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 correlation between salaries and odds for this week’s PGA Championship:
The r-squared value of 0.82 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, where the r-squared value is lower than on DraftKings, but FanDuel VBR is still useful:
Without further ado, here are the PGA Championship VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel:
PGA Championship Strategy
Based on VBRs, the primary strategy to employ is an extreme stars-and-scrubs approach. The reason is simple: In order to win a guaranteed prize pool, you almost certainly need to roster the winner of the tournament. Take a look at just how many people are in the DraftKings Milly Maker . . .
There are a variety of factors that go into selecting a golfer to roster in daily fantasy golf, including recent form, course fit, weather, and projected ownership. Those are all important, but there’s a lot of uncertainty that goes into every one of those data points; what is highly certain, however, is that in a GPP of 110,211 people you must roster the winner of the tournament. Rostering players who can win shouldn’t be your only thought, but it should be a primary one.
As usual, the best values in terms of odds to win are the highest-priced players. According to the regression analysis, Rory McIlroy, who is $11,800 and owns the highest odds to win with a 13.3 percent implied probability, ‘should be’ priced at a little over $15,200, given the odds for the rest of the field. The next player is recent British Open winner Jordan Spieth, who has a predicted salary of $13,000 but is priced at $12,000. The worst value according to this regression is Henrik Stenson, whose 2.2 percent odds to win give him a predicted salary of $7,800; he’s actually $9,800.
This doesn’t mean that Rory is a must-play and Stenson an auto-fade. Rather, VBR exists to help you create GPP lineups that have a better chance of winning. Because of the salary cap structure, it isn’t possible for DraftKings and FanDuel to price studs properly, and that’s a fact that can be exploited. Even if the odds for elite golfers are relatively low — for reference, the Houston Astros have an implied probability of 67.21 percent to win tonight — those golfers still have odds vastly superior to those of other golfers, and they’re higher in a way DFS sites can’t capture. In infinite worlds, Spieth and Hideki Matsuyama won’t win the British Open and the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational every time, but they’ll win more often than the guys priced beneath them — even after adjusting for salary. That discrepancy is waiting to be exploited in tournaments.
Other Value Ratings
I mentioned this in the PGA Breakdown, but you can do this same regression exercise with a variety of other metrics, including Long-Term Adjusted Round Score, our proprietary all-in-one stat that best identifies a golfer’s talent. Thus, an “Adjusted Value Rating” would best identify which players are the most underpriced relative to their long-term talent. Of course, that doesn’t factor in recent play, course fit, and other variables — that’s what Models are for — but it does provide an easy way to pick out who the best values are solely based on talent. If you’re curious, here are the top five underpriced golfers on DraftKings (and their Adjusted Value Ratings):
- Patrick Cantlay ($6,900): 68.5 LT Adj Rd, 100.0 AVR
- Francesco Molinari ($6,800): 68.7 LT Adj Rd, 97.2 AVR
- Steve Stricker ($6,800): 68.7 LT Adj Rd, 97.2 AVR
- Jason Dufner ($6,700): 68.9 LT Adj Rd, 94.4 AVR
- Charles Howell ($6,400): 69.1 LT Adj Rd, 94.1 AVR
As it turns out, the r-squared for FanDuel (0.53) in terms of salaries versus LT Adj Rd was much higher than for DraftKings (0.39). That suggests that while the latter prices players more on odds to win, the former prices them more on long-term performance. Here are the top-five AVRs for FanDuel this week:
- Patrick Cantlay ($5,000): 68.5 LT Adj Rd, 100.0 AVR
- Charles Howell ($5,200): 69.1 LT Adj Rd, 85.9 AVR
- Francesco Molinari ($5,900): 68.7 LT Adj Rd, 85.5 AVR
- Emiliano Grillo ($5,500): 69.1 LT Adj Rd, 82.4 AVR
- Pat Perez ($5,300): 69.3 LT Adj Rd, 80.8 AVR
Cantlay dominates on both sites, although it should be noted that his LT Adj Rd is based off a sample of seven tournaments over the past 75 weeks. He’s played well during that time, but it is unlikely he’ll continue to perform at a comparable level as his sample grows. He is still likely a more talented golfer than his $5,000 salary indicates, but take his data with a grain of salt. The other guys are intriguing, although they do have warts. Molinari is especially underpriced relative to his long-term form, but it is also hard to forget his brutal missed cuts at the U.S. Open and British Open this year. Still, AVR (like VBR) has value; if you can exploit pricing inefficiencies and salary cap nuances, you can give yourself an extra edge in taking down a GPP.
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