An Analytical Means for Making Your Own Luck in Daily Fantasy Golf
Everyone likes a good sleeper, no matter what sport we’re playing. In DFS golf, like any sport, having a low-owned, low-salary player perform beyond not only our own expectations, but the expectations of everyone we’re playing against, is a key ingredient for most recipes that result in a top finish in a large-field GPP contest.
There are many ways to try to find these guys – there are off-field narratives, “gut/instinct” plays, random chance, course-fit, course history, and recent form, just to name a few. The ebbs and flows exist for all golfers, and some of them do it more rapidly than others, and there’s almost no angle that can be thrown out the window when trying to find the elusive “sleeper” that shocks the world, finishes at the top of the leaderboard, and wins us glorious amounts of money on our favorite daily fantasy website!
But I want to talk about one angle in particular that I use, and I’ve found out that some of the things we can learn with this kind of analysis can help us with our cash game plays, as well!
“Drive for show, putt for dough”
There’s long been an adage in golf – “drive for show, putt for dough” that pretty much sums up the sentiment that in order to win big golf tournaments, you absolutely have to putt at an elite level. I don’t really disagree with this sentiment at all, but I think it’s fair to say that as the game has evolved, we see the elite players in the world placing more and more emphasis on their tee shots. There is a cumulative edge that comes with elite driving distance – and the fact that every subsequent shot on a given hole is likely to be closer to the pin than your opponents – that cannot be emphasized enough, and it exists even on short courses, just maybe not to the extent that it does on others. But that is a discussion for another time.
If you have read any of my Course Fit articles (available under the Research tab for DraftKings PGA), you’ll know that I analyze the variance in scores associated with each hole every week, and try to make some conclusions about which holes will cause the biggest separation in the field. I’ve also found that variance can be a helpful tool in evaluating golfer performances with the goal of trying to be slightly more predictive than everyone else when identifying strong fantasy plays.
I think a lot of people attempt to analyze the variance of golfers’ scores from event-to-event and use those conclusions to identify cash game and GPP plays. People know that certain golfers are “consistent” and others are “erratic” or “unreliable” but “liable to go off at any time” – and those are good core fundamentals to differentiating between cash game plays and GPP plays for any fantasy lineup. Some people do this anecdotally, or by reputation, and other people probably quantify it, and I think you can have success with either method. But I want to look at something a little more in-depth, and something that I think isn’t such an obvious method for picking plays. After all, if we’re finding our low-owned, low-salary guys the same way that everybody else is, how much of an edge are we really going to have?
So back to the driving vs. putting debate. All advantages aside, one thing I’ve noticed is that putting is an inherently high-variance activity. Putting comes and goes and slumps and surges a tremendous amount compared to other golf statistics. That is the crux of this entire angle. Now how can we use that to help build better fantasy lineups?
Let me just mention that I do not have a mathematical proof handy, and if anyone would like to show evidence to the contrary, I’d love to learn from somebody else’s perspective, but in my mind it is safe to say that putting is a high-variance stat.
If you look at the Strokes Gained: Putting stat, you will notice that the best players on TOUR gain around 0.7 strokes per round from their putting, while the best tee to green players are gaining over double that. Also, the 75th percentile for tee to green is over double what the 75th percentile is for putting (0.78 vs. 0.35 approximately).
Editor’s Note: Haven’t heard? We’ve got DraftKings PGA incentives, which include full projections and expert picks from Notorious, as well as top plays from 2014 FSWA Golf Writer of the Year, Gibbathy! Expert Consensus Rankings and a Weekly Course Analysis are also included. Find out more about our incentives offerings here!
What’s interesting though is that, like the old adage says, we often see players at the top of the Sunday leaderboard who have averaged over a full stroke per round better than the field when it comes to putting. Obviously there are exceptions – but whether or not a player actually wins, wild swings in putting performances are often associated with dominant overall performances. Even Jason Day – who is generally an elite putter – has benefitted greatly from multiple rounds recently where he gained over 3 strokes through putting alone, an astronomical departure from his 0.7 strokes gained putting per round this season. Jason Day’s outlier stretch aside, these kinds of putting performances do happen, and they’re hard to predict, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still find an edge.
The reason why this is so, why putting can be so high-variance, starts with the fact that putting is just flat out really difficult. I like to look at long birdie putts like I do home runs in baseball. The very best putters have about a 25% chance of making a putt from a given distance, let’s call it 15-20 feet for the sake of this article, keeping in mind these are ballpark figures. This is a similar figure to the chances of a top home run hitter hitting a home run in a single MLB game against an average opponent, again using approximate figures, except most golfers get several attempts at these length putts throughout the course of an event. It’s well known that home runs are a high variance stat, and a key stat to monitor for almost any reasonable GPP strategy, but more on this later.
Something to keep in mind is how golfers that lose strokes putting end up losing them. You can’t lose any strokes really for missing a 30 foot putt, per se. You can lose strokes putting if you leave a 30 foot putt 15 feet from the hole, though. The catch is you can get them all back by sinking the 15 foot nightmare that you left for yourself with such a horrible lag putt, and no harm has been done. So what we see is the most common way to lose strokes putting is by missing more 6-10 foot putts than you should, and sometimes by completely choking on very short putts as well. The curse of the really bad, or even break-even putters on tour, is that they remain on tour usually by being exceptional ball-strikers, and often end up leaving themselves way more birdie putts than their opponents, which means more chances to miss, and more chances to give back the precious strokes they gained with their irons and tee shot. It’s inevitable. And the players who miss a lot of these putts usually get that way and stay that way for quite awhile. Obviously players make improvements, and once-great putters are now horrible, but I wouldn’t take any of these guys hoping that they totally transform their putting game for the one week that we pick them.
Why COULD we pick them though? Because they have the opportunity, over a short sample of 72 holes, and less than 120 putts, to get lucky. Now, hear me out. I never want to invest money on lineups just because I’ve got a bunch of guys in there who I hope will luck-out four days in a row and have a great week. So my first point would be – it’s hard enough to get this to happen for one player, I would take extreme caution in using this approach to select any more than one roster spot for your team (assuming we’re playing a 6-golfer DraftKings lineup).
I can make these plays sometimes, because we have well-founded reasons to believe some of these guys have a better chance of getting lucky than others. And perhaps more importantly, when they do get lucky with their putting, it might be to the tune of a top 5 finish, because they already do so many other things so well, and a lack of putting is the only thing keeping their salary and popularity depressed.
To again use ballpark numbers, I would say that every time a golfer sinks a 20-30 foot putt, that basically buys them two misses from 6-10 feet, as far as strokes gained putting are concerned. And making 20-30 foot putts is not something you can ever rely on, but they’re not as unpredictable or as rare as a hole-in-one or something, and for large-field tournaments, this is kind of the golf version of a “home run” that I like to look at when trying to build teams with the sole purpose of having a high upside.
Also, I threw a number of about 120 putts out there for a 4-round tournament, per golfer. A very ballpark number. But something else we have to realize is – the vast majority of these putts are nearly 100% guaranteed makes, or 100% guaranteed two-putts. Again using approximate numbers, PGA Tour pros make almost every single putt inside of 3 feet, and almost never make putts outside of 30 feet. I would say each of those shots are easily about 95%+ guaranteed what the result will be for any PGA tour pro when they step up to the ball. People totally blow putts and people make 50, 60, 70 footers, sure – but for all intents and purposes, only a very small portion of putts throughout the week are actually, let’s say, difference-making opportunities. This is what gives us a chance to rely on luck – a chance performance – a small sample – to find a player who actually has a chance to go from being really bad or break-even at putting, to having a career-altering tournament by knocking down a few more low-percentage putts than they should, simply due to variance.
So the first thing I would say is – looking at golfers who excel in almost all areas of the game except putting – we have a list of players who have inherently high upside potential. Now there are varying degrees of being bad at putting. Lucas Glover is probably the worst on TOUR this year, and even if he bombs in a few 30 foot putts on a lucky weekend, he’s bad enough that he’s likely to give all of those strokes back and then some before the 72 holes are over. That said, even Lucas Glover managed to pull of a win at the 2009 US Open, and if DraftKings had existed then, probably would have made somebody a million dollars if they played him :) And to this day, I’ve seen Lucas Glover appear in the GPP lineups of some of the highest-volume players out there, when he has a few other factors piling in his favor, as well.
