- The RBC Canadian 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.
Last week was a good one as all five leverage plays I wrote up made the cut.
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
Sebastian Munoz ($9,200 DraftKings)
Munoz may be one of my favorite golfers to roster. You never really know what you are going to get with him. I’m never shocked if he goes nuclear and shoots -7 in a round, or if he shoots +7. I’ve rostered when he’s rattled off multiple birdies in a row and when he’s made quadruple bogey.
Because of his volatility, I usually shy away from him unless he’s going to be contrarian. To a certain degree — that looks to be the case this week as we have him for around 10.5% ownership — but I think he could come in under 10%.
Munoz is popping up in around 13.5% of our perfect lineups when we run our sims, resulting in a top-11 SimLeverage Score in our models.
All things considered — he’s a strong leverage play this week as he ranks ninth in True Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, including eighth in True Strokes Gained: Approach.
Adam Long ($7,800 DraftKings)
There is certainly nothing exciting about rostering Adam Long, but he’s showing up as a decent leverage option. Long is showing up in around 8% of our perfect lineups, but his ownership projection is a few points below that, resulting in a positive SimLeverage Score.
Long’s metrics don’t jump off the page, but he’s fairly average (or above average) in all the Strokes Gained categories and ranks 24th in True Total Strokes Gained.
He’s worth consideration in this top-heavy field where the talent drops off quickly.
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.
