Last year, I introduced the Vegas Bargain Rating (VBR) metric to identify discrepancies between DraftKings PGA salaries and odds to win a tournament. Such a metric is valuable because DraftKings weights player odds heavily in its pricing. Take a look at the (updated) correlation between salaries and odds for next week’s British Open:
The r-squared value of 0.89 is high and suggests that DraftKings prices players largely by their odds to win. That’s useful information because it’s not a perfect 1.0 correlation. There are outliers, and identifying those can help us find value in our quest to roster the winner of the tournament. And that’s useful because daily fantasy golf guaranteed prize pools (GPPs) are massive these days. If you want to take down a top-heavy GPP, you almost always have to roster the tournament’s winner. The VBR metric can help you find golfers who are cheap relative to their odds of winning.
To calculate VBR, I find a line of best fit (shown above), ‘predict’ what a player’s salary would be if there were perfect correlation, calculate the difference between predicted salary and real salary, and then reset everything to an easy-to-understand 0-to-100 scale.
We can do the same exercise for golfers on FanDuel and FantasyDraft, and I’ll include all three sites in the table below. In case you missed it, here’s Part 1 of this article. Here are the updated British Open VBRs for DraftKings, FanDuel, and FantasyDraft:
Line Movement
The most significant line movement has been with the studs, as the highest-priced golfer on DraftKings, Dustin Johnson at $12,000, has seen his implied odds to win the British Open drop from 10.0 percent last week to just 5.9 percent currently. Jordan Spieth has also dropped quite a bit from 10.0 percent to 6.7 percent, but he’s still tied for the top odds with public darling Rickie Fowler, who has seen his odds increase from 5.3 percent last week to 6.7 percent today.
That movement, combined with Fowler’s already ridiculously low price tag, should make him the chalkiest golfer this week. I mentioned this in the PGA Breakdown earlier today: Because of the high variance of golf, no one player is worth 30-plus percent ownership. If Rickie approaches that mark, then he’s essentially a must-play in cash games and a must-fade in guaranteed prize pools (GPPs). Be sure to check out our DFS Ownership Dashboard shortly after contests lock to track ownership rates across all buy-in levels.
In judging these players, there’s always a fine line between equity to win the tournament and ownership equity. You have to strike a balance with players, and it seems that people are currently overrating the former part in this delicate seesaw. It seems silly to fade a guy with this much equity — Fowler is the odds-on favorite along with Spieth and he costs just $9,200 on DraftKings! — but his ownership will likely make him a negative expected value play in top-heavy tournaments like the Millionaire Maker. Randomness happens every week, and Rickie, despite the high equity in terms of odds versus price, still has only 6.7 percent odds to win. Don’t forget that fact: It’s hard to win a major, and Rickie essentially has to win in order to make it worth playing him at his ownership.
Also, note that Fowler is so underpriced on DraftKings relative to his odds that no other golfer has a VBR even at 50.00. Rafael Cabrera-Bello has the second-highest mark at 49.79, which itself is a surprise given that most weeks VBR is skewed toward the high-priced studs. On FanDuel and FantasyDraft, however, the gap between Rickie and the rest of the field is much lower. Spieth, for example, has VBRs there of 88.55 and 83.33, and there are nine totals golfers on FanDuel who have VBRs of 50-plus. In theory, that could work to lower Fowler’s ownership because there are other cheap, valuable alternatives compared to DraftKings, but that dynamic likely doesn’t exist because of FanDuel’s low salary floor. The highest-priced golfer, DJ, takes up a very different percentage of the salary cap across the three sites.
- DraftKings: 24.0 percent
- FanDuel: 17.3 percent
- FantasyDraft: 18.4 percent
Further, despite the extra roster spots needed on the latter two sites, it’s still easier on FanDuel to roster the studs. If you filled all the spots on each site with minimum-salaried players, here’s the cap that would take:
- DraftKings: 72.0 percent
- FanDuel: 60.0 percent
- FantasyDraft: 72.8 percent
It’s difficult to fit studs in on DraftKings and FantasyDraft and easy on FanDuel. That means that despite Rickie being ‘less valuable’ on FanDuel and FantasyDraft compared to DraftKings, he’ll still likely be just as popular given the salary cap situations.
I’ll end my rambling there. Join us at 8pm ET for the PGA live show!
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