Last year, I created the Vegas Bargain Rating metric for daily fantasy golf. The metric leverages the strong correlation between DraftKings golf salaries and outside data: Vegas odds to win the tournament. The two are highly correlated. For example, when DraftKings released its Masters salaries a couple weeks ago, the r-squared value for the salaries and Vegas odds was 0.817. Since these data points are so highly correlated — but not perfectly correlated — we can use the discrepancy (the missing .183, if you will) to spot “values” using Vegas odds.
The easiest way to do this is to plot the two data points for each golfer and then find a line of best fit. From there, we can see what player salary ‘should’ be (assuming perfect correlation), find the differences between the theoretical and actual salaries, and then put them onto a 0-100 scale to yield their Vegas Bargain Ratings.
Ultimately, this metric is all about discovering which golfers are the cheapest relative to their current odds to win.
The 2017 Masters
Let’s look at the data for this year’s Masters tournament, using first Vegas odds from last Monday (3/27) and then updated odds from today (4/3):
The first thing you’ll notice is that the r-squared value has decreased since last week. That makes sense: Since DraftKings bases a lot of its pricing on Vegas odds, and since A) DraftKings released the salaries weeks in advance and B) the odds have changed, salaries and Vegas odds would likely be less correlated now. And since that’s case — since salaries don’t adjust to the market but odds do — we will theoretically be able to find more value today and as the tournament approaches, especially once more sharp money enters the pool on Wednesday.
Here are the Vegas Bargain Ratings for last week and this week’s odds (as well as the differences):
The biggest changes have come at the top, and that’s mostly because a difference between, say, 4/1 and 5/1 is much larger than 100/1 and 150/1. If a high-priced stud changes in odds, it’s felt by the field much more than if a minimum-priced golfer essentially doubles his odds from 0.1 percent implied probability to win to 0.2 percent. As a result, the biggest fallers in VBR value are Jason Day and Jordan Spieth, who dropped from 7.7 percent to 5.3 percent and 13.3 percent and 11.8 percent. Further, the biggest jump belongs to Dustin Johnson, who went from 12.5 percents odds to win to a whopping 15.4 percent — or about +550 (11/2) if that’s how you think.
Spieth: Masters Report
Johnson: Masters Report
It’s probably weird to think about DJ being the best “value” in terms of his odds to win — I mean, he has the second-highest DraftKings salary at $11,300. That said, the high-end golfers own significantly more equity in terms of odds to win than the non-elite guys, so they’re actually the best values if you’re trying to select a lineup with the winner of the tournament. While trying to roster the tournament winner is probably an overrated strategy on a week-by-week basis, it’s certainly not for a guaranteed prize pool like the $3.5M Fantasy Golf Millionaire, which has 122,613 participants. You can do well and be profitable if you don’t have the winner in your lineup, but it would take an incredibly rare situation to get first place.
Given that so much value is available at the top of the salary scale, it’s probably not surprising that the best way to maximize your odds of selecting the winner is to go stars-and-scrubs. The top-three guys — DJ, Spieth, and Rory McIlroy — “own” 39 percent of the odds to win in the entire tournament. In fact, if you wanted to optimize a lineup simply for the purpose of finding the winner of the tournament, it would look something like this (via the Lineup Builder in our Player Models):
McIlroy: Masters Report
Of course, rostering guys like Fred Couples and Jose Maria Olazabal, who have 0.3 and 0.1 percent odds to win and a low probability of even making the cut, is a risky move. But winning a top-heavy contest with 122,613 participants requires risk. It probably doesn’t require that much risk, and there’s a middle ground here, but the point is that if you want to roster the tournament winner — and you (probably) absolutely need to do so to win a big GPP — you probably want go some version of a stars-and-scrubs lineup. On the plus side, stars-and-scrubs is likely to give you exposure to golfers with low ownership, which Pro subscribers can review in our DFS Ownership Dashboard shortly after the Masters starts.
The biggest movement in odds will likely start on Tuesday, so we’ll revisit this piece on Wednesday afternoon leading up to the Masters on Thursday.
