The Super Bowl of PGA and PGA DFS has arrived and so too has a special edition of Three Five(!) Vital DraftKings Trends for Masters week! It is going to be an awesome week of golf and there are some really fantastic DraftKings tournaments (besides the Millionaire Maker) that have very nice prize pools.
All of the trends you see in this article come from our fantastic Trends tool, which that lets you query thousands of different possible combinations of screens based on courses, salary, recent or long-term form, or just something as simple as Driving Distance. Pretty much anything your mind wanders to, we have it.
Before we get to the data, keep in mind the following:
- The cut for the Masters is the top-50 golfers and ties plus all golfers within 10 strokes of the leader.
- The field is only 90 players deep this week. This makes getting six golfers through the cut plus having at least two or three top-20 finishers absolutely paramount to place in large-field guaranteed prize pools.
Greens in Regulation: The Key to the Masters
If I tried to boil down one key statistic to hammer hard while doing research this week, it would be GIR. Nothing flashy. But seriously, golfers hitting GIR often is an absolute must for scoring at Augusta. How important is it?
Consider that, of the 16 golfers who finished tied for 12th or better at the 2015 Masters, 12 finished the week ranker in the top-16 in GIR percentage. That’s absurd. Three quarters of the golfers who hit the greens most often went on to finish T12 or better for the week.
The year prior? Oh, just 16 of the 20 golfers (80 percent) who finished tied for 14th or better were also in the top-20 for GIR on the week. I know, I know. Hitting the green often is always important, but here, at Augusta, it’s a necessity.
Driving Distance: The Second (Lesser) Key to Augusta
You can read analysis out there suggesting that DD isn’t 100 percent necessary at Augusta and that is somewhat true. Sure, some golfers like Kevin Na and Zach Johnson have done extremely well at Augusta despite hitting their drives about 11 percent shorter than the Dustin Johnsons and Bubba Watsons of the tour. Still, having that extra distance off of the tee is prettay, prettay nice at the Masters.
At Augusta, DD isn’t as strong of a correlate to high finishes as GIR is. Eight of the 16 golfers who finished T12 or better at the 2015 Masters were above average in DD. The year prior featured eight of 20 golfers who tied for 14th or better and also finished inside of the top-20 in distance off of the tee for the week.
Distance isn’t absolutely crucial, but it helps.
Sub-$6,500 Golfers With Adjusted Round Scores Below 70
All we’re trying to capture here is potential value so we can pay up for multiple higher-priced golfers who have a relatively high chance of winning. As I mentioned at the top, we need to have multiple golfers in the top-20 on our rosters this week and one great way of achieving that (with lower-priced golfers) is by using a trend that I have been tracking since we released our data.
It’s as simple as this: Here are the golfers this week who have an Adjusted Round Score of less than 70 in their six most recent events, sorted in ascending order:
Daniel Berger and Smylie Kaufman really stand out to me on this list. Berger is a golfer who can pour on birdies and seems to be rounding into form (his GIR percentage has increased in four straight tournaments), and Kauffman seems epically mispriced given his form this season. Here are Kauffman’s finishes on tour this year: 33rd, 15th, 14th, 25th, MC, MC, 37th, 8th, 12th, 17th (Dell Match Play).
Both golfers are also making their first trip to the Masters, which should keep their ownership levels palatable.
Justin Rose at Expected Low Ownership
For whatever reason, Justin Rose is always slightly underpriced and under-owned on a weekly basis. Rose is ninth in this field in long-term GIR and 14th in Driving Distance. He also owns the 11th-best Recent Adjusted Round Score (68) at the Masters.
Couple his excellent form with the fact that Rose ($9,900) is wedged in between Dustin Johnson ($10,200) and Henrik Stenson ($9,600) and there might be a nice leverage play to be had with more players gravitating towards the slightly cheaper Henrik Stenson or slightly more expensive bomber in Johnson.
Sign me up for Rose, who has hit 70-plus percent of GIR in four of his last five Masters trips and owns five straight top-17 or better finishes on Tour this year. Did I also mention that only Bubba Watson (-10) has a lower Recent Adjusted Par 5 scoring than Rose (-9.5) in recent events?
All the Brits! But, Seriously, Paul Casey is Underpriced
Well, we’ve apparently hit the part of the article where I just write about all the players from Britain. (I sort of like Danny Willett, too.)
I remember looking at the pricing when it first came out about three weeks ago and thinking to myself, “$7,700 is really cheap for Paul Casey.” I guess that impression stuck.
It took Casey a few tournaments, but he is really rounding into form as of late with back-to-back top-10s at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Cadillac Championship. This is coupled with the fact he’s tied with Justin Rose for the ninth-best Recent Adjusted Round score in the Masters field (68).
Casey has also hit 69 percent of GIR in his most recent tournaments (13th-best rate in the field) and is averaging an absurd 16.7 birdies/tournament in his last six events, which is tied with Rickie Fowler and Billy Horschel for the eighth-best rate in that statistic.
So those are my five trends for the Masters 2016. Good luck!
