It’s officially Masters Week! Hopefully the Shell Houston Open treated everyone well and if you spent some time loathing Brooks Koepka and Brendan Steele for missing the cut in Houston, it at least happened at the expense of preparation for the biggest golf tournament of the season.
As always, the point of this article is not to gloat or post my winnings. In fact, some weeks, as a primarily GPP player in PGA, I will struggle to eclipse the 80th percentile needed to cash in tournaments. Instead, the PGA Process serves as a review of our decision-making and what we can learn from our successes and failures.
(Lineup Percentile Score: 80th)
What Went Right at the Houston Open
So my contrarian plays of golfers around 5% or below ownership didn’t go so great — but at least Harris English made it to the weekend and he did card 18 birdies.
Just eight of the 22 golfers priced from $7,000 through $7,900 at the Houston Open made the cut and only two (Jamie Lovemark and Russell Henley) had a chance of winning the event come Sunday.
Which brings me to Jamie Lovemark himself. On Wednesday night I go through the golfers I have exposure to and make sure I am playing them for the right reasons (expected low ownership, mispricing, good course fit, unique element to roster construction, etc.) and realized I had 75% exposure to Lovemark. Typically in PGA I don’t love having massive exposure to one player because of the variance we always talk about, but Lovemark was way too cheap considering his recent form (T6, T31, MC, T20, MC, T6) and the fact he drives the ball a mile (307 yards on average). Driving Distance was a key statistic I was looking at for the Houston Open.
He’s sort of always unsexy, but it’s hard not to love Henrik Stenson when he plays. He’s missed just 3% of cuts in his last 75 professional events and his finishes in his last six PGA Tour events he played coming into the Houston Open, are, well, nothing short of absurd: 2nd, 2nd, T10, T2, T11, and T3. (Spoiler for a future article this week: Stenson is very mispriced at just $9,600 for the Masters).
J.B. Holmes’ late withdrawal changed this landscape, but I was expecting to get Charl Schwartzel ($9,500) at around 7-8% ownership with everyone, including myself, on Brooks Koepka ($9,300). Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: Koepka was a fantastic play at the Houston Open — he drives the ball forever (306 yards) and hits nearly 70% of GIR — but I did want to hedge off of him a little bit given the fact I knew he would be extremely popular.
What Went Wrong at the Houston Open
I’m hesitant to call Hudson Swafford a “bad” play at the Houston Open, but I had one of those classic option scenarios DFS players deal with every week. In this particular lineup, I was deciding between Swafford and Jhonattan Vegas. I liked both as sub-5% plays and wanted to evenly split my exposure to both.
Swafford and Vegas both had distance off of the tee (306 and 302 yards, respectively) and both hit players hit above 67% of greens in regulation. Swafford was tracking towards the cut-line before two double bogeys on the back-nine derailed his round and perhaps I’m only including Swafford here because I’m bitter he didn’t make the cut. That’s wrong.
In this article I have the ability of hindsight, which, to me, is a lot of power to wield. Still, I should not have allowed the ability to look in the rearview cloud my judgement of this lineup. Once hindsight bias starts creeping up, overconfidence seeps in. It took me looking back at some of my key stats I was looking at for Houston while writing this article to remember that Swafford wasn’t a very bad play at all.
“Just Beat the Field”
In DFS, we don’t have to be perfect or attempt to score the most fantasy points — we just have to be better than the field of players we’re facing. As I mentioned at the top, Brooks Koepka and Brendan Steele blew up a ton of lineups which led to the fact that the majority of lineups (35%) got 4-of-6 golfers through the cut.
Thanks to J.B. Holmes’ late departure on Wednesday night, Brooks Koepka’s ownership across DraftKings shot up to 28% on average. Now, Koepka was still a great play — but due to the variance of the sport, any golfer that is on more than a quarter of lineups is possibly worth just an outright fade. I’m really not sure that was the case here.
Sure, in hindsight I can decide that he was worth fading and I would be remiss without mentioning that I had 63% exposure to him this past week. Still, Koepka lined up beautifully with this course and came into the event with four straight finishes of T26 or better. The point here: just because something — or someone — doesn’t go the way you expected (i.e. an unexpected missed cut), it doesn’t mean you were wrong per se.
Okay, enough of the Houston Open. We’re on to… The Masters.
You can read past PGA Process articles here: Puerto Rico Open, Arnold Palmer Invitational and Valspar Championship.
