- The Travelers 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
Kevin Kisner ($7,500 DraftKings)
I’m rarely on Kevin Kisner, but this is likely one of the few courses he can compete at. While his ranking of 58th in True Strokes Gained: Approach isn’t anything to write home about, he still ranks 34th in True Total Strokes Gained — he’s got the ability to make up for his sporadic iron play with his putting and around-the-green game.
He’s projected for around 5% ownership, but Kisner is projected to be in around 9% of perfect lineups when we run our sims.
Overall, he makes sense as a pivot in tournaments if you’re looking to mix in some lower-rostered pieces with the chalkier Brendan Steele or just looking to pivot off him altogether.
It won’t take much to be overweight on Kisner relative to the field.
Tom Hoge ($7,400 DraftKings)
Another golfer in this range who looks like a viable pivot is Hoge. He’s coming in just around 8% owned, with a similar Perfect%, so he has a slightly positive SimLeverage Score.
That said, Steele could be one of the highest rostered guys on the slate, so Hoge’s ownership still makes him a viable pivot.
He’s one of the better iron players in the field — ranking 25th in True Strokes Gained: Approach — he’s also solid elsewhere — ranking 19th in both True Total Strokes Gained and True Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green.
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.
