PGA DFS Core Plays - DraftKings & FanDuel: Butterfield Bermuda Championship
Top-ranked DFS player, Notorious, breaks down his favorite PGA DFS plays at various salary ranges for the coming week’s golf tournament. Who should you be building around? Find out below.
Butterfield Bermuda Championship
It was a good week for the core plays at THE CJ CUP (why do tournaments insist on yelling at us?). Rory McIlroy picked up the win, Matt Fizpatrick finished T13, Corey Conners finished T23, and Aaron Wise finished sixth. My decision to chase the longshots instead of Rory in the outright betting market was costly, but that’s the nature of golf betting. We’ll look to keep the good start to the season going at this week’s Butterfield Bermuda Championship.
We head to the small island of Bermuda for this event. While Port Royal Golf Course is beautiful, the event does lack mainstream appeal. For starters, this is the weakest field that we’ve had in nearly a month. And on top of that, the event won’t have ShotLink data, which means we won’t be able to sweat every shot of our golfers. We’ll still get the “Shot 1 from the Tee Box, Shot 2 from the Fairway, etc.,” but it’s not the best experience and there seem to be more errors than most events.
As for the course, it’s a Par 71 that measures just over 6,800 yards. By PGA Tour standards, this is an extremely short golf course. It gets even shorter when you consider the fact that there are three par fives (all reachable in two) and three par threes that measure over 210 yards. In total, eight of the par fours measure less than 415 yards. When you combine the lack of length on the scorecard with the fact that the fairways are tough to hit, distance becomes close to irrelevant when trying to pick a winner.
Accuracy is certainly better than distance this week, but it’s hard to trust raw driving accuracy numbers. The longer hitters will be able to club down here, so their accuracy will naturally improve from their season averages. Regardless, it’s not a bad week to discount or even ignore off the tee metrics. In 2021, Brian Gay won this event. If you know anything about his game, he’s one of the shortest hitters on tour. He finished 189th of 196 golfers in strokes gained off the tee that year.
My thoughts on the course are backed up by the numbers as well. We don’t have ShotLink data from this event, but we do have the older statistics we can sift through. Let’s take a look at how the top 10 finishers of this event over the last two years have fared in certain statistics:
- Driving distance: 35.5
- Driving accuracy: 18.5
- Greens in regulation: 17
- Putts per GIR: 15
- Birdie or Better %: 8
- Scrambling: 8
Iron play is going to be critical, both in terms of hitting the green and providing golfers with good birdie opportunities. These greens are average in size and fairly difficult to hit. This creates a lot of scrambling opportunities, so it’s no surprise that golfers will need to scramble well in order to contend here. As you might have guessed, all of the grass on the course is bermuda — fairways, rough, and greens.
For a short coastal track that’s played in the swing season, Port Royal actually has some teeth to it. It has played in the top 20 in difficulty in each of the last two years and the averaging winning score here over three editions is 18-under par. With 20+ MPH gusts expected on Friday and Saturday, we can expect tougher scoring conditions for two of the four days. Experience on coastal tracks, experience in wind, and experience on bermuda courses will all help this week.
Downloadable and Customizable Model for the Butterfield Bermuda Championship
Tournament Info
Field Size:
- 132 golfers
Cut Rule:
- Top 65 and ties
Weather Forecasts
Key Statistics
- Strokes Gained Approach
- Strokes Gained Around the Green
- Total Driving
- Strokes Gained Putting (Emphasis on Bermuda)
- Birdie or Better %
Core Plays
Alex Smalley
DK: $9,500 — FD: $10,900
Total Driving — 2
SG: APP — 25
GIR — 3
SG: ATG — 65
SG: Putting (Bermuda) — 39
Noto’s Rating — 82.6