About a year ago, 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 the Quicken Loans National:
The r-squared value of 0.86 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 Quicken Loans National VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel:
Quicken Loans National Strategy
As usual, the best value in terms of odds to win versus pricing belongs to the studs in Rickie Fowler and Justin Thomas. After that, there are some golfers in the $6,000 and $7,000 range who could easily be paired with those high-priced guys: Si Woo Kim, Adam Hadwin, and Kyle Stanley are all underpriced relative to their odds this week. That said, these guys are not secrets: They’re all projected for at least nine to 12 percent ownership, and Stanley is particularly high at 17-20 percent. Going with a stars-and-scrubs approach is optimal in terms of finding the winner because of the excess value the studs provide and also because of the mispriced cheap golfers every week, but in guaranteed prize pools (GPPs) it still pays to find contrarian plays. Finding them in cheap guys keeps your overall roster upside high. Kelly McCann covers some cheap contrarian golfers in this week’s Five Under Five.
One intriguing guy is Luke List, who has a solid 51.04 DraftKings VBR and is just $6,900. As I mentioned on this week’s PGA Daily Fantasy Flex podcast, when a value player is projected to be chalky, the guys at similar price points tend to have diminished ownership rates. My example was Francesco Molinari at the U.S. Open; he was severely mispriced at $7,000 and as a result he was chalky and his surrounding golfers were incredibly contrarian (per our DFS Ownership Dashboard):
The DFS players who pivoted to Charley Hoffman at the same price were rewarded, as Molinari missed the cut and Hoffman went for 87.5 DraftKings points at just 1.64 percent ownership in the Milly Maker. We’re not projecting List for less than two percent ownership in our Models, but he should be lower-owned than guys like Hadwin and even Lucas Glover, whose 69.3 Long-Term Adjusted Round Score is elite for a guy at $6,900.
Finally, let’s talk about DraftKings and FanDuel pricing differences. In the table above, the last column is titled “Diff”: FanDuel VBR minus DraftKings VBR. The biggest discrepancies are listed below:
- Russell Henley: $9,200 DraftKings, $7,300 FanDuel
- Billy Horschel: $8,800 DraftKings, $6,900 FanDuel
- Patrick Reed: $11,100 DraftKings, $9,800 FanDuel
- Marc Leishman: $9,800 DraftKings, $8,500 FanDuel
- J.B. Holmes: $9,400 DraftKings, $8,500 FanDuel
Now that FanDuel’s golf product has changed — you roster eight golfers for the week — it is imperative to take advantage of mispriced golfers. It’s hard enough most weeks to have 6-of-6 golfers make the cut on DraftKings, and FanDuel has made it even harder with their eight-golfer lineup. A guy like Leishman, who has has averaged a +9.98 FanDuel Plus/Minus over his last 10 events and been especially impressive over his last five, goes from a solid option in cash games and GPPs on DraftKings to an elite, almost must-play option at his reduced price on FanDuel. The sharpest DFS players are sensitive to pricing across the two sites, and that definitely applies to daily fantasy golf.
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Good luck this week, and be sure to do your own PGA research with the FantasyLabs Tools!
