PGA DFS Core Plays: WM Phoenix Open
Top-ranked DFS player, Notorious, breaks down his favorite PGA DFS picks at various salary ranges for this week’s tournament. Who should you be building around? Find out below.
I’m not going to lie, I had to thank my lucky stars after last week. Despite using both Xander Schauffele and Max Homa in my main lineup, I was able to secure a profit thanks to my value plays. We’ll never know if the tournament ending a round early helped or hurt our bottom line, but I do wish they could have gotten all 4 rounds in at Pebble Beach. Nevertheless, we now turn our attention to the WM Phoenix Open. I have been to the festivities a couple of times, and let me tell you, the tournament lives up to the hype. If you aren’t familiar with the party stadium built around the 16th hole, you will quickly find out what I’m talking about when you watch the coverage.
TPC Scottsdale is a Par 71 that measures 7,261 yards. Unlike Pebble Beach, this is a driver-heavy course. The average driving distance here in 2023 was 303.5 yards, which was one of the highest marks of any course on TOUR. You don’t necessarily have to be a bomber to play well here, but it’s important to gain strokes off the tee (either through distance, accuracy, or a combination of both). The fairways are generous (33.5 yards on average) and the rough is playable, but golfers can’t afford to spray the ball. This is desert golf, which means there are a lot of waste areas that could result in taking unplayables.
Noto’s PGA Model Download & Video for the WM Phoenix Open
Familiarity