In the last two articles, I went over the implications of Vegas-based pricing and how to spot value by ignoring Vegas odds as an input to your decision process. There are some additional odds and ends concerning Vegas-based pricing that are still worth covering because it’s so different from other DFS sports. I see a lot of bad habits in PGA roster construction that are carry-over habits from other sports, and they’re bad habits specifically because they’re derived from the non-Vegas based pricing of other sports. We’ll talk about them in detail and point out some habits that are worth breaking.
First off, let’s go over some definitions. What do I mean by non-Vegas based pricing? In short, it’s the pricing mechanism for players in the big three sports (football, basketball, and baseball). Pricing for those players is roughly based on a last-10-days moving average of their fantasy points. That pricing scheme doesn’t care if those players are recently promoted backups, who their competition was during those 10 days, and is not forward-looking in the slightest. That also means it’s designed to be inefficient, which is why you hear phrases like “his salary hasn’t caught up to his production yet.”
Golf, on the other hand, is entirely forward-looking in its pricing when it’s based on odds to win. That’s why you can have players like Patrick Rodgers, who are priced $7,200 one week and $10,500 the next week when they play in much weaker fields and go from lower-to-middle players to tournament favorites. If you ever see analysis based on salary change or hear the phrase “his salary hasn’t caught up,” it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how PGA pricing works and you should probably ignore it.
In addition, there are some quirks about the combination of forward-looking pricing and golf being an individual sport that makes PGA DFS different from the big three. Specifically, the concept of value is a little different. In other sports, value is created most often when events happen between when pricing is released and when lineups lock. (Think NBA, when starters get injured and their backups play a lot more minutes.) In PGA, there are a lot fewer value-generating events that occur between pricing release and lineup lock. Let’s go over everything that can happen in this time frame:
- Golfers withdraw from the field. Sure, there are alternates that can take their place, similar to backups, but alternates usually aren’t even available in opening pricing, so there’s nothing to exploit. If it’s a top golfer that withdraws, everyone else in the field might have their odds to win increased, but it’s roughly in proportional to their existing pricing, so there’s no one that gains more than anyone else.
- Tee times get announced and weather becomes clearer. This is probably the only value-generating event in PGA, where if specific golfers have lower winds and/or higher temperatures for their allotted tee times, they will score better on average. Still, there’s no guarantee there will be a weather differential from week to week.
- Golfers will sometimes provide additional information, like how they like the course or how they’re feeling that week. Some people (including our very own CSURAM88) incorporate this into their process; I don’t because it’s tougher to do from a data-driven approach. This is also a low-magnitude source of value and is generally used as a tiebreaking factor at best.
That’s about it. There’s just a lot more already priced into players in PGA, and value isn’t generated as often. One of the corollaries of this difference is when there’s not as much value, it becomes much more difficult to roster top-end players when trying to maximize expected points (i.e. a cash-game lineup). As a sanity check to your process, you should see how often you’re rostering top-end players in your lineups. There’s generally not enough value to justify rostering these players, so if you’re finding $11,000-plus players in your lineups frequently, it’s a good basis for reevaluating your process.
