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 Honda Classic.
The r-squared value of 0.84 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 Honda Classic VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel.
GPP Strategy: Stars and Scrubs
Unlike last week, when Dustin Johnson was an overwhelming favorite at Riviera, this week there isn’t a strong favorite, but the three studs at the top in Rickie Fowler, Rory McIlroy, and Justin Thomas stand out with the highest VBR scores. They’re all expensive, but the point of this data is that they’re still underpriced despite their high price tags on DraftKings. According to the regression formula, for example, Rickie ‘should’ be priced at about $14,700 given his 11.1 percent implied odds to win. He’s the most expensive guy at $11,700 but his $3,000 ‘price discrepancy’ is still the largest of the week. If your goal is to maximize your chances of rostering the winner — and, again, you should given the top-heavy GPPs — then getting access to these golfers, and probably two of them, is the way to go. That works well, as the next players up in VBR are low $7,000/high $6,000 guys like Byeong-Hun An, Patton Kizzire, and William McGirt. It certainly seems like a way to go uber stars-and-scrubs.
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.
Patrick Cantlay was the highlight of this section a week ago, and he was one of the most underpriced golfers we’ve seen in quite a while in daily fantasy golf. He led most of the weekend and ended up finishing T4 at Riviera. There’s not a Cantlay stud in the $7,000 range this week, but there are mispriced golfers relative to their talent. The two guys at the top on both DraftKings and FanDuel are Stewart Cink and Lucas Glover. Cink is just $6,700, and yet his Long-Term Adj Rd Score of 69.4 is tied for 17th in the field. For reference, he has a superior Long-Term score than, say, Russell Knox, who is priced much higher at $9,000. Glover has an even better score of 69.3, and he’s only $7,200. Cink has missed two cuts in a row and is 44, and Glover has poor history at PGA National, but they’re definitely underpriced relative to their talent.
Two other guys who stand out in the $7,000 range are Charles Howell and Russell Henley. Howell is the perfect cash-game play: Of golfers with at least 25 tournaments over the past year, he ranks third with an 83 percent Consistency Rating. He’s averaged an +8.54 Plus/Minus with a 70 percent Consistency Rating over his past 10 tournaments, and he seemingly fits the type of golfer you want at this course — ball-strikers who grind. Henley has also been solid over the past year, and he bounced back at Pebble Beach two weeks ago after missing back-to-back cuts. His 69.2 Long-Term Adj Rd Score is tied for eighth in the field; he has a superior mark to Alexander Noren, who is $10,100. Henley is a former winner here (2014) and has been striking the ball well of late. At just $7,700 he’s in play in all contest formats.
Good luck this week!
Photo via Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports
