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 the 2018 Masters.
The r-squared value of 0.89 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. The r-squared value is lower than on DraftKings, but FanDuel VBR is still useful.
Without further ado, here are the 2018 Masters VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel.
GPP Strategy: Taking the $9k Guys
Odds to win the Masters are going to be very inflated for a bunch of the top guys, most notably Tiger Woods. Still, it isn’t likely a player is going to stick above 10-1, and a bunch of guys in the $9,000 to $12,000 range are going to have similar odds to win. That means it could be wise to pay down a bit for golfers like Rory McIlroy, who just won the Arnold Palmer Invitational and is only $9,900 for the Masters, or Justin Rose, who has excellent odds at just $9,200. Rose has stellar history at Augusta, finishing second in 2017, 10th in 2016 and second in 2015. He’s also hot right now, winning or finishing in the top 10 in 11 of his past 13 tournaments. Given his current play, history at this course, pricing and current odds to win, he’s likely the best fantasy and betting value in the entire field.
Finding Mispriced Golfers According to Talent
We 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 average 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.
Because it’s a major, there are a ton of guys that are in the $6,000 to $7,000 range who are normally way higher than that in other tournaments. Take Francesco Molinari, for example, whose 68.8 Long-Term Adjusted Round Score of 68.8 is tied with guys like Matt Kuchar and ahead of someone like Tommy Fleetwood, who is $1,500 more expensive at $8,500 on DraftKings. Molinari is a tough golfer to analyze: His long-term talent is undeniable, but he doesn’t have great history at Augusta, finishing 33rd in 2017, 50th in 2014 and missing the cut in 2013. He’s also playing poorly at the moment: He’s bounced back slightly over the past two weeks, but he still hasn’t sniffed a top-10 on tour since the last major at Quail Hollow. He’s a very talented guy with major warts on his resume; will he surprise at low ownership?
On FanDuel, the guys that stick out are Rafael Cabrera-Bello, Kyle Stanley and Patrick Cantlay. The latter is especially intriguing with his 68.5 Long-Term Adjusted Round Score. Cantlay was one of the most promising young players on tour several years ago but took a break for a couple of years due to personal issues. The talent is there, however: He posted the lowest round in PGA Tour history by an amateur, and he was consistently competing in majors at a young age. He’s one of the most talented golfers on tour, and the pricing still hasn’t caught up with that; he’s just $7,600 on DraftKings and $9,300 on FanDuel. The only thing going against him is a lack of history at Augusta. He has played the course just once, in 2012, and, per Pat Mayo, the past 20 winners at Augusta have made the cut there the year before. Cantlay has the game to compete, but he’s at a disadvantage with course knowledge. Still, getting a top-15 talent at that low price tag is certainly intriguing in all contest formats.
We’re still a week out, and odds will certainly adjust, especially since we just finished WGC Match Play. Stay tuned to a ton more content here at FantasyLabs and The Action Network as we cover all aspects of the Masters.
Photo via Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports
