As stated in my introductory article on the FanDuel golf series, the core difference between FD and DraftKings is the former’s split between Thursday/Friday and Saturday/Sunday scoring, which requires DFS players to designate the time slots for which their golfers are rostered. In order to make informed lineup-building decisions, we need to understand what projected scoring looks like for players across both time slots and how and why those projections differ. Let’s take a look at some actual data and see what conclusions we can draw.
The CareerBuilder Challenge
I applied FD’s scoring system to a sample tournament this year, the CareerBuilder Challenge, and ran scoring projections for both time periods for all players. Here are the distributions of top-to-bottom projections for both time periods:
FD’s roster rules mandate that you must pick four golfers from the blue line and four from the orange line.
There are a few observations (some obvious and some less so) about the shapes of these lines and what they mean for roster construction. In no particular order . . .
The Second-Half Drop-off
The drop-off in points is about 2.6 times greater for the second half than the first half. In other words, top golfers have a much higher premium in the second half due to their increased odds of making the cut. We all know this intuitively, but there was a question as to whether the decline was shallow enough to enable us to get cute from time to time by rostering a non-star/scrub in the second half of an event. Even as a super-low ownership play, such a golfer would probably give up too much point expectation to be rosterable on Saturday/Sunday.
Here’s how that graph looks when both lines are normalized (and also compared to the normalized DK projections for good measure):
That FD and DK second-half projections are so closely bunched together suggests how significant the odds of making the cut actually are.
The First-Half Flat Line
The first-half projection line stays remarkably flat, even at the ends. This is a partly because of a scoring system with no finishing points as well as a near guarantee that all golfers will play a full two rounds in the first half. That there’s such little separation between first-half golfers suggests that a stars-and-scrubs approach will likely be heavily utilized in the first couple tournaments, since most people will realize that scrubs are rosterable relatively free of consequence in the first half and in the second half stars who won’t score zero points are at a premium.
This likelihood is definitely exploitable from a game theory perspective, which leads me to my last observation . . .
The First-Half Ownership
First-half ownership will probably be the single biggest factor for success in guaranteed prize pools. A flat line means all golfers have very similar first-half expectations, so all else being equal we should see well-distributed ownership within a price range. Inevitably, that’s not what we’ll see, because people will probably just port over their DK analysis and/or listen to tout recommendations. Those first-half recommendations are the only real way to differentiate lineups in GPPs since there’s very little incentive to stray outside of the top golfers with second-half picks.
Combine this with no points awarded for finishing position, and you have a decent recipe for trying to find winning GPP lineups: Embrace similar projected outcomes for the first half, and ride the variance of low-owned plays. In any given tournament, I won’t be surprised if the top GPP lineups don’t even have anyone finishing in the top 5 on Sunday. Instead, they’ll have super low-owned first-half plays.
Looking Ahead
In the next article, we’ll 1) look at individual players’ first- versus second-half projections and the variation within that plot and 2) try to explain that variation by exploring what it means to be a first-half golfer versus a second-half golfer.
