The Daily Spin – Sentry Tournament of Champions

It is always a little bittersweet for me when the football season starts to wind down. I have been a massive football fan since the age of 5 and as you all know, my devotion to the Minnesota Vikings is very strong. When the Vikes get waxed by the Saints this weekend in the playoffs and I send my congratulations on to Marty Kearns I will start the countdown to Augusta.

In actuality, the beginning of each year is my favorite portion of the golf season. I love the Hawaii events and getting to watch golf later into the evening over the weekend. I love the west coast events. For whatever reason, much like CHIII, I always seem to come out of the blocks at a full sprint. Perhaps I am just a much better DFS player when it comes to poa greens and coastal courses. Of course, my favorite tournament of the year takes place at the end of January when I get the chance to head down to San Diego for a week to take in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. Part of the FGI team will be out for the weekend as Erik (Statboy) and Aaron (site developer) will join me for the tournament and if you are in the area, we would love to connect with you, grab a drink and walk a few holes while chatting up DFS.

If you have not been out to Torrey before, it is a gorgeous course with scenic views and the first two days are split between two courses so it is easy to get around and the crowds are light before the cut. Also, if you are currently in the military or a veteran like myself, you get free tickets for the event and there is a tent set up on the Par 5, 13th hole where there is free food and drinks. With the 2021 US Open coming in 17 months, we should continue to see strong fields for this tournament as players will want to get familiar with the course leading up to that event.

Before I get into the TOC this week, I want to discuss some new things with the site for 2020. As some of you have noticed, we added an exclusive slack chat channel for subscribers this week. You can sign up in the drop down menu for Tools or right here at this link: https://fantasygolfinsider.com/join-fgi-slack

One of the things that Jeff and I really want to focus on for 2020 is to maximize our interaction between our subscribers and the rest of the FGI team. Each of our columnists will have at least an hour during the week leading up to each tournament dedicated to being on slack to chat strategy and take questions. I love how easy it is to use and you can even download the Slack app and pull it up right on your phone. I’m a night owl so if you ever find yourself awake at 2am and have golf on your mind, shoot me a question and you’ll likely get a reply, especially late on Tuesday nights as I am grinding away at finishing my column.

As most of you have already noticed, we added a new weekly column for the year, our betting picks. We heard you loud and clear and as always, we try our best to deliver when we have demand from the market. Each week, you will see 4-5 picks to win from our staff in the column for you to lay some bets on throughout the season. Depending on the tournament and the composition of the field, each writer will pick one player at short odds, a couple in the middle range and one or two long shots. We think that combining this weekly column with the work that Jeff did with his Crystal Ball article for 2020 will give you a nice edge with your wagers this season. As always, this is an area that we can also hammer out on chat now that the slack channel has been established.

We also want to get a few other parts of the site updated coming into the year. One of the things we have heard from folks during the year is just how tough it is to listen to so many podcasts each week. Most drone on for close to an hour or more as ours has in previous years. Like you, I find myself scrolling through the list, fingers hovering over the play button, only to sigh when I see that it is 70 minutes. We thought, instead of trying to put more into it, forcing you to sift through it each week to get the real value, that instead, we would try to keep it to 20 minutes each week.

There are 1000 places to read about the course and the layout. Adam Daly covers it thoroughly for us in The First Tee each week. The recap portion is going to be gone. You have read our columns, played our recommended players and can track my cash lineup for every event. We’ll still throw a quick shout out to FGI members who did well, but you know how the tournament went so we will not waste your time with that. Our goal is to get into things right away, discuss strategy, the texture of the field and pricing and a quick look at how I plan to tackle cash games and how Jeff will approach GPPs. Plus, we do not need to give away everything on the podcast. We want to save the deep dive for you, our subscribers.

We also have Aaron working to update our player database going into 2020. We’ve had the Player Profile tab for the last few years where you can pull up an Excel spreadsheet that covers the basics of a player’s background, but we are revamping it now to make it much more user friendly and searchable. This way, when you want to know which players have a Texas connection, you’ll be able to search for it quickly rather than downloading the spreadsheet and sorting it or doing individual searches. Hopefully, we’ll start to be able to integrate recent results and course history into this tool as Aaron gets the chance to build it out.

Finally, we’re working on ways to try to zero in on ownership better each week. Jeff and I always get our numbers out on Monday night, but by Wednesday, the industry will have settled on its favorites. We are working on ways to incorporate the ever changing landscape of ownership as the week unfolds and are working on a few ideas to fine tune our numbers so that you will have the best possible advantage when building your lineups so that you can feel confident about the chalk each week and those plays which will truly be contrarian.

If there are any other ideas that you have for us, shoot me an e-mail in the next couple of weeks. When Erik, Aaron and myself sit down over cocktails down in San Diego for our annual summit meeting before the tournament, we will spend many hours going over the model, the tools on the site and anything that we think we can do to improve the user experience with FGI. We are committed to building the best site for our users when it comes to the total experience of tools and content so your input is greatly appreciated, even if we cannot implement every idea immediately. Now let’s get on to the Sentry TOC!

The tournament this week is always a fun stop on the schedule to start the new calendar year. The players come back well rested and Hawaii is a nice spot to ease back into the grind each year. The course is as easy as we will see all year and it is located on the coast in Maui so the views are beautiful. The only thing that could make it better would be if all of the actual champions from the previous year showed up to play! We are missing Tiger, Rory, Brooks, Rose, Molinari, Lowry  and Phil Mickelson this week so a lot of the star power is absent which makes pricing a little tricky this week.

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