- The Mexico Open at Vidanta 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
Cameron Tringale ($9,700 DraftKings)
Rostering Cam Tringale is about as unexciting as it gets in PGA DFS, but at the time of writing, he has the second-highest SimLeverage Score in our models, showing up in about 16.5% of perfect lineups but is only projected for around 9.5% ownership.
You could do a lot worse than someone who ranks 12th in this field in True Total Strokes Gained, including 10th in True Strokes Gained: Approach.
Kevin Na ($10,100 DraftKings)
Kevin Na is a tough one — well anyone in this range is — because if you’re using Na, Tony Finau, Abraham Ancer, or Patrick Reed, that means you’re likely fading Jon Rahm. Rahm is projected for a monstrous 31% at the moment, so he will be a big decision point for a lot of DFS players.
With his huge ownership projection, Na has an ownership projection of around 10%, resulting in the third-highest SimLeverage Score as his Perfect% is around 16%.
Furthermore, with people wanting bombers this week, that could push Na’s ownership even lower. That said, he’s still in strong form, ranking second in True Total Strokes Gained and also leading the field in True Strokes Gained: Approach.
Na seems like a strong pivot if you like to get super contrarian. I wouldn’t be surprised if his ownership came in even lower with more people targeting Rahm, Finau ($300 more), Ancer ($200 more), and Woodland ($200 cheaper) in this range.
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.
