One of the first things I did when I started digging into FantasyLabs’ PGA data was to find a way to parse through the below-$7,000 golfers on DraftKings fairly quickly.
A part of my process that still needs work is identifying golfers that are low priced, but are relatively less risky. PGA inherently has a ton of variance, but my general checkpoints were as follows: first, since a golfer sub-$7,000 just needs 61.5 points to meet or even exceed value, I care if they have a higher probability of making the cut or not. Next, but less importantly, I wanted to develop a Trend that also incorporates form, but doesn’t chop off a predictive part of the sample. Finally, I needed to incorporate the number of tournaments played in a relevant range so we derive a decent sample of golfers that play often.
Using our powerful Trends tool that lets you build your own predictive pieces of data, I created something I aptly (lazily) named “Value Cut Makers”.
The methodology here really couldn’t be any easier.
Using Long-Term Missed Cut (MC) percentage and Recent Missed Cut percentage in tandem, I hopefully found a way to boost the probability of finding a cheap golfer that can make the cut away from 45%-50% to perhaps closer to 55-60%.
Recent MC% — any “recent” data — only includes the last six tournaments a golfer played and Long-Term data is over the last 75 tournaments. The Long-Term adjusted round dissects the difficulty/strength of the course and adjusts the number of strokes per round accordingly. I used 70.5 strokes per round and below because I wanted to only include players that are theoretically playing under par (on Par 71 and 72 tracks) on average. Together, this Trend keeps our usable golfer universe tight.
For example, this week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational there are 120 golfers in the field and 62 of them are sub-$7,000. This trend constraints that universe of 62 players down to five for the Arnold Palmer Invitational: Will Wilcox, Vijay Singh, Robert Streb, Colt Knost, and Stewart Cink.
Our “Value Cut Makers” Trend is not the be all and end all when it comes to bargain golfers, but I do think it serves as a nice starting point for analysis of low-priced players.
