PGA DFS Core Plays: Sentry Tournament of Champions
Top-ranked grinder, Notorious, breaks down his favorite daily fantasy golf plays at various salary ranges for the coming week’s golf tournament. Who should you be building around? Find out below.
Sentry Tournament of Champions
While I have enjoyed the break, it is good to be back. Golf is the only sport where I don’t feel burnout during the course of the season. The NFL is a close second, but the last few weeks can be a grind with so many teams out of the playoff picture. The NBA and MLB regular seasons are so long that taking a few slates off is needed. When it comes to golf, I don’t miss a single tournament. Every Thursday morning I wake up and am excited to sweat my DFS lineups and my bets. While we don’t have a cut this week, we do have Shot Tracker back in our lives. I have a feeling that if the PGA Tour had any idea how much Shot Tracker enhanced the viewing pleasure of golf fans, they would make it their top priority each week.
Each new year always kicks off with the Tournament of Champions. To get into the field, you had to win a PGA Tour event in the last calendar year. This always provides one of the most lopsided fields of the season. The best players are obviously going to win a lot of tournaments throughout the year, but there are a lot of random golfers that win as well. This week’s field is stacked at the top, it’s stacked in the middle, and then there is a huge drop-off in talent. Typically, we want to employ more of a stars and scrubs approach in no-cut events. The idea is that all golfers are guaranteed to play four rounds and that we should chase the winning equity at the top. However, I don’t feel great about the cheaper options this week. Sure, some of them will pop up in the top 10 but I’m having a hard time deciphering the good values from the bad ones. I plan to employ more of a balanced approach in single-entry contests.
The Plantation Course at Kapalua is very misleading if you only look at the scorecard. It’s a Par 73 that measures nearly 7,600 yards, but it doesn’t play nearly that long. The elevation changes from the tee to the fairways along with the rolling hills create some mammoth drives. Have no fear, you will see plenty of 400+ yard drives this week. If you pull up the longest drives on tour each year, many of them come from this event. The fairways are extremely wide and golfers are somewhat at the mercy of where the hills end up kicking their ball. The greens here are absolutely massive (over 8,000 square feet on average). Wide fairways lead to a high driving accuracy rate and large greens lead to a high green in regulation rate. There was a renovation here in 2020 to make the course more difficult, but Harris English won here in 2021 with a score of 25-under par. This has played as one of the top five easiest courses in four of the last five years.
“Noto’s PGA DFS Model Breakdown Video and Download Link”:
Cut Rule:
- Top 65 and ties (156 golfers in the field)
Key Statistics for the Week
- Strokes Gained Approach
- Driving Accuracy/Fairways Gained/Good Drive %
- Birdie or Better %
- Strokes Gained Putting (Bermuda)
- Bogey Avoidance