- The PGA Championship 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
Jon Rahm ($11,200 DraftKings)
Rahm is popping with the second-best SimLeverage Score in our models. He’s currently showing up in around 23% of our perfect lineups (Perfect%) when we run our sims, but he has an ownership projection of around 12-14%.
That projection could certainly hold, especially since Rahm (at the time of writing) will get the worse side of the weather draw. However, I think Rahm is still a worthy target given that there is some volatility in weather forecasts. Let’s also not forget that these guys are just really f****n good and can still play well in various conditions.
Relatively speaking, Rahm has disappointed this year, but he still ranks eighth in True Total Strokes Gained. If you can stomach targeting the poor weather draw, he makes sense as a leverage play.
If you’re just wave stacking this week, you do have the ability to pick and choose how you want to wave stack in our Lineup Optimizer:
Tyrrell Hatton ($8,100 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.
A perfect example of this is Tyrrell Hatton and Max Homa. Hatton and Homa are projected within one point of each other, but Homa is expected to be much higher owned.
Both players will get the good part of the weather draw, but Hatton is still a strong golfer and ranks 18th in True Total Strokes. That’s mostly carried by putting, but I think it’s +EV take a shot on Hatton in this spot when you factor in median and ownership projections.
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.
