Two years 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 weighs player odds heavily in its pricing. Take a look at the correlation between salaries and odds for this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am:
The r-squared value of 0.77 is very 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 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel:
GPP Strategy: DJ vs. the Field
Dustin Johnson leads the field with 11/2 odds to win the tournament, which has an implied probability of 15.4 percent. There are three golfers below him with 9.1 percent implied odds — Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, and Jason Day — and last year’s winner, Jordan Spieth, has a 7.7 percent implied probability of winning. DJ isn’t just the favorite — he dominates the field in terms of Vegas odds. And that’s compelling given his pricing on both sites. Sure, he’s the highest-salaried player at $11,700 on DraftKings and $12,800 on FanDuel, but that is nowhere near where he should be priced based on his odds.
According to the regression formula, which is based on the collective odds and salaries of the field, DJ should be priced at about $15,900 on DraftKings and $21,500 on FanDuel. Clearly, that’s not possible given the salary caps on the sites, so instead he’s grossly mispriced according to his odds to win. If you solely want to maximize your odds of having the winner of the tournament in your lineup, you simply cannot get around fading DJ. Of course, I always want to throw in the caveat of projected ownership, but with the loaded field it’s likely he won’t be exorbitantly owned. When rostering a golfer you must consider the equity balance between his chances of winning and projected ownership, and given the huge weight of the former variable, he’s a very tough fade this week.
Finding Mispriced Golfers According to Talent
You can do the same exercise outlined above for a variety of metrics: Find which players are the best ‘values’ relative to their course history, their birdie-making ability, or their long-term talent. Let’s touch on that last one. We can use our signature PGA metric, Long-Term Adjusted Round Score, as a proxy for talent. It is defined as the averaged adjusted strokes per round over the past 75 weeks; adjustments are made to account for the difficulty of the course and the strength of the field.
Two players occupy the top-two spots in AdjRd Value Ratings on both sites in Russell Henley and Steve Stricker. They’re both drastically underpriced relative to their talent. Henley, for example, has the 17th-best LT Adj Rd Score but the 122nd-highest salary. He’s just $100 above the minimum on DraftKings, and his LT AdjRd is superior to the mark of Branden Grace, who is priced at $9,100. Henley doesn’t have the greatest course history in the world — he has a 52nd and a missed cut in his two appearances since 2010 — but seems to be a fine fit for the courses here. He’s coming off two missed cuts at the Phoenix Open and Sony Open, but he barely missed them, and $6,600 is just too harsh of a price decrease.
Another guy that is standing out in terms of Adj Value Rating is Paul Casey, who is fairly high-priced at $9,400 but still an incredible value given his 67.9 LT Adj Rd Score. That marks ranks second in the field behind DJ’s, which means in our most important golf metric, one that is a better proxy for talent than perhaps any other singular metric in the industry, he stands above guys like Spieth, Rahm, Day, and Rory. He’s one of the best golfers in the world and likely deserves to be priced near the studs at the top of pricing range. Further, he also fits this course like a glove, as he’s one of the best ball-strikers on Tour and is especially adept at scrambling — two traits identified as important at Pebble Beach on our PGA Flex podcast. Unfortunately, Casey won’t be sneaky like Henley; he’ll be one of the most popular players in all formats this week. He’s worth it.
Good luck this week!
Photo via Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
