PGA DFS Core Plays - DraftKings & FanDuel: Shriners Children's Open
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.
Shriners Children’s Open
The Sanderson Farms Championship didn’t quite pan out as I had hoped. While my fade of Sam Burns ended up being solid, my pivot to J.T. Poston proved quite costly. My week can essentially be summed up as follows — I didn’t have any exposure to the winner Mackenzie Hughes and I had a lot of exposure to Alex Smalley, who decided to blow up on his last few holes to miss the cut. If you aren’t in the RotoGrinders Discord, I highly suggest hopping in there each week. In addition to all of the pre-tournament debates on players and roster construction, we all sweat our lineups together on Thursday and Friday.
With last week in the rearview mirror, we now turn our attention to the Shriners Children’s Open. This is my favorite event of the swing season and if I had to venture a guess, this will likely be the strongest field we see until January. Golfers will have to avoid cactuses (cacti?) and late nights on the Las Vegas Strip in order to contend at TPC Summerlin this week. The course is a Par 71 that measures 7,255 yards. All three par fives are reachable by everyone in the field and the current forecast looks rather benign. This is routinely one of the 10 easiest courses on the PGA Tour and we can expect that trend to continue this week.
Off the tee, golfers will see wide fairways (35 yards) with bunkers strategically placed in landing areas. The goal of the course has been to discourage the bomb and gauge play and make golfers be more strategic off the tee and on approach shots. When you combine the bunkers with the fact that it’s really tough to get the ball close to these pins from the rough and “waste areas,” pure distance is not the angle that we want to take in DFS. I am certainly still looking at off the tee metrics, but prefer to use total driving or strokes gained off the tee over driving distance.
The greens here are large in size (7,400 square feet) and easy to hit on average. They do feature a lot of undulation, so hitting approach shots to the correct portion of the green will be critical for scoring. We typically don’t weight strokes gained around the green at birdie fests, but it has actually been important at TPC Summerlin over the years. Perhaps it’s because you’ll often need to get up and down for birdies on the par fives or because when you miss a green, you can’t afford to make bogeys. The greens are made of pure bentgrass if you believe in putting splits. Strokes gained on grass type can always be found in my downloadable model.
The final note is that course history has been sticky here over the years, meaning it’s more important than most courses we see on the PGA Tour. I am placing a bigger emphasis on that this week and will also be manually bumping up the course history for the golfers that are based out of Las Vegas (there are quite a few in the field).
Downloadable and Customizable Model for the Shriners Children’s Open
Tournament Info
Field Size:
- 144 golfers
Cut Rule:
- Top 65 and ties
Weather Forecasts
Key Statistics
- Strokes Gained Approach
- Total Driving
- Birdie or Better %
- Strokes Gained Putting (Emphasis on Bentgrass)
- Strokes Gained Around the Green