I break down players into 3-4 different categories as most of you are well aware, discussing my favorite blue chip players, value players and sleepers. However, over the last few weeks, we have had a lot of questions from subscribers about how to put together their GPP rosters and how to break down how much of each player to use within the mix. This week, I elected to take a little extra time to walk you through just how I opted to build my lineups for the $3 and $300 GPP events to try to give some insight into how my process works so that you can start to organize your picks better when it comes to making roster selections. I am looking forward to getting some feedback this week as to whether it is something that you like or dislike and how you would best like to see it integrated moving forward.

TPC Louisiana is a 7,425 yard, Par 72 course with four Par 5 and four Par 3 holes. It is one of the easier courses of tour in terms of scoring and one that does not tend to punish players for being inaccurate off the tee so long as the are solid from mid range and further out with their irons and can hit greens. It tends to play towards the bombers as there is added emphasis on Par 5 scoring and driving distance in addition to the traditional statistics that we tend to see every week. Over the years, a wide variety of players have done well here, so there is no need to focus specifically on the bombers and since there are not a lot of high caliber bombers in the field (guys who do anything beyond hitting it 300 yards off the tee), you should be looking for a good mix of players. Also, be sure to get a good weather check tonight. It looks like thunderstorms are currently expected tomorrow throughout the day so there could be some issues effecting play there. Right now, there was not one tee time that stood out from the other so I do not think it will be something that we can schedule around, but as always, we will cover that on Wednesday night when our final e-mail goes out to subscribers around 8 or 9pm CST.

The key statistics for the week as derived by our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics:

Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 35%
Strokes Gained Putting: 30%
Birdie or Better %: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 10%
Proximity: 10%
Driving Distance: 5%

Good luck this week. Please be sure to send me an e-mail if you have any questions on lineup construction or strategy between now and the start of the tournament. Some of our best success stories have come from the folks that we work with each week as they progress from just starting out to having success in bigger events, so do not be afraid to ask us for help.

[cointent_lockedcontent view_type=”condensed buyButtonOff”]
Before getting too deep into my GPP breakdown for the week, let’s take a look at what our model produced for an optimal lineup. We broke even again with the optimal lineup last week as we had one winner (thanks, Charley) and one loser (thanks, Phil). If you are mixing in 2-3 lineups per week things should be okay for your 50/50 and double up games. We would like to see things become a little more predictable like last year, but I would not count on it in the near term with the sorts of fields that are in play in these less prominent events. Use this lineup as a starting point for highlighting value this week. It is a good template to start with until you get comfortable mixing in some of your own ideas to compliment it.

Justin Rose – $11,800
Marc Leishman – $9,100
Charles Howell III – $8,700
Sean O’Hair – $7,600
David Toms – $6,700
Tim Wilkinson – $6,000

The model definitely favors more of a stars and scrubs approach this week. Rose is a great place to start our team this week as he won here a year ago and has played really well here over the last four years. Leishman should be a solid addition to the team. He makes cuts and his stats are really tremendous for the key areas this week. CHIII has been rock solid not just in making cuts, but also securing Top 25 finishes and he priced out really well again. Sean O’Hair is probably the name that made you wince when you looked over the team after a terrible effort the last time he made the optimal lineup. Try to get past recency bias here and just focus on his game, his stats and how he has enjoyed success here many times previously. David Toms brings a ton of course experience this week as he went to school at LSU and has been playing this course now for over 20 years on tour. Finally, Tim Wilkinson took care of us last week and without a huge price bump, he rose quite a bit in the model this week. He has been making cuts this season and he is a statistical match for the course and at $6,000 he gives us a lot of extra salary cap space at the top to play with.

Our alternative optimal lineup for the week:

Billy Horschel – $19,300
Charles Howell III – $8,700
Jamie Lovemark – $8,400
Patton Kizzire – $8,200
Ben Martin – $7,900
Retief Goosen – $6,500

This is a slightly more balance approach to cash games this week. We take one dip down into the sleeper pool to grab Goosen, but he is playing well this year and brings course experience to the mix. Billy Horschel is on top of his game right now and is a former champion. Patton Kizzire is a great cut maker with upside potential for a good price. Ben Martin has been quietly reliable this year and Jamie Lovemark, although he has missed the cut here in both starts, is a different player than two years ago and his stats line up really well so I am willing to take another shot with him this week.

