- The Valero Texas Open will be underway Thursday morning.
- Justin Bailey takes a data-driven approach on his favorite leverage plays.
- Strokes Gained data and the FantasyLabs Perfect% and SimLeverage in the PGA Models are the foundation of his analysis.
If you’ve ever read “Antifragile” by Taleb, then you’re familiar with how certain things gain from disorder in life. This notion certainly applies to DFS.
If there is one thing to take advantage of in PGA DFS (and DFS in general), it’s people’s overconfidence in their ability to predict what’s going to happen in the future.
Granted, you still need a lot to go your way in DFS. Even if you successfully fade highly-rostered players who end up failing, you still need to get your pivots correct to take full advantage.
The goal of this article is to help identify a few golfers we should consider using to help leverage our lineups against the field by using our brand new feature in our PGA Player Models.
If you missed it, we added two new metrics in our models — Perfect% and SimLeverage. You can find an explainer on those metrics here.
The cliff notes version is that you can use SimLeverage to quickly find leverage plays in tournaments, while Perfect% is great for finding the best price-considered plays for cash games.
And don’t forget about the tools that FantasyLabs has to offer, like our Lineup Optimizer to effortlessly create up to 150 lineups, or use our Lineup Builder if you like to hand-build your lineups.
This analysis may reference Strokes Gained, a set of proprietary metrics generated by the PGA TOUR using millions of data points to calculate how many shots on average it takes a player to get the ball in the hole from every distance and situation.
Strokes Gained is available in the FantasyLabs PGA Models.
When deciding on pivots to make, I keep things very simple.
I’ll look at ownership projections, discrepancies in betting odds, projected points, and I stick to more catch-all golf metrics like Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, Total Strokes Gained, and Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score) instead of getting very granular.
I’m always interested in a minimal approach in an industry that tries to overcomplicate things.
Let’s dive in.
Note: Data Golf’s True Strokes Gained data is over the last 50 rounds unless otherwise specified.
Abraham Ancer ($10,300 DraftKings)
Paying $10,300 for Ancer does involve some sticker shock, but he’s got the 11th-best SimLeverage Score in our models. This isn’t surprising since his ownership projection is in the low double-digits.
Rory McIlroy and Corey Conners are soaking up all the ownership above and below him, but Ancer is still showing up in 16% of our perfect lineups with our simulations.
He’s a strong pivot who has solid metrics. He ranks eighth in True Total Strokes Gained and has the seventh-best LT Adj Rd Score.
Note: Ancer just withdrew from this week’s tournament (7:01 p.m. ET)
Si Woo Kim ($9,600 DraftKings)
If you’re looking for a pivot off Corey Conners and Chris Kirk, look no further than Si Woo Kim. Si Woo is currently rating third in our SimLeverage Score. He’s projected for around 9.5% ownership, while Conners is checking in at 17.5%, and Kirk is 18.5%. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if both got higher than 20%. And even more so in small-field GPPs, where a lot of DFS players just throw in their optimal lineup.
Overall, Si Woo rates 12th in True Total Strokes Gained, including ninth in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee.
Note: You can create aggregate ownership projections in our PGA Models using our projections and other services such as FanShare Sports (available in our marketplace).
Now, let’s get to the golfer who is No. 1 in our SimLeverage Scores for this week’s tournament.
