Vegas Bargain Rating
I have been studying Vegas implied odds in daily fantasy golf for a while. What I’ve found is that, because of the correlation between DraftKings salaries and Vegas implied odds to win a tournament, using an extreme stars-and-scrubs lineup approach is optimal for PGA Tour DFS contests.
Because the correlation between Vegas odds and DK salaries is very strong, we can predict what a player’s salary should be based solely on Vegas odds. Measuring the difference between that number and a player’s actual salary, we can find inefficiencies in pricing and create essentially a ‘Vegas Bargain Rating’ (VBR), which can show us the discount or premium available on any given golfer’s Upside.
The 2016 Open Championship
There are a couple important things to note about Vegas odds and DK salaries for Majors specifically.
1. Not All Results Are Priced Into DK Salaries
Salaries for PGA contests on DraftKings usually come out Monday evening the week of the current tournament. For Majors, salaries are released at least a week before that and sometimes earlier. Because of the early release, not all tournaments and data can be properly priced into salaries. For example, Alexander Noren’s $6,900 salary this week was released before he won last week’s Scottish Open.
Of course, since Noren won the tournament, there might be some recency bias and thus inflated ownership levels this week.
To find value, we should look for golfers who 1) may fly under the ownership radar yet 2) still saw their data improve over the last week. Danny Lee is a great example of this: His current Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score) — now updated with Scottish Open data in our Player Models — is at 69.6. At only $6,300 this week, Lee provides great value with his statistics and odds to win (currently 0.9 percent).
2. DK Salaries Are Softer Than in Non-Major Weeks
I won’t get into why this is the case, but note that Majors pricing is typically softer than it is in other weeks, especially at the top. That also happens with loaded fields: For the Quicken Loans National a couple of weeks ago, Rickie Fowler was $12,000 and had 6.7 percent implied odds to win. This week, Dustin Johnson is also $12,000, has 10 percent implied odds to win, and enters the tournament with four straight top-five finishes, one of which is a U.S. Open victory.
This salary softness can be seen up and down the pricing scale, which makes the stars-and-scrubs lineup approach easier. Brendan Steele and Kevin Na both have elite LT Adj Rd Scores, and the former especially fits Royal Troon very well: Steele is both long (301.9-yard Driving Distance) and accurate (69.1 percent Greens in Regulation). They’re $6,100 and $6,500, respectively. You can lock in Steele, Na, the PGA Daily Fantasy Flex podcast favorite Emiliano Grillo, and two studs very comfortably without feeling as if you have a suboptimal lineup:
Line Movement and Open VBRs
The importance of line movement is a debated one here at FantasyLabs at the moment. We also talked on this week’s podcast about whether line movement was more important for Majors, given the amount of money bet on the tournaments. We have a live show tomorrow (Wed., 7/13) night at 9pm ET and we’ll discuss notable line movement then.
So know that lines will likely change — and we’ll update our data as soon as new information is available — but for now here are the VBRs for the Open Championship:
