The Daily Spin – DraftKings Preview – Wyndham Championship

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Recap

Harding Park was a great course for the PGA Championship last weekend and the resulting tournament ended up being fantastic. I love when a course is designed perfectly for a major. It forces players to be at their best and makes any deficiencies in your game apparent over four rounds of play. While there were not a lot of holes that created disaster in an of themselves, the cumulative affect of having to run the gauntlet of long, difficult Par 4 holes meant that players had little room for error as scoring opportunities were few and far between. While I do enjoy a good birdiefest, I also like to see players have to work to the best of their abilities to get through a round. Harding Park did not have any holes that allowed you to get away with a poor tee shot like other courses. If you were out of position off the tee, you had to work the rest of the hole just to make par.

The beauty of an event like this is that as more rounds go by, the leaderboard gets better and better. You might see some unexpected names near the top on Day 1 (Hello ZJ & Martin Kaymer), but that does not last (both imploded and missed the cut Friday). You see little runs by surprising names up through Saturday, but when you have a course like Harding Park, the impostors tend to get rooted out and it usually takes just a hole or two of mistakes to derail their charge.

By Sunday, we had plenty of drama to look forward to and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. So often during the golf season, you push through a lot of little events with less than stellar fields. More often than not, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the little events, as the drama of seeing a veteran players breath through to reach his dreams is always an emotional experience. While those are great moments, the joy of watching the best professionals in the world play out a dramatic major on a crowded leaderboard on a Sunday has to be one of the best experiences as a sports fan. As late as Saturday afternoon, there were still around 15 golfers that were in the mix to win the PGA Championship. By late Sunday, that number had dwindled, but we ended up with a fantastic champion in Collin Morikawa.

I cannot pat myself on the back too hard for having Morikawa as a core play last week. I think there are a lot of sports books that are still feeling the pain from all the 40-1 tickets that paid off with his win as our industry circled his name really hard and much of Twitter pounced. Hopefully, you got in on it with Jeff and Pari as I am still kicking myself for not adding him to my card. One of the most useful ways to use our betting article is to check to see where there is overlap among our picks each week. I make it a point to put my card together without reading the picks of the others on staff as they come into my e-mail (easy to do with Stat Boy since I do not get his until about 4:07am on Tuesday). Fortunately, Morikawa was on my cash game team and anchored another GPP squad that nearly helped me to take down the Mini-max tournament where I finished in 3rd place for the week.

My cash game team hit again for the second week in a row which always feels great. I’ve been up overall in cash games this season, but it certainly has not been an easy ride with plenty of losses peppered in along the way. Last year, I went on about a four month streak of wins where I felt totally unbeatable which was amazing. You start to feel invincible, like you figured the game out, but like I tell people, it is a journey with a lot of ups and downs along the way. You are going to have streaks where nothing seems to be working. Do not allow yourself to get frustrated. If your process is strong, over time, you are going to be a winning player.

You have to realize that if you are a single bullet DFS cash game player, that only means about 40-45 shots per year. That may sound like a lot, but in reality, you need hundreds, if not thousands of trials to see long term if you are a winning player. In the early years, you will likely be frustrated. It can take a couple of years of steady patience and practice to get to the point where you stop making careless mistakes. Do not let a little negative run ruin your confidence. Though you see me win more often than not, it is never as simple as seeing the prices on Monday morning, building a lineup and watching the money pour in. Remember, proper bankroll management is so important to your long term success in DFS. Often time, I will see people come along, get hot, build up a bankroll and play bigger and bigger stakes. Suddenly, a cold streak hits them and a month later they are hitting the ‘DEPOSIT’ button on DraftKings. What is happening here?

Always remember that if you have a percentage rule for your bankroll that you can never go broke. If you commit to only playing 20% of your bankroll each week, you can never lose it all. Often times, we get too eager to jump into bigger contests. There is a massive gap between the offerings on DK. To go from being a minnow to a shark is a huge leap in bankroll. I would honestly say that anything below a $25k bankroll should be playing it pretty close to the vest. There are plenty of great $0.50, $3 and $5 GPP contests where you can enter a lot of lineups. Stick to those and some of the smaller 3-max entry, or SE events. It is always tempting to shoot for the huge prize pools that are out there or the qualifiers, but these contests are going to suck your bankroll dry. If you are looking for the fun of chasing a big score, have at it. Maybe you will get a good sweat or two out of it, but more than likely, you will gut yourself quickly and become another DFS statistic. Play the long game with me. Grow your bankroll little by little. Work your GPP skills in some of the smaller contests. You’re not likely to get a big sweat all that often, but you will make money and not risk going broke and leaving the game completely.

