The Daily Spin – GPP Strategies Part IV

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Are you starting to get a little bit excited? We have hit Week 17 of the the NFL season which means that PGA golf is right around the corner. This next year is going to be one of the most exciting and nerve wracking for the DFS world. When football ends, there will be a huge influx of new players trying out golf for the very first time. Hopefully, the government gets out of the way long enough for these new players to stick around and to help grow the game for us. We expect there to be a Millionaire Maker for each of the majors and if we beg and plead with DraftKings, maybe we will see one or two more for some of the other big events in the early part of the season.

As these Millionaire Maker events tend to attract the most attention, they can be a lot of fun to enter for a great sweat if you can get a team or two in position come Sunday afternoon. More often than not, these events are going to break your heart, but don’t we all like to imagine ourselves winning that $1 million? These GPPs are posted many weeks ahead of time and the salaries come out well in advance of the events giving players ample time to speculate on their favorite golfers and sleepers. It is truly unlike any other fantasy sport out there with the amount of time you have to complete your research and to hear from almost everyone in the industry as to who is going to be the most popular play of the week, who will be the best value play and who the sleepers will be. It can be overwhelming to say the least. Fortunately, the majors tend to be the most profitable events of the year for us hardcore DFS golf fans so it is important to study up ahead of time and to formulate a plan of attack to keep yourself from getting lost in the flood of new players.

Not surprisingly, the way to make money during the majors is to FOCUS ON CASH GAMES. Yes, it was worth writing in all capital letters to make sure it grabbed your attention and held it. Most players who enter the DFS golf world for the first time or even the ones who play just a few times a year are not simply going to be playing in the Millionaire Maker and buying a solo lottery ticket into the event. Many of them are also going to gravitate towards cash games as well just like during football season. They may have had some success playing NFL cash games or double ups and now want to try out golf. These are the types of players that you are going to make your money off of during the majors. They will apply a formula that they used in NFL cash games, but get burned by taking unnecessary risks that punish a player in golf much more than for NFL games.

For the major tournaments, DraftKings alters the salary structure tremendously to attract new or inexperienced players. If a fantasy owner can build a team full of recognizable names, they will have a much easier time cheering for those familiar names over the weekend and will also make them more inclined to build multiple lineups. If owners really have to struggle with the salary structure for each lineup, then some of the fun is lost for those novice players and in return, they will give up after just building one or two teams. This creates a lot of opportunities for expert players to build lineups that cover the salary spectrum, but also take on very little risk of having players who have the potential to miss the cut.

The strategy that I used during the major events last season before even thinking about the Millionaire Maker events was to pick a pool of about 8-10 players that were pretty rock solid to make the cut. You want to look for the boring names in the field, players like Jim Furyk and Matt Kuchar, guys that would normally be in the upper tier of pricing that are now relegated to the upper middle tier with all the talent in these events. For courses like Augusta, there are certain players and styles that fit the course really well. The same tends to be true for US Open courses and for The Open even if they are not played at the same courses each year. The PGA Championship tends to be a little bit of a wildcard from year to year, but typically the style of course can be matched to other courses giving you a reasonable idea for who to look to for success or failure.

I recommend playing a little heavier in cash games than normal during most major tournaments. The biggest exception to this for me is when The Open takes place. The Open is a unique event, in my opinion as the weather is probably just as important as the course and its layout in determining a champion. Last season, the weather proved to be an absolute disaster over the first few days of the event, which led to the best scores for the event coming from those players who teed off on Thursday morning when the weather was at its best for the first two rounds. If you are really good at tracking the weather and are awake at 1am when the event starts, maybe you will be able to decipher the weather well enough to make it work for your cash games to your maximum advantage, but the weather there is so unpredictable and forecasts can change so quickly that it is tough to make a precise call leading up to the event. For The Open, I tend to wind back my cash game exposure to a degree unless I feel really comfortable with the conditions for the event over the first couple of days.

So now you are asking, what does this have to do with GPP strategy? EVERYTHING! I may have mentioned previously that I was able to get my dad into playing DFS for the first time this past year. He deposited $600 into his account. He likes to play a pretty even mix of cash games and GPP events in NFL and PGA events. It is not quite the optimal balance for a person looking to grind out a profit, but he looks at it as a chance to have some fun and to take shots at a big prize. When you see user, MacNCheeseSwag up there on leaderboards, that is him weaving his way to the top.

