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 Genesis Open.
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. 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 Genesis Open VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel:
GPP Strategy: DJ vs. the Field
For yet another week, Dustin Johnson dominates the field in implied odds to win. He’s at 18.2 percent currently (he moved up this morning from 16.7 percent), and below him sits Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth at 7.7 percent. DJ won this event by a ridiculous five strokes last year, and that’s right in line with his historical excellence at Riviera.
Of course, all this means that he should be expensive, and DraftKings indeed priced him as the most expensive golfer at $11,900, but that’s nowhere close to where he should be. Based on the regression formula for the field’s odds versus salary, DJ’s 18.2 percent odds should give him a price tag of $17,200 on DraftKings and $23,700 on FanDuel. That’s not possible given the salary cap, so instead he’s ridiculously underpriced relative to his win equity. He should be incredibly popular — he was around 35 percent owned in tournaments last week — which could make him a worthy fade in GPPs. But in cash games he provides unreal value.
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.
It seems to be a trend in 2018: Francesco Molinari is yet again underpriced on DraftKings at $7,200. This is one of the best golfers in the world: Molinari’s 68.7 Long-Term Adjusted Round Score is seventh in the entire loaded field, and yet he has just the 49th-highest salary. For reference, he has the exact same LT Adj Rd Score as Rory, who is $11,100. Part of the reason Molinari is cheap this week is his course history at Riviera: He’s missed the cut in two of his four visits, and in the other two he finished 52nd and 40th. The biggest reason he’s struggled of late has been his putter, which is concerning given that Colin Davy, on the PGA Flex podcast, suggested that putting is unusually important on this course. Still, buying low on one of the most talented golfers on Tour seems like a profitable long-term strategy.
Speaking of silly prices, I can’t think of a reason Patrick Cantlay would be priced down to $7,600. He’s been up in the high $8,000 or $9,000 range, and he’s still returned value, posting a +8.73 DraftKings Plus/Minus with a 70 percent Consistency Rating over his past 10 tournaments. He doesn’t have any recent course history here, which makes this price tag truly a mystery. Cantlay was the No. 1 amateur golfer coming up, and in 2011 as an 18-year-old he finished in the top 25 of his first Tour event. He played well in his first major that year, and then a week after the U.S. Open he scored the lowest round (60) by an amateur in PGA history. He then dealt with an injury and a personal tragedy, but the pedigree is obviously there, and he’s back to competing as one of the better golfers on Tour. Again, I don’t know why he got a price decrease this week, but I’m looking to take advantage of it in all contest formats.
Good luck this week!
Photo via Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports
