- The Wells Fargo 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.
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
Sergio Garcia ($8,700 DraftKings)
We currently have Sergio projected for around 11% ownership, resulting in a solid SimLeverage Score since he’s popping in around 15% of perfect lineups. That said, that’s partly due to Paul Casey soaking up some ownership at $100 more expensive. Sergio’s ownership could inflate a bit after Casey was a WD from Wednesday’s Pro-Am.
Still, Sergio ranks fifth in True Total Strokes Gained, and he’s a monster off the tee, ranking fifth in True Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee.
Abraham Ancer ($10,400 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.
They’d rather pay for 25% owned Corey Conners instead of Abraham Ancer at 10-11%, who projects for just a few points less. Conners is the better golfer, but should he be nearly 2-3x the ownership?
Ancer still ranks 22nd in True Total Strokes Gained and has the third-best SimLeverage Score when we run our sims.
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.