My dad was sharing his story of playing DFS the other week with a friend of his and mentioned that he had started with $600 in January and had about the same amount now. I told him that most players go on to lose their initial deposit and some lose their second, and third and fourth, etc. I explained to him that with his goals in mind, he was exactly where I would expect him to be as a player who takes his time does good research each week. With the amount of tournament exposure he has, he should expect to be breaking even or losing a small amount of money over many months until his patience pays off and he hits a good sized prize. This should be balanced out by the steady gains made each week in cash games that should cover the swings in the GPP portion of his bankroll.

Unfortunately, too often, people get absorbed into these Millionaire Maker contests and blindly start throwing their bankroll into them chasing down a big pay day. The truth of the matter is that these types of tournaments are not usually going to be profitable for any individual fantasy owner. They tend to play similarly to the weekly $3 GPP where you need to have a team finish near the top in order to make all of the buy-ins pay off. Now, if your goal in playing DFS each week is entertainment first with the possibility of winning a lottery, then perhaps chasing the Millionaire Maker is a suitable approach for you. However, if your goal in playing each week is to win money and to be profitable, then you should be prioritizing cash games over the Millionaire Maker and focus on the opportunities presented by an influx of novice players. Of course, if your bankroll is large enough to afford both, by all means take your shot at DFS immortality. Just do not forget that there is a lot of dead money in play during the majors that is there for the taking if you do not get caught up in the hype of the Millionaire Maker.

I am sure at this point, I have dissuaded nobody from wanting to take their shot at the big prize which leads us back to our original question: how do we go about crafting a coherent strategy to win such a long shot event? There are two approaches that you can take when building your rosters. The first method is what I envision from most fantasy owners and involves sitting down for hours on end building lineups over and over in a semi-random manner that focuses loosely on selecting core players, but also tries to incorporate as many peripheral players as possible. Usually, when people build out 100 lineups for the first time, they try to leave no stone unturned. They may use 50 different players in the hopes of being absolutely sure to find the winner among the players they have selected, even if that means that many of these players only appear once or twice in all of the lineups. The second method of building lineups for contests like this involves sticking to a tighter core of players for the vast majority of your lineups and tightening down on the group of peripheral players used as well. While this approach might hurt a bit more when it fails to identify some of the top finishing players, it does offer the advantage of giving you more opportunities to win when you have correctly identified the right group of core players to build around.

When the Millionaire Maker for The Masters was announced last season and the salaries were released, my first instincts were to start building lineups and loosely counting in my head how many times I had used certain players. I tried to do most of my work in one or two sittings in order to stay in the flow of things and to feel better about my unofficial count. When I had built my original 100 lineups, I then went back and copied them all into an Excel spreadsheet. I listed every golfer that I had selected and had Excel do a count for every player on that list. While the numbers looked pretty reasonable at a glance, editing the lineups to try to bring them into balance proved to be a difficult task. In looking at any individual lineup, it rarely occurs to you that a particular lineup ever seems like it could not be a potential winner so it becomes tedious to pick through each one in order to make small adjustments. More often than not, I suspect that people who use this rapid fire approach will get to the finish line, count the percentages and decide that they are close enough and do little editing.

The outcome for this style of approach is predictable. More than likely, you will have a pretty even distribution of finishes from top to bottom. If you are a regular player, your average team’s performance will probably be a little better than the average of the field so that overall, your teams will be a little better than someone taking a random shot, but that is not going to win you a lot of money. If you hit the perfect lineup, then it worked beautifully, but if not, you probably suffered 70-80% losses on average. While this is certainly one method that you could utilize to give yourself an opportunity to win, it is highly ineffective.

Following The Masters, I revamped my approach for the rest of the season for Millionaire Maker events. I wanted to find a process that I could replicate to some extent each time I went through building 100 lineups. The first idea that I thought about was the makeup for the winning lineup. Obviously, in order to win a GPP where there are over 100,000 entries, the winning lineup will almost certainly feature the winning player. Theoretically, this does not have to be there case, but it is far more likely than not. If you use that idea as a starting point, then it makes a lot of sense to try to give yourself as many opportunities as possible to have a lineup with the winning player on it. If you could be reasonably sure of who had the best chance to win an event, it just makes a lot of sense to overweight your exposure to them. I actually took this step at the PGA Championship last season when I created 100 out of 100 lineups with Jordan Spieth as my featured player. I did not like the idea of having so many core players that it would be difficult to get them to overlap in a meaningful manner so I made the decision to aim at a small range of players so that if my strategy worked and Spieth won, I would have the most possible chances to win the event.

My Spieth play came up just a bit short as he ended up finishing in 2nd place at Whistling Straits, but I did have some combinations that started with Jordan Spieth and Jason Day so I did end up with a few very strong finishes. While this is not an approach I will use in every major, it fit well with the narrative of last season where I felt absolutely certain that Spieth would be in contention on Sunday so although he did not win, my theory proved correct and I maximized my chances for winning had he been able to pull off a victory. My suggestion for owners playing in Millionaire Maker events is to use a similar approach. You may not be in on a player 100%, but perhaps choosing 3-4 golfers to center around and having at least 40-60% exposure on each is appropriate. With the number of entries being capped out at 100, you have to take some chances on who to focus on and who you are going to fade.

One of the things that you will always notice in GPPs with a large number of entries is that owners who utilize the second approach successfully are fairly easy to identify. Rather than having an even distribution of finishes in an event, they will have a couple finishes inside the top 100, perhaps ten or more in the top 1000 and the majority in the top quarter of the field. The opposite is also true. When they misidentify their core players, they lose on nearly every entry. It sounds like a high risk/high reward method, but if you were going to lost 70-80% in one scenario and 90% in another, you start to realize it is a high risk situation regardless of your approach. The benefit of the second option is that when you hit your core players on the head, you are going to have multiple opportunities to win rather than having to root for one specific ticket to go perfectly for you.

There is no perfect method for this concentrated approach, but if you take a little bit of time to get organized before your start plugging in lineups, you will have a much better chance to succeed. Take some time upfront to assign percentages to each player for how much overall exposure you want to have. I have gone as high as 100% on an individual player, but in no case should you ever include a player below 5%. If you want to use a player, give them multiple opportunities to succeed for you. If you hit the miracle long shot of the tournament, but he was only on a single ticket where two other players missed the cut, it will not help you win any money. When those players do well, hopefully you can get them through on at least one clean ticket where not other players were cut and given the fact that about 20% of tickets in major events will get 6 golfers though the cut, your hope is that 1 out of your 5 tickets with that lower owned player will be a 6/6 ticket. This rule helped me a lot in keeping myself from getting spread too thin across some very talented fields.

Once you have chosen how much exposure you will have to each player, you can start to construct some core groupings of players. Typically, a core group involves using 3-4 players many times together with different peripheral players plugged in around them. This gets back to the idea of maximizing your opportunities to win when you feel really good about a few players, but still have some uncertainties about the rest. You will want to identify 2-3 players in each salary tier (Blue Chip, Value and Sleeper) to use as your core players. My exposure to these players will be at least 25%. Typically, I will then select another 10-15 players to be used as peripheral players with ownership ranging from 10%-25%. Finally, I will select another 10 or so players to be used in small amounts of 5-10%. I like to keep my exposure to around 25-30 players for these events. Beyond that and it starts to get difficult to fit everyone across enough entries in an effective manner.

There is no perfect method for putting together your rosters at this point. The easiest way that I have been able to do this manually is to copy and paste my core groupings across and then just filled in the rest. If you have some skill at using Excel you can put together your own little lineup optimizer to help you churn out some rosters, but this is obviously not something that everyone will have available to them. Fortunately, there are tools being developed in order to help facilitate the process in the future. The most important part when starting out is to make sure you are somewhat precise with your top core players and not too far out of range for any of the others. It will be nearly impossible to hit every percentage dead on so do not go overboard in trying to balance things perfectly.

In terms of ownership percentages, the events we tracked last year did not give us a precise range to work from with the low end running at around 60% for the US Open all the way up to 99.9% for the PGA Championship, which played very close to the chalk. Of note is that each lineup had at least one player who was owned by less than 5% of the field and two players owned by less than 10% of the field.

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