One other idea that Jeff and I have been discussing the last couple of weeks for your GPP rosters is way to play on current industry sentiment surrounding course history. Over the last two months, there has been a barrage of tweets and articles about ignoring course history and focusing just on player form or stats. These stat guys want to boil it all down to a single number that then leads them to a ranking which then tells them whether or not to play a certain golfer. Now we think that current form and stats are hugely important as well and they will always be the two most heavily weighted components in our model. However, this negative sentiment towards course history seems way overblown in our opinion.

Players compile their statistics at a wide range of courses and over different periods of time against different fields. You can run regressions, use weightings for the strength of field and course scores, but when it comes down to it, there are going to be certain players who play well on specific courses throughout their career and it makes sense to identify them regardless of how they may be playing in a given season. Just as one would never say that the historical numbers at a baseball stadium do not matter, I do not think you can reasonably say that the historical numbers from certain courses do not matter.

The biggest argument against using course history is that there is a limited sample size for most players. If a player has done well at a course for four straight years, that only equates to 16 rounds of golf…far from what we would want in any sort of study to try to say that we have conclusive results. But there are a couple of things to consider here. First, just because we have limited numbers for a single player does not mean that we cannot collect data from the entire field. In each tournament, there will be 400-500 rounds of golf played and over the years that number gives us thousands of individual trials. When we run a regression of the data, it is easy at this point to start picking out the key statistics for the course. From there, it becomes easier to start finding the prototypical successful player for the course. Many times, this will reveal exactly why a certain player has enjoyed success at a course over the years so in this case, you have worked backwards to figure out why a player stood out and had these results from year to year. I think even the stat guys would concur with this approach as it takes us through a logical progression of A leads to B, which leads to C type of thinking.

I think an area that gets underemphasized when looking at just the data is overall player familiarity with a course. Yes, we have a few rounds of recorded stats to look at on certain courses, but there are other intangibles involved when it comes to golf. Perhaps a player grew up in the area or went to college near a certain course. Maybe over the years they found a favorite course where they really enjoyed playing during the offseason. What looks like just a couple of rounds when staring at the data on the PGA website, may actually be a hundred rounds or more when taking into account where a player has put in time over the years. This is where you tend to see players whose stats do not look like any kind of match for the course and yet they are able to get it done year after year.

Another big factor that gets overlooked when just staring at data is course design. How many times have you heard someone say that Matt Kuchar is a Pete Dye course specialist? And it is true, the type of design for a course will fit certain players in terms of their eye and how they see the course and how they go about attacking it. These intangible factors cannot always be translated into driving distance or greens in regulation, but have more to do with shot making ability and where the best places are around the course to be positioned in order to set up the best possible approach shot. For players who end up working with the same caddie for years and years, that is also an advantage. In listening to Paul Tesori (caddie for Webb Simpson) do an interview the with The Tour Junkies back about two months ago, he could not emphasize enough how important it was to know the course and to have a feel for how it plays. It is what will make Webb a must start next week at the Wells Fargo Championship. Are courses like this just that perfectly tailored for a player? No, familiarity, which leads to a golfer playing with more confidence and being able to then relax on the course is definitely at play here and should not be ignored.

The result of all of this push back against course history is that DFS owners are now starting to move away from using it much in their rankings. At the top, it is not going to matter. If Jason Day has a great record at a course or if he has only played it twice, he is going to be heavily owned. When Charley Hoffman entered the Valero last week in great form, his amazing course history only helped to build up an already solid play. Where we will get our advantage is in using players who are just performing okay or even underperforming coming into an event. If certain players are now just looking at form and stats, those players with strong course history certainly are not going to show up high in their models. What better place for most of these guys to turn around a slump than on a course where they have consistently had their best stuff before? If we can now get these types of players without the rest of the field piling in, I think we can squeeze out a small edge in GPP events. Last week provided a lot of great examples of this, but after a really good week for course history plays, the time might be short to take advantage of the trend as sentiment shifts very quickly in terms of strategy in DFS golf.

I am going to try something new this week with my write up and will give you a breakdown of my roster construction for my GPP teams this week. I have discussed this by e-mail with subscribers previously, but have never really built it out to share with anyone so here is how my rosters break down for the week. Below is my $3 GPP mix for the week. For my $300 teams, I upgraded from Rose to Day and used him on all three of my rosters. You know who he is by now, and my thought is that he was one bad round away at The Heritage from winning, he is a threat to win any event and unless he has another inexplicable blowup round, he will be in contention on Sunday. I used Rose in the $3 as he has the upside here to win, but is also a little cheaper which gave me a little extra wiggle room to work in extra players which I really want to do when I build 100 lineups.

CORE

Justin Rose – 100% ($11,800)
Charles Howell III – 50% ($8,700)
Patton Kizzire – 50% ($8,200)
David Toms – 50% ($6,700)
Tim Wilkinson – 65% ($6,000)

So the first impression that most of you are going to have is one of surprise. You don’t typically think about players in the sleeper range being core plays. However, if you want to get a mix of top players in your lineup, you are going to need to drop down to find a couple of cut makers in the lower levels. GPPs are a boom or bust endeavor each week. Too often, owners are just shotgunning one lineup after another into events, hoping that they fire that one magic bullet that hits the target perfectly. Show that philosophy in the garbage. It will work on a rare occasion, but it’s usually just happenstance and certainly not a repeatable process going forward. We want to embraced the sniper philosophy of aiming small to miss small. When our core hits, we’re in business and we will have perhaps 25-40 lineups that are in position to contend. Rather than having to hope for everything to go perfectly for one team of six golfers, we will now have multiple paths to victory.

Tim Wilkinson and David Toms are our cut makers this week. Using a player like Wilkinson at $6,000 gives us a lot of extra cap space that we really need in a bottom heavy field. He ranks highly in the model this week statistically, has made 7/9 cuts on the season and has made his last two cuts at this event. David Toms is another player who we are using as a pure cut maker this week. There are other options around Toms that might have more upside, but they also contain more risk as well and we will use them in other areas. I like that Toms is an LSU grad that has played this event nine times since it moved here in 2005 (skipped a year in 2006 due to Hurricane Katrina) and has made the cut eight straight years after missing it in the first year at the course in 2005. He is also playing well coming in having made three straight cuts and progressively improving each time. He is not long off the tee or a scoring machine, but he does not make a lot of mistakes so I am looking at him to get to the weekend….please!!! If one or the other miss, I will still have a few teams fighting with a reasonable shot so one magic bullet could still potentially hit the target, but for a big week, I need these two guys to show up.

Rose is pretty self-explanatory. He won here a year ago, he has been solid here for the last four years and he is playing well this season. Our two value players in the core, CHIII and Patton Kizzire have both been good to us this year. CHIII has risen beyond being a cut maker and ascended to a player with upside each week. He had no issue transitioning to the new PXG clubs and they have only helped him so far. His putter is hugely improved this year and although he still is not a closer, he is doing enough to more than justify his price this week. Patton Kizzire is a well rounded player from tee to green and a solid putter who can score on the Par 5’s. He makes cuts and can push for upside. In a field this week, he should even be able to contend if he is on his game. I think CHIII and Kizzire offer huge value for their price, but should also have a high enough cut making percentage here to justify the added exposure.

SECONDARY

Marc Leishman – 25% ($9,100)
Jamie Lovemark – 25% ($8,400)
Ben Martin – 25% ($7,900)
Sean O’Hair – 25% ($7,600)
David Hearn – 25% ($7,500)
Lucas Glover – 24% ($7,200)
Retief Goosen – 25% ($6,500)

This is the area where we want to start to differentiate from the field a bit. For my core plays, each golfer has a very specific role, but we know that we will need to find some lower owned players as well in order to make our lineups unique enough to have a chance to win. I think this group of players will allow us to diversify, but also should have a high probability of success as well.

Marc Leishman is overlooked almost every week, even when he is priced around $8,000. With his price hitting $9,100 this week, people will probably stay away as there is not a lot of history here to look at (28th last year, MC in 2009). However, his stats here are almost a perfect fit for the course this season and in a field this weak, it would not surprise me to see him break out. Jamie Lovemark is another player who does not have much here in terms of course history (MC in 2014, MC in 2012), but his game has evolved this past year and he is the type who is a boom or bust player, eithe contending or missing the cut. His stats point towards a positive result and we want him on some teams if that happens.

