Last year, I introduced the Vegas Bargain Rating (VBR) metric to identify discrepancies between DraftKings PGA salaries and odds to win a tournament. Such a metric is valuable because DraftKings weights player odds heavily in its pricing. Take a look at the correlation between salaries and odds for next week’s British Open:
The r-squared value of 0.92 is high and suggests that DraftKings prices players largely by their odds to win. That’s useful information because it’s not a perfect 1.0 correlation. There are outliers, and identifying those can help us find value in our quest to roster the winner of the tournament. And that’s useful because daily fantasy golf guaranteed prize pools (GPPs) are massive these days. If you want to take down a top-heavy GPP, you almost always have to roster the tournament’s winner. The VBR metric can help you find golfers who are cheap relative to their odds of winning.
To calculate VBR, I find a line of best fit (shown above), ‘predict’ what a player’s salary would be if there were perfect correlation, calculate the difference between predicted salary and real salary, and then reset everything to an easy-to-understand 0-to-100 scale.
We can do the same exercise for golfers on FanDuel and FantasyDraft, although the former site has yet to release salaries for the British Open. The latter has, and although the r-squared value is lower there than it is on DraftKings, this is still a useful exercise:
Without further ado, here are the British Open VBRs for both DraftKings and FantasyDraft:
British Open Strategy
You might notice how much higher salaries are on FantasyDraft versus DraftKings. Don’t let that fool you: They aren’t that different in terms of percentage of the salary cap, and the scoring on FantasyDraft is quite similar as well. I wrote a FantasyDraft strategy piece last week when we incorporated the site into our Models; check that out if you want to get some action across all three sites for the British Open.
Based on VBRs, the primary strategy to employ is an extreme stars-and-scrubs approach. The reason is simple: In order to win a guaranteed prize pool, you almost certainly have to roster the winner of the tournament. Take a look at just how many people are in the DraftKings Milly Maker . . .
There are a variety of factors that go into selecting a golfer to roster in daily fantasy golf, including recent form, course fit, weather, and projected ownership. Those are all important, but there’s a lot of uncertainty that goes into every one of those data points; what is highly certain, however, is that in a GPP of 110,211 people, you must roster the winner of the tournament. Rostering players who can win shouldn’t be your only thought, but it should be a primary one.
Because of the salary cap and the way the sites price golfers, the biggest inefficiencies in terms of salary versus odds to win come with the top players. They simply can’t price the studs high enough to account for the discrepancy between their odds and the field’s odds. Take Jordan Spieth, who leads all golfers as of Thursday morning with a 100 VBR on both DraftKings and FantasyDraft. According to the relationship between odds and salary — the line of best fit shown in the above graphs — Spieth should be priced at $13,369 and $23,173. Thus, he’s essentially $1,769 and $5,173 underpriced compared to his odds to win and the field.
Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler, and Rory McIlroy also have high VBRs. You’re probably getting the picture now: Because of how underpriced these players are — how much equity they hold versus how much of the salary cap they take to roster — it makes sense to go heavy on them next week. They have the highest raw odds of winning the tournament, and when you combine that with their pricing it becomes clear how valuable they are. Rostering at least one and probably two of the top golfers is likely the best way to maximize the odds of rostering the British Open winner.
I do want to talk about the differing VBRs among sites and how we can use those as proxies for Bargain Ratings, but I’ll save that for next week’s update; FanDuel salaries will be out by then, and we can include them in our analysis. We’ll also be able to see some line movement, which will almost certainly occur after the conclusion of the John Deere Classic and the Scottish Open.
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