(In the interest of full disclosure, Glover was actually a respectable putter in 2009. Just goes to show that these skills come and go like the wind for many TOUR professionals …)
So the situation that I see is, in a 72-hole golf tournament, you have the opportunity to make up for MANY bad putts with a FEW fantastic putts, and that is what drives me to look at these players who “do everything well except putt” very closely when building high-risk high-reward lineups. And unlike home runs, where some MLB players do not even try to hit them very often, or in some cases really don’t have the physical ability to hit the ball that far unless they catch one absolutely perfectly, at the risk of being purely anecdotal – these guys can all sink a 20-30 foot putt every once in awhile. Obviously the better putters do it way more often over the course of the season, but in a 4-round sample we might only need a handful of these low-percentage putts to drop out of 72 holes to have a massive over-achiever on our hands. When you can find one of these guys who is already fairly reliable in a lot of other areas from week-to-week, we have a formula of sorts to try to predict the unpredictable at a slightly higher rate than your average player.
Utilization for Cash Games
Another fascinating thing I realized while going down this analytical path, is that we can use the same principles to help us build cash game lineups, too. The idea goes like this: Great tee to green players survive off of generating a sheer volume of chances. Great putters generate a very limited number of chances, and make more of them than everybody else does. (And Jason Day does both, obviously :) ). Actually, most people who win tournaments do both, at least for that weekend, they just have a hard time “putting it all together” again week after week. So I think mathematically, your chances of molding into an acceptable or even good putter for one week is a lot higher than all of a sudden hitting the ball farther off the tee or controlling your irons perfectly for 72 straight holes, out of nowhere. There are large swings in both areas of the game, but like I said – the mere fact that you can change your putting stats for an entire round with one or two long putts gives us a fighting chance of “getting lucky” there, so I think it is a good angle to chase tournament plays on the premise of looking for the guys who are “one aspect away” from having a great round. Sometimes we find courses that don’t require a golfer to play to their weakness, and we can get an edge on their salary based on this kind of research from time-to-time, but in almost every tournament there’s several guys out there who are a few lucky putts away from contending, and getting lucky putting for a weekend happens a lot more often than getting lucky off the tee over 4 rounds.
But don’t let me forget about the cash games! So the simple fact that great tee to green players generate more chances, while great putters with get-me-by tee to green games generate less chances, but make more of them – makes players who do almost all of their work on the greens risky cash game plays. They have less chances and if they happen to miss a few putts and not gain strokes on the field in that area for a round or two, they are going to run out of opportunities to get them back very quickly.
Now, there are lots of caveats to this, and lots of other things to consider, but these are just a few things that I think are well-founded reasons to try to answer some of the harder questions we face when building lineups for all contests types. There are many elite players who survive this way – Henrik Stenson, Justin Rose, Jim Furyk, to name a few. If you watched Stenson’s play at the BMW Championship, everyone remembers him hitting it in the water to ruin his round, but what I loved to watch – was how he would consistently place himself so often within say 12 feet of the hole for birdie, and he really didn’t make as many of them as all the people who owned him wanted him to. But he would always come back a few holes later and hit a putt you didn’t think he had a chance at making, and bring his putting stats back level or better for the day.
The really interesting aspect is finding the guys who are cheap, but only because of their putting. Again there are varying degrees of being bad at putting, and this concept applies to players who are just “average” putters, as well. But players who are average putters and great at everything else very rarely get low salaries, and when they do they are usually obvious plays, so you’ll inherently have to take some risks with this strategy, but not much more than you would with any cheap golfer. Some things to watch out for are a few guys who have been transitioning, or going back-and-forth this season between belly putters and traditional putters. Webb Simpson comes to mind. I think he qualifies as one of the main golfers who would come up if you tried to find the kind of player I’m talking about. I’m not sure exactly how to model this or if we should expect him to get better at some point – but if he does – if you own him on the week that he finally figures it out, or the week where he gets lucky … he does so many other things well that you’ll have one great GPP play on your hands for bottom barrell salary! And there are many more like him out there if we can find them every week! I think the best players use this cautiously, but it is a powerful tool, and especially if you can find a guy who has several other factors in his favor – be it motivation, an upward trend, or especially guys getting back to a type of grass or greens that they are very familiar with – you have an even better chance of making your own luck and, through good research, being in the enviable position of being the guy who everyone is cursing at because they “got lucky” and played the $6900 guy who ended up winning the whole thing out of nowhere!
So I guess simply saying “putting is very streaky” would be fair, but hopefully some of the things I touched on lent some more insight into how we can use that to our advantage in fantasy golf contests. As always, feel free to drop me a line, either on the forums, in a PM, or in the article comments if anyone has anything to add, or questions to ask – or outright criticisms in my thought-process! If somebody proved that I was absolutely wrong about this, I would be glad to have opened the discussion and learned more myself! So, let me know what you think!