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PGA TOUR DFS Picks: Contrarian Golfers to Consider at THE PLAYERS Championship

  • THE PLAYERS Championship will be underway Thursday morning.
  • Justin Bailey takes a data-driven approach on his favorite leverage plays.
  • Strokes Gained data and the FantasyLabs Player Models and tools 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 ownership projections from Fanshare Sports in our Player Models (available in our marketplace).

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.

Get Your First Deposit Matched Up to $100!

Sign up and deposit up to $100

Your deposit will be fully matched

New users only

 

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.

  • THE PLAYERS Championship will be underway Thursday morning.
  • Justin Bailey takes a data-driven approach on his favorite leverage plays.
  • Strokes Gained data and the FantasyLabs Player Models and tools 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 ownership projections from Fanshare Sports in our Player Models (available in our marketplace).

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.

Get Your First Deposit Matched Up to $100!

Sign up and deposit up to $100

Your deposit will be fully matched

New users only

 

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.

About the Author

Justin Bailey is the Lead Editor for RotoGrinders and FantasyLabs. He’s been playing DFS since 2013 and specializes in small-field NFL and PGA contests. Justin qualified for the DraftKings Fantasy Golf World Championship in 2023.