PGA DFS Core Plays: The Masters
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.
The Masters
It typically feels like a long wait between Masters, but this one kind of snuck up on us. I suppose that will happen when the last one was played five months ago. Before we get into the breakdown of Augusta National, a congratulations is in order. Jordan Spieth picked up his first win in nearly four years at the Valero Texas Open. He’s been knocking at the door for months and finally put together a near-flawless Sunday to pick up a win. It was a frustrating week of DFS for yours truly, but RG’s own Justin Van Zuiden had a nice $20,000 hit and I got a number of Tweets from members that had big weeks.
We now turn our attention to the year’s first major and my personal favorite — The Masters. If you are new to PGA DFS, this is the only major that is played at the same course every year. Even though Augusta National doesn’t release ShotLink data from past events, we have plenty of data to work with. The course is a Par 72 that measures 7,475 yards. The fairways here are wide and the rough is about as short as some of the fairways at your local muni course. Given the length of the course and not having much of a penalty for missing fairways, we can expect a ton of drivers to be hit this week. Historically, distance has been much more important than accuracy off the tee.
The field this year is set at 88 golfers and the top 50 and ties will end up making the cut. There are three amateurs in the field, a handful of older golfers that are highly unlikely to make the cut, and a number of below-average golfers that are only in the field because they picked up a win fairly recently. In other words, there are around 15 golfers that we can cross off our list of potential targets because their odds of making the cut are small. If we say 75 golfers have a real chance to make the cut, that means at least 66% of the field will end up playing the weekend and that’s if there aren’t any ties. I point this out for two reasons — we should expect the 6/6 through the cut percentage to be high and we can be a little more aggressive with our roster construction.
Even though there are golfers that buck the trend at the Masters each year, we generally want to target golfers that are at least average length off the tee, golfers that are good with their irons, golfers that avoid three-putting, golfers that are good around the greens, and golfers that know their way around Augusta National. It sounds like the course is playing much firmer and much faster than it did in November, which makes a lot of sense. It’s obviously a different time of year and after Dustin Johnson took the course apart five months ago, it’s no surprise that they would want to make the course a bit more difficult this time around. If that does end up being the case, it brings a few more golfers into play and in my opinion, makes Masters experience even more important.
As always, be sure to watch my model video which will be posted on Wednesday. Also, I am here to answer any and all questions you have about the course, contest selection, roster construction, or individual players. You can post your questions at the bottom of this page or you can reach out to me on Twitter or Discord.