Ben Martin never gets much press, but has quietly put together a nice season so far. making five straight cuts and missing only three overall. He was 15th here two years ago and he ranks highly in the key stat categories this week. Sean O’Hair finds a way to hurt us whenever he jumps up on the model, but we have to set aside recency bias in order to roster a high risk/high reward player this week. He has made 5/6 cuts here with three Top 15 finishes and not counting a WD, he has missed just three cuts all season. He ranks well statistically and should be overlooked after burning owners in his last outing. David Hearn has great course history at the Zurich, having made the cut in all six starts with a number of quality finishes. He started the season slowly as it took him some time to adjust to the short putter, but over the last four weeks, he seems to be returning to form again. His putting numbers are off so far this year, but are beginning to improve and his tee to green game is not bad at all. I like having Hearn’s experience here and his potential to outperform his price.

Lucas Glover is perhaps the best ball striker on tour. Early on this year, he had even fixed his putter to a degree although now it appears he has reverted to his true self and his putting numbers are below average again. However, below average is still a vast improvement for Glover who typically is the worst putter on tour. Glover has made 7/8 cuts here with three Top 10 finishes, although I will note that he has been 60th or worse in three of his last four starts as well. He is still a frustrating player to root for, but he has made three straight cuts and outside of his putter, he has everything that we want this week. I wrote about Retief Goosen earlier in the column and mentioned that the veteran has played well lately in making seven straight cuts. He is not a real explosive player and certainly not a bit scorer, but he makes cuts and has three straight Top 30 finishes here. He is another player that I am using to make the cut and hopefully offer a little salary cap relief.

Tertiary

Charley Hoffman – 10% ($10,500)
Billy Horschel – 15% ($10,300)
Danny Lee – 15% ($8,500)
Boo Weekley – 10% ($7,800)
Luke List – 15% ($7,400)
Kyle Stanley – 15% ($7,300)
Will Wilcox – 10% ($7,100)
Stuart Appleby – 10% ($6,900)
Morgan Hoffmann – 10% ($6,700)

The last group of players are the guys I want to work into lineups, but for various reasons, do not feel quite as confident in as the players in the other groups above. Billy Horschel and Charley Hoffman are both strong players, but nowhere near as good as the top three players in the field this week. As I have staked myself to Justin Rose for the $3, I was forced to shed some shares of these two players, but still wanted to have some exposure as each is playing really well right now and both are nice fits statistically for the course.

Danny Lee has been maddeningly inconsistent this season, showing up at and event like The Masters and then blowing the cut at The Heritage with a triple bogey on the 18th hole Friday afternoon. He has played well here previously and tends to crush weaker field events so I wanted to have him on a few teams if he is on his game this week.

Boo Weekley is a course history play this week. he has three Top 10 finishes in seven starts and although he got off to an atrocious start this year, it looks like he is back in form again after making three straight cuts. He still makes me nervous, but he’s shown he can produce here and I think owners are still worried about his previous play which gives us an opening.

Luke List has been fantastic over the last couple of months and came through nicely for us as a sleeper play a week ago. He is making cuts and pressing for Top 25 finishes. Owners are starting to take notice, but his price has risen as well which should keep him from being overowned in this salary range.

Would you believe that Kyle Stanley has made eight of his last nine cuts? Of course, he ruined Jeff in Puerto Rico with the one miss, but his play has been very good outside of that. He is solid across the board this week in terms of stats, history (even finished 3rd here in 2013) and form. You could use him in cash games this week with the way he playing right now.

Will Wilcox was actually the last player to make it into the group this week, but seems to be trending in the right direction…I think. I love that he interacts with everyone on Twitter, but a part of me wishes he would keep it to a minimum at times so as not to be a distraction. When he is on his game, he is an excellent ball striker with a solid putter. When he is off, he can be all over the place. It’s worth the risk for a small buy this week.

Stuart Appleby has slowly clawed his way back to relevance over the last two months in making the cut in four of his last six events. He has made the cut in all four starts at the Zurich with a couple of Top 20 finishes. I liked him better at $5,900, but he is playing well enough to own a few shares this week.

I almost always just ignore Morgan Hoffmann, even when he is playing well. He finally had a nice result in his last event, finishing in 23rd place at The Heritage, and has shown signs of life in other events as well. He has made three cuts in three starts at the Zurich and with his one nice finish recently, I suspect that will be enough to get a lot of folks to jump back on to the bandwagon so although I think there is some potential here, he has been so disappointing that I do not want to get caught owning a large percentage of Hoffmann if he stumbles again.

Good Luck,

-myz
[/cointent_lockedcontent]