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 Farmers Insurance Open:
The r-squared value of 0.87 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 Farmers Insurance Open VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel:
GPP Strategy: Rahm vs. the Field (Again)
I titled this section “Rahm vs. the Field” last week, and this week things are no different. Jon Rahm is the highest-priced golfer at $11,800, and he’s by far the favorite with 11.1 percent implied odds to win. He won last week, he’s gotten top-two in each of his past three tournaments, and he won this very event last year by three strokes. Further, he fits the course like a glove, given his long distance off the tee (305.9-yard Driving Distance) and excellent all-around play. It’s no surprise that he’s the best Vegas value, and he should yet again be one of the highest-owned golfers in the field. If you want to do nothing more than maximize your odds of having the winner in your lineup, Rahm is easily the best value even at his week-high price tag.
The second-best value is none other than former World No. 1 Jason Day. He had a disappointing 2017 campaign but looked to be getting into a groove at the end of the year: He’s hit value in nine of past 10 tournaments, averaging a robust +33.28 DraftKings Plus/Minus during that time. He’s still having some accuracy issues, but he’s very long off the tee — a prerequisite for success here given one of the courses plays at nearly 7,700 yards — and has shown his elite putting is still there. His 5.3 percent implied odds to win suggests he should be priced around $10,000, which means he’s around $600-$700 underpriced at his $9,400 salary. He’s missed the cut here at Torrey in each of his past two visits but won the year before in 2015 and finished second in 2014. He could be low-owned given his 2017 struggles.
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.
Francesco Molinari is clearly the most mispriced golfer on DraftKings: He’s tied for the seventh-best LT Adjusted Round Score in the field (68.7), and yet he has just the 38th-highest salary at $7,400. He has a superior score to, say, Brian Harman, who is over $2,000 more expensive. It’s unclear why Molinari is so cheap this week, although perhaps it is due to slightly negative course history. He’s played at Torrey just twice: He finished 14th last year but missed the cut in 2016. Still, this is one of the best golfers on Tour, and he’s not even priced in the top-20 in salary in this field.
The other players who are most underpriced are the usual suspects like Lucas Glover, Luke List, Emiliano Grillo, and Martin Laird. Perhaps the most intriguing guy is Patrick Cantlay, who is affordable at $9,500 and continues to play very well in his return from injury. The former World. No. 1 Amateur, Cantlay is currently tied for the third-best LT Adj Rd score in the field (68.4). Only Rickie Fowler (68.1) and Hideki Matsuyama (68.2) are ahead of him. Of course, he does have a smaller sample size of tournaments, but it’s no longer too small to trust. He’s played 16 tournaments over the past year, and he’s been particularly impressive lately, hitting value in nine of his past 10 and averaging a +17.1 Plus/Minus. If the talented golfer is indeed back to his early form, he’s more valuable than his $9,500 salary implies.
Good luck this week!
Photo via Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