For my cash team last week, I ended up with DJ/Berger/Morikawa/Day/Ancer/Reavie. Chez gave us a fun sweat on Friday. When he bogeyed the 9th hole to go to +4, I wrote him off for the week and was looking at my team trying to decide if my 5/6 team would hold up. He was not making birdies and his putter was ice cold. Somehow, he found it in himself to make four birdies to only one bogey on the back nine and managed a heart pounding save on the 18th hole, knocking in a 5 foot par putt to keep my team intact.

My top four were in great shape the whole weekend. After Morikawa blew a two foot putt on Friday afternoon, I figured he was not going to be a huge contributor, but that changed in a hurry. DJ played well as I expected (so much for that ‘back injury’). Like Brooks Koepka, DJ shows up for the most part when the lights are brightest. Once again, DJ struggled when it mattered most. At the end of his career, he is likely to remembered as one of the most talented players of his era, but like Peyton Manning, more than a couple of big games have gotten away from him. Jason Day continued his great run of recent play. I am not sure how he has done it, but his approach game has been resurrected from the dead. He was a couple of close putts away from being at the top with Morikawa and had the opportunities, but in any event, I am really encouraged by his game over his last four starts. I really thought Daniel Berger was going to be in the hunt on Sunday. His tee to green game is in such good shape right now and he is playing with a lot of confidence. It killed me to see his putter go cold on Saturday as he looked like the best ball striker on the course for much of the round, but could not drop anything in that 8-15 foot range that is so key for golfers to win a major tournament. Finally, Abraham Ancer struggled after making the cut and never really got into gear over the weekend. He was not terrible, but he had chances to get into striking range early Friday and then faded badly, hovering around the cut line before muddling through to the weekend. He’s got the tee to green game to be great, but needs to put it together at a big tournament to take the next step in what has otherwise been a very impressive season.

The only real big disappointment for me last week was Matthew Fitzpatrick. He has been playing so well coming into the tournament and I felt like the Europeans could shine, but some issues finally caught up with him. He’s been doing it all with his putter this season, which is usually a recipe for problems at some point and Harding Park finally put his tee to green game to the test. Perhaps I was a little too hopeful with Fitz and need to be conscious of longer courses that have narrow fairways with thick rough for him going forward. You need to be great with your irons on courses like that and Fitz struggled mightily Thursday with his approach game and the thick rough absolutely killed him when trying to scramble for par.

I also played some Rickie Fowler, who wrecked a bunch of GPP teams by making one of the most careless mistakes I have ever seen in my life on a golf course. He stepped up to tap in a putt from 6 inches and managed to just barely nick the ball an inch or so, which turned into a double bogey. He missed the cut by a shot. Tyrell Hatton also missed the cut which hurt. He looked so good to start the year and now so bad the last two times out. I do not know what to do with him the rest of the way this year. Is he the player who could not finished outside of the Top-10 to start the season or the player who has played really poorly the last two weeks.

Most of the rest worked out okay. Brooks fading did hurt a few GPP rosters and JT never got going, but I did make a nice run in the Mini Max as I built a team that was my cash game core (DJ/Mori/Berger/Day), but with two pivots, Finau and Scottie Scheffler. The team fluctuated over the last two rounds from as high as 1st, down to 20th and back to the top again. Two things kept me from winning. First, Ryan Palmer played a ridiculous round on Sunday. I did have shares of Palmer last week and I know that Stat Boy was picked up by his miraculous rally on Friday to make the cut, but he ended up finishing at Even par for the week, but had as many points as Xander who finished at -8 and in 10th place. Gross. The other factor that knocked me back was that absurd 95 foot putt by Bryson to end his round Saturday. I should have known it was coming when they flashed to him on the TV coverage, but he was in the mix and they do tend to show players finishing up their round. In my head, I thought, oh boy, this could be a three putt, that would be huge. Oh s**t, he made the f***ing putt. F**k me! F**k! F**K!!!!! Needless to say, I finished 3rd, not a bad effort. If you guys have ever wanted the experience of building 150 lineups for a tournament, you can do that in the Mini Max for $75 and the payout structure is not bad at all. It is not so top heavy that only a few folks near the top are profitable.

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