The Daily Spin – Sony Open

The Daily Spin – Sony Open

RECAP

Golf is back and the Tournament of Champions delivered our first thrilling finish of the year. For the second time in just over a year, Collin Morikawa completely melted down in the final round of a small field event (see Hero World Challenge, Dec 2021, Round 4 for previous event) and gagged away what looked like an insurmountable lead. A couple of bad shots early sent him into a mental retreat, the likes of which we have seen only a handful of times over the years. On the other end of the spectrum, Jon Rahm turned into a cold-blooded assassin, firing a 63 and closing out the tournament with a dagger on 18 that slammed the door on Morikawa before he had even reached the green.

For my own teams, this worked out well and after yoyoing around for the first two rounds, my cash team finished in the green on Sunday with plenty of room to spare. It is always nice to steal a win in a no-cut event like this one. It is much tougher for our opponents to make mistakes in these sort of events so it becomes extremely important to nail the high dollar golfers in our lineups and avoiding the landmines that plummet to the bottom of the leaderboard on the first day and make little effort to move up the board after that. This was a rare time where I managed to entirely avoid any grenades in my lineup which meant that outside of a catastrophic final round for multiple players, I knew I would be well positioned going into the weekend.

For my cash lineup, my starting point was always going to be Jon Rahm. The combination of his recent form, dominant course history over many starts and the newer, flat pricing structure on DraftKings made him an easy choice to build around. We also knew that going into the tournament, he was likely to be the highest owned golfer in cash games by a large margin. Why is this important? Many of you have heard me talk about this at length on our podcast or in these pages in my columns. The last thing that you want to do with a cash game lineup in a tournament of this type is to turn it into a bet on Jon Rahm playing well or poorly. Rahm ended up being over 60% owned in the $100 double up this past week. When a player like that wins the tournament, if you did not roster him, you are at an immediate disadvantage and need to make up a lot of ground with your team. If he does not win the tournament, but still finishes near the top, you could still be in rough shape. Rahm has never finished outside of the Top-10 at Kapalua so at worst, maybe he ends up T7 and your usage of him neither helped nor hurt you.

In GPP contests, it makes a little more sense to pull the fade if you want to play the ownership game. While Rahm has dominated at Kapalua, you know that at some point in his career he will eventually throw up a dud performance and finish 19th or something along those lines. If you fade him throughout the entire run, you may lose for 4-5 years in GPP contests, but if you are consistent in your approach, you should be pretty live the year when he struggles and hopefully you select the right core to take advantage of the moment. However, in cash games, there is no need to try make these sorts of ‘hero calls’.

The other consideration that we need to think about this year is the way that DK has shaken up its pricing algorithm again. There have been a few different eras of pricing at DK and my feeling is that in 2023, we have entered an era of flatter pricing, much more akin to what we are used to over at FanDuel where you can consistently build stronger lineups from top to bottom. What does this mean for us in cash games? It is likely that going forward it will be considerably easier to roster the top golfers in the field without having to make big sacrifices in other portions of your lineups. At the 2022 TOC, Rahm was $11k, but this year he was only $10k. That does not seem like a huge difference, but when you get down to that last roster spot, it can make a huge impact on the quality of your team. I am not 100% certain that this will continue throughout the year, but I want you to keep an eye on it as this marks the second week in a row where the top priced golfers have not reached the $11k mark. If this trend continues, expect ownership of golfers like Rahm, JT and Scottie Scheffler to skyrocket in cash games this year beyond what we have witnessed over the last few years. Be sure to plan accordingly to adjust your strategy as needed to counter this trend in both cash game and GPP contests.

The rest of my lineup was focused on finding the best value plays in the stack and seeing how much cap space I had at the end to select my final star players. I locked in Tom Hoge almost as quickly as Rahm. His salary was ridiculously low last week for an event without a cut. Hoge’s irons have been about as good as it gets on tour of late which set him up well for Kapalua. I certainly was not expecting a 3rd place finish, but went in believing a Top-10 was within his grasp. He gained over 10 strokes on approach last week and though we know he will go through stretches during the year of uneven play where he will miss a lot of cuts, this was a low risk week to use him even if he was not totally on his game.

My other two value range golfers were Seamus Power and Brian Harman. I loved the form for each player coming into the tournament as Power had a win and two other Top-10 finishes to end the fall and Harman had a pair of 2nd place finishes along with two other Top-25s to start his season. Harman continues to be lights out from tee to green and though he was not great with his putter last week, he is usually a solid player on Bermuda greens. He finished 16th for the week and missed a 7 foot birdie putt on the final hole on Sunday that would have secured the AU70 bonus. Power was not quite as good, but not awful either. He shot 69 the first two rounds and 70 the final two rounds, slowly slipping back to 25th by the end of the tournament. He did manage to be bogey free on Sunday though he did not make a birdie over the final nine holes which was costly in terms of his overall placement. Fortunately, this was my worst performing player and it was not even all that bad.

I had plenty of flexibility on the final two roster spots. Sungjae Im was a player that I circled as soon as I saw the salaries for the week. He had back to back Top-10 finishes at Kapalua and a game that seems tailor made for the course. $8300 seemed $500-700 lower than what I would have expected last week on price so I was never hesitant in getting him into my lineup. He delivered a 13th place finish for the week which is about the floor for what I would have expected. He could have broken into the Top-10 on Sunday, but a bogey and then a double bogey on the back nine proved costly.

My final golfer for the week was Justin Thomas. I love playing JT in these types of events as he seems to turn his game up around the best players in the world. Unfortunately, he was not at his best last week. He ended up with three double bogeys over the weekend, letting a few holes get away from him on a course that usually does not push players all that hard. His 25th place finish was poor for someone that has won at Kapalua previously and been in contention many times. I was lucky that it did not hurt my team, but you can get away with an off week from JT when the rest of your roster holds up well. I’ll take the win to start 2023 and am excited to move onto our first full field event of the year.

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