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 WGC-Mexico Championship.
The r-squared value of 0.91 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 WGC-Mexico Championship VBRs for both DraftKings and FanDuel.
GPP Strategy: The Initials
The two guys with by far the best VBRs this week are Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas. They have implied odds to win of 14.3 and 11.1 percent, respectively, and are some of the toughest fades in DFS currently. What’s interesting this week is that DJ and JT still have high odds despite the loaded field. That’s likely because there are only 65 golfers; the betting market is suggesting that the small-ness and loaded-ness of the field cancel each other out and make it a normal week. Of course, DFS isn’t played with just studs, and rostering either of these two guys means also rostering several cheap dudes. And that tier isn’t exactly enticing this week. Mathematically, according to Vegas odds, if you want to maximize your chances of rostering the winner of the tournament, you should take DJ, JT, and then four scrubs in the $6,000 range like Brandon Stone, Adam Bland, and Gavin Green. That’s not viable: Even if one of the top guys wins, the overall lineup will likely be brought down by the low-priced guys. It’s a tough week to go uber stars-and-scrubs, although the public will realize that, too.
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.
On DraftKings, Paul Casey stands out as the most mispriced golfer according to his talent. He has the 15h-highest salary at $8,400, but he trails only DJ and Jordan Spieth with his Long-Term Adj Rd Score of 68.1. For reference, his LT Adj Rd is superior to that of JT and yet he’s $3,100 cheaper. Of course, JT has turned up his play of late and has higher upside, but that $3,000 discount is too much and exploitable in cash games. As I mentioned in this week’s PGA Betting Guide at The Action Network, I want guys who can hit it long but also strike it well. Casey is one of the best ball-strikers in the world, evidenced by his 70.7 percent Long Term Greens in Regulation.
On FanDuel, the strongest values are three guys in the $8,000 range in Kyle Stanley, Francesco Molinari, and Charley Hoffman. They’re talented but have been priced way down due to recent play. Stanley, for example, is tied with Tommy Fleetwood with his 69.2 Long-Term Adj Rd Score, and Fleetwood is $10,000 and expected to be chalk at that salary. Fleetwood is trending up; Stanley is trending down — but their long-term marks are identical. Molinari is a fascinating player to speculate on: Just months ago on the PGA Flex podcast, Colin Davy said he was playing like a top-10 golfer. Recently, he’s been poor, and he’s coming off a missed cut after posting a first-round 77 at PGA National. These three might disappoint yet again, but they could also break out of their funk. I always like the strategy of buying low on talent.
Good luck this week!
Photo via Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports
