About a year ago, I introduced the Vegas Bargain Rating (VBR) metric to help identify discrepancies between DraftKings PGA salaries and odds to win a tournament. Such a metric is valuable because DraftKings weights player odds so heavily in their pricing. Take a look at the correlation between salaries and odds (as of Tuesday night) for THE PLAYERS:
The r-squared value of 0.89 is massive and suggests that DraftKings prices players almost completely by their odds to win the tournament. That’s useful information because, again, 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 the top-heavy first-place prize, 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.
Without further ado, here are the DraftKings and FanDuel VBRs for THE PLAYERS:
There are three main takeaways from the data; let’s run through each.
The DJ Dilemma
You might have noticed in the table that Dustin Johnson‘s 100 VBR on both sites absolutely dominates the field. In fact, he’s the only golfer on DraftKings with a VBR even above 50. In terms of VBR, DJ isn’t in a class of his own — he’s in a different school in a different district. In a different state.
The reason his VBR is so high is because the top golfers in the world hold so much equity in any given tournament. Because DraftKings and FanDuel contests operate under salary caps, it’s nearly impossible for them to price all golfers accurately; either the top guys are too cheap relative to their odds or the rest of the golfers are too expensive. It makes sense that the sites would rather price the top guys too cheaply: It’s more fun to roster them, and it’s not reasonable to price up an entire field because of one golfer.
For reference, DJ’s actual DraftKings salary this week is $12,000. If he were properly priced according to his odds to win the tournament, he should be $14,300, which would be a prohibitive salary unless he were supplemented mainly with minimum-priced golfers. Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy are also underpriced relative to their odds, although not nearly as much extreme as DJ: Spieth ‘should’ be $11,300 and Rory ‘should’ be $11,700. They’re actually $10,800 and $11,200. You might see where I’m headed with this: If you want to find a winner, it definitely makes sense to cram in two top guys.
Roster Optimization
You might think that, in order to roster the tournament’s winner, you should roster a balanced group of guys. But since those top guys, especially DJ, have so much equity in the tournament, it actually is more optimal to take two guys and then four “scrubs.” Here’s what that might look like (I’m definitely not telling you that this is the optimal lineup; make your own lineups with the Lineup Builder in our Player Models):
This may seem dramatic, but because DJ and Rory have high odds compared to the field, rostering them with other golfers who have no more than 1.0 percent odds to win is the most optimal route to find a tournament’s winner. Again, I’m not saying this is the optimal lineup: There’s only one winner, and guys with low odds to win often don’t make the cut. This lineup has the best odds of rostering the winner of the tournament, but it probably doesn’t have the best odds of scoring the most DraftKings points. Only one of Rory and DJ can win, and the other guys have a lot of risk and volatility.
The larger point is that you should be aware that the top guys are improperly priced. That may mean they’re going to have even higher ownership and thus depreciated value in GPPs, but the point still stands: The way to win a GPP this weekend is to roster the winner, and giving yourself the most exposure possible to the top guys while also not hurting the overall expected value of your lineups is the best strategy, in my opinion. Putting that strategy together into a lineup or 150 is another issue.
FanDuel Pricing
Before we end, I want to show the correlation between odds and FanDuel pricing. It’s much weaker:
That means there are more ways to exploit pricing inefficiencies on FanDuel, where (as a result) Spieth and Rory are more valuable as well as some of the second-tier of guys like Jason Day or Jon Rahm. They’re still overpriced relative to their odds, but the weaker correlation makes finding the winner easier. It’s not unfeasible to roster all three of DJ, Rory, and Spieth given this fact and the low salary floors of the “scrubs.”
Good luck this week.
