- The RBC Heritage 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
Patrick Cantlay ($10,000 DraftKings)
Cantlay seemingly makes this column every single week, but I will continue to target him while DFS players are bearish on him as long as he continues to pop in our SimLeverage and Perfect% metrics.
He still ranks third in this field in True Total Strokes Gained, trailing only Cam Smith and Justin Thomas. Even though his irons aren’t totally dialed in, he still ranks 20th in the field in True Strokes Gained: Approach, and he has the third-best LT Adj Rd Score.
It’s a positive sign for someone who is the No. 5 golfer in DraftKings pricing. As a former cash game grinder (now mostly small-field single-entry GPPs), I’ve learned it’s usually +EV to take the ownership discount on elite players even if we are sacrificing a few projection points in the process.
In PGA DFS, it’s really easy to construct contrarian lineups while still selecting solid golfers.
Tyrrell Hatton ($8,600 DraftKings)
I had Hatton on my Masters team last week, and he likely would’ve been better off if he had just missed the cut instead of shooting +17 for the tournament.
Hatton is standing out in our SimLeverage this week, boasting the fourth-best SimLeverage Score. Overall, he’s showing up in 14.6% of our perfect lineups when we run our sims.
At his current ownership, it won’t be hard to be overweight on the field if you’re planning on mass-multi-entering. His play has been sporadic, but he still ranks 16th 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.
