Daily Fantasy Golf: 2012 PGA Tour Fantasy Potpourri

With Daily Fantasy Golf now underway on DraftStreet, I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve picked up throughout my play on DraftStreet. Hopefully the potpourri bag of tips below will help out the Grinders who are newer to golf, based on my experiences playing on DraftStreet. And with the NBA All-Star break looming, there could be a good amount of Golf action going on this weekend. It’s not a bad time to take a swing at it…

1. Why Should You Play Fantasy Golf?

Frankly, it’s not that hard. Think about it, we have basketball and hockey going on right now with baseball coming up. In each of these sports you have to consider travel, time of day/how many games in a row team A has played consecutively compared to team B, injuries, coach’s decisions, weather and the list goes on and on. With golf, you can be guaranteed there will be 1 tournament every week and for the most part everyone will be traveling from it to the next except when golfers decide to take a break. Granted a few times players have to withdraw, but during the regular season that hardly ever happens at the last minute. It is a much more consistent pattern. Instead of having to worry about if 4 of your players aren’t going to get to start because the Yankees/Red Sox game is rained out and/or teams on the west coast don’t have their lineups out yet and maybe your guys aren’t playing, we can be assured for the most part, fantasy golf will be the same for everyone. There are hardly any outside factors. You pick the better golfers, you win. No luck of a thunderstorm or a coach’s decision to ruin your chances after you put in all that work.

2. Draftstreet Golf Prices

Phil Mickelson is priced almost $8,000 more than the world number 1, Luke Donald, this week at the Northern Trust Open. Last week I believe he was somewhere around the 10th highest price tag while Tiger Woods was priced way more than any other golfer. These huge fluctuations make no sense to me. Mickelson is now ranked #11 in the world with 1 good showing this year (the win last week) and is priced $36,208, which would mean 1/6th of your team would account for 36.2% of your entire bankroll on a golfer not even ranked in the top 10 in the world. I can only imagine what Tiger’s price tag would be back in 2000 if fantasy golf was around then.

I do however, think Draftstreet does a great job as a whole with all the pricing. My problem wouldn’t be with them on the Mickelson price. (Hey if you are willing to pay that price so be it!) If I could critique 1 area of Draftstreet golf pricing, it would be the majors and the playoffs. These tournaments are at full strength and prices need to be adjusted accordingly, not so that you are left with 1 good golfer and 5 decent guys. Last year during the playoffs you basically had to pick 1 guy in the top 25 and the rest in the bottom 30%. They need to allow for more creativity in the bigger tournaments.

3. Avoid the Beginning of the Year

Kyle Stanley, Johnson Wagner, Brandt Snedeker, Mark Wilson, Ben Crane, Martin Laird, John Rollins, and Charlie Wi are 8 of the top 10 players on the money list this year. Who saw that coming? The west coast swing is the “official” start of the year, but the World Golf Championship is basically the start of the year for the top pros and international golfers on US soil. It’s basically a crap shoot trying to put a team together in January and most of February so I avoid it altogether. This week I finally made a blog and hopefully it won’t turn out to be a complete embarrassment. I like comparing the sports betting world to fantasy sports in this instance. As the weeks go on in sports betting, most of the time you hear of bookmakers “adjusting” and the lines getting “sharper”. Well in fantasy golf (and I assume the other fantasy sports, although I don’t claim to know much about them) you are the bookmaker, and your picks should get “sharper” each week.

4. Old (Proven) Guys = Big Tournaments

I’m not a fan of paying for older players in the smaller tournaments mainly because they are priced way too high and their goal now is to win majors. Even if you listened to Tiger years ago during interviews, he always said his goal is to peak 4 times a year, during each major. Sure, they want to win every tournament they enter, but they are also just trying to fine tune their game for the right moments. Maybe the US Open favors a person who hits a left to right ball flight, so the big pros will try to work that into a competition before the actual major so he can see how it holds up under a bit of pressure. Meanwhile, the young guys are trying to grind out that smaller tournament to keep their PGA card for next year and needing to qualify for the majors, let alone tune up for them. For instance, Kyle Stanley is now number 1 on the money list. Before his win this year, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t even qualified for the Masters. Also, you can never underestimate the necessity of a strong mental game that has been tested in prior majors which is a strong point for picking older, but more importantly PROVEN guys in majors.

That’s all for now, good luck!