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.
Patrick Cantlay ($9,500 DraftKings)
While Cantlay’s current ownership projection (14%) isn’t incredibly low, it’s reasonably low for a smaller field like this. Additionally, he’s popping in our models with the third-best SimLeverage Score since he’s showing up in just under 20% of perfect lineups when we run our sims.
Cantlay is priced as the No. 11 golfer this week, but he has the third-best LT Adj Rd Score — a metric that is course and field adjusted. His LT Adj Rd Score trails only Jon Rahm and Cam Smith and is tied with Justin Thomas.
His irons haven’t been as sharp of late, ranking 32nd in True Strokes Gained: Approach, but he’s been solid everywhere else, ranking fourth in True Total Strokes Gained.
Cantlay’s $9,500 salary will still allow you to roster anyone in the $10,000+ range, or you can continue on with a balanced build.
Sungjae Im ($8,400 DraftKings)
Sungjae is in a weird price range that may go overlooked a bit. And if DFS players are looking around here, they may just go to Adam Scott or Joaquin Niemann instead.
Sungjae currently has the ninth-best SimLeverage Score as he’s showing up in around 10.5% of our perfect lineups, but he has an ownership projection of just 6.5% as of Wednesday morning.
His irons aren’t as strong as some of the other golfers here, but he has the ability to turn in strong approach performances. Additionally, Sungjae has a pretty balanced game, ranking inside the top 25 in all the main Strokes Gained categories (47th in True Strokes Gained: Approach).
I don’t mind mixing in Sungjae as he’s priced as the No. 22 golfer on DraftKings, but he ranks 14th in True Total Strokes Gained.
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.
