- The AT&T Byron Nelson 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.
PGA DFS SimLeverage Picks
Xander Schauffele ($9,700 DraftKings)
With most DFS players targeting Sam Burns and Will Zalatoris, at $200 and $300 cheaper than Xander, he makes for a solid pivot in this range.
Xander has the 11th-best SimLeverage Score (fifth-best in Perfect%) in our models and ranks fourth in True Total Strokes Gained, including ninth in True Strokes Gained: Approach.
Burns and Zalatoris are both projected for nearly 2x the ownership even though their projections and metrics are comparable.
Seamus Power ($7,900 DraftKings)
One edge that I think will always exist in all DFS sports (not just PGA DFS) is that people will always gravitate toward the “best” values given the reliability of projection systems these days, instead of just sacrificing a few projection points for more leverage on the field.
Adam Hadwin is projected for nearly 20% ownership (same with Mav McNealy) this week, while Power checks in around 9-10% despite them projecting within a few points of each other.
Over the course of a large sample, I’d expect the golfer with comparable metrics but lower ownership to be more +EV when it comes to placing in GPPs.
Power ranks seventh and third in our Perfect% and SimLeverage Score when we run our sims.
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.
