PGA DFS Core Plays: Zurich Classic
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.
Zurich Classic
For the first time ever, we have DFS contests for the team event in New Orleans. Both DraftKings and FanDuel are offering contests and the format is a little different on each site. DraftKings decided to list the players individually, even though they will be scored as a team. You will only be able to roster one player from each team, which makes mass multi-entry a bit difficult (although we have a fix for that in LineupHQ). FanDuel has their player pool listed as teams, which will make it easier to build rosters. The downside is that they won’t have live scoring (everything will be updated after each round).
While the setups aren’t perfect, we have to give props to both sites for figuring out a way to offer contests. I will gladly put in a little extra work to build lineups in order to have a sweat this week. As for the format of the event, the teams will play best ball in the first and final rounds (each golfer will play their own ball and the team will take the best score of the two for each hole). For the second and third rounds, teams will play alternate shot. The first teammate hits the tee shot, then the other hits the approach shot, and so on. One golfer will tee off on all the odd holes and the other will tee off on all the easy holes. There are 80 two-man teams in action this week with the top 35 and ties moving on after the first two rounds.
TPC Louisiana is a Par 72 that measures over 7,400 yards. It was designed by Pete Dye and like many of his designs, you don’t need to overpower it off the tee. We’ve seen a mix of shorter and longer hitters win here. The greens are small and feature bermudagrass, so the course fit isn’t all that different from what we saw last week at Harbour Town. The major difference is the team format. Golfers will naturally be more aggressive (especially on the best ball days). There will be plenty of narratives to chase (birdie makers, team chemistry, golfers that complement each other’s games, etc.). Personally, I’m not going to overthink it. I’m using my traditional ratings (which are an average of the two golfers on each team this week) and letting my model do the hard work for me.