The Daily Spin – Hero World Challenge

The Daily Spin – Hero World Challenge

Welcome to the final event of the year for The Daily Spin for PGA. I have had so much fun covering golf during 2022, 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 2023 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 2023 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 at the end of January, 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 since 2015 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 on Thursday this week so you should have plenty of time to get your lineups ready to go.

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 see something around -20 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 20 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.  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.

My preference is to also focus in on golfers that have stayed active throughout the fall. There are some noteworthy players that played through the DP World Tour Championship and stayed sharp the last few months while a few of the bigger names decided to relax and played very little outside of the Presidents Cup. Those golfers that played consistently are going to have the advantage this week in my eyes. Sure a player like JT could come out of nowhere and play well, but like any other sport, there is a competitive rust factor that comes into play, especially for an event that has a more leisurely feel to begin with.
Sign up for an FGI account today to see the rest of this post.