The Daily Spin – Hero World Challenge

Welcome to the final event of the season for The Daily Spin for PGA. I have had so much fun covering golf during 2019, but I am also happy to have a nice break for a couple of weeks. Do not fret. We have plenty of coverage coming up in the weeks ahead. In fact, if you leave now, you are going to miss out on some of the best offerings that we have all year in terms of the GPP summary that I put together each year and even more importantly, Jeff’s Crystal Ball for 2020 which has made those folks that bet on golf a lot of money over the last few years so be sure to stick with us as there great things ahead and the 2020 winter season is just around the corner so it will not be long before we are ramping up our coverage again. I can already picture myself walking along the fairways at Torrey Pines next month, catching a well earned break from the brutal winter that is about to blow into Minnesota over the next few weeks where it will remain for the next 3-4 months.

The Hero World Challenge is a Tiger Woods hosted event that is played each year down at the Albany Golf Club in the Bahamas. The tournament has been played here the last four years and has provided a fun respite from some of the weaker field events we have been forced to endure over the last three months. This event starts early this week so be aware that you need to get your lineups in early in order to be in on the action as the tournament runs from Wednesday to Saturday in order to help with travel plans for the Presidents Cup next week in Australia.

Tiger put this event together so that the best players in the world could get together in a beautiful place to play a few rounds golf around the holidays and close out the year with a little fun to end the year. The course is the easiest layout we are going to see all year. It’s unconventional with five Par 5 holes and five Par 3 holes. It’s wide open and the only defense is the wind so scoring tends to come easy and we’ll almost assuredly get into the mid -20s for the winning score once again this weekend. It’s a Par 72 course that plays at around 7300 yards. We are looking for the bombers this week. As long as the winds do not look too awful, this is a driver course which is why we have seen big hitters win here each year. Par 5 scoring will be key and the greens are Bermuda so look for those players that tend to putt well during the southeast stretch of events each year where Bermuda is predominant.

A couple of quick words on strategy this week. This event is a very tough one for both GPP and cash games. The 18 man field makes is very challenging to build unique teams. There are a few obvious squads that really stand out this week depending on who you start with at the top. The trick is to make sure that if you are going to multi enter the bigger contests, that you do your best to make some unique teams. This is the sort of event where owners will use every dollar more often than not. The only way to be unique this week is to hold back a few dollars of salary. There are a lot of weeks where I do this myself as I find that it does not tend to hurt my results by sparing a few dollars, but this week, the field is so strong that I really do not think you give up anything by opening it up. You do not need to build all of your rosters under the total cap, give yourself a wide range on the cap on the lineup builder and it will kick out plenty of teams well under the limit.

This is not an event to get too overextended. Like the Tour Championship, have some fun and build a few teams. Tune in to Tiger and the boys hitting it around the island and sharing a few laughs. If you are a cash game player, feel free to throw in a team in the smaller contests. There is not any need to get crazy. If you do not hit the winner on your cash team, you are going to be in a tough spot if it is someone that is even remotely highly owned, which almost every player outside of the bottom few will be for the week. There is not a tremendous edge in cash games with this small of a field. There is obviously no cut which means that it is very tough to make any mistakes at all when building your team. The whole week revolves around being overloaded on the winning player, uncovering the one or two deep value plays in the $6k range that hit and avoiding the golfers that finish at the bottom of the leaderboard.

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