PGA DFS Core Plays: Valero Texas Open
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.
Valero Texas Open
Even though the WGC-Match Play didn’t turn out how I was hoping, it is quickly turning into one of my favorite events to sweat. Whether you are playing DFS of betting, you are glued to the television and/or Shot Tracker for as long as your golfers are on the course. I had a chance to get six golfers through the group stage in one of my main lineups, but Friday was absolutely brutal. Abraham Ancer and Patrick Cantlay both lost their matches and then lost in their sudden-death playoffs. Ultimately, we had a very interesting final four with Victor Perez, Billy Horschel, Matt Kuchar, and Scottie Scheffler. After a very windy final day of matches, Horschel came out on top.
In the alternate field event, Joel Dahmen picked up his first PGA Tour win. He was in awful form heading into the week, missing six of his previous seven cuts. While I did write him up as an elite play in this article, I am still kicking myself for not putting an outright bet on him. This marks the second week in a row I’ve forgotten to bet a core play and they have gone on to win the event (Matt Jones the week before at the Honda Classic). Dahmen has a great story and he might have the funniest caddie on tour. If you didn’t see his post-round interview from Sunday, take a few minutes and find it on Twitter. It’s always cool to see how hard these golfers have to work and how grateful they are when it all comes together.
This week we head to San Antonio for what many will treat as a Masters primer. TPC San Antonio does not serve as the same warm-up that Houston used to, but we still have a pretty strong field for this event being sandwiched between the WGC-Match Play and the Masters. If you don’t already have an invite to Augusta, this is the last chance. Golfers like Rickie Fowler can win this week to stamp their ticket to the first major of the year. TPC San Antonio is a Par 72 that measures 7,494 yards. The difficulty of the course largely depends on the wind and we are expecting tons of it this week. The course has ranked in the top 25% of difficulty in two of the last three years and we should expect it to play difficult again this week.
The fairways here are quite wide (33 yards wide) and with four par fives on the course, it makes sense that we’ve seen a lot of drivers hit here over the years. On average, golfers hit around 56% of fairways (lower than tour average) at this event. The greens are also difficult to hit, which creates a lot of scrambling opportunities. Given the fact that the fairways are tough to hit and that the course is long, distance is a slight premium over accuracy. With wind in the forecast, I will be looking heavily at around the green play. The greens themselves feature bermudagrass and should be around an 11 on the stimpmeter (not overly fast). I’m basically looking for strong tee-to-green golfers this week and I’ll take my chances when it comes to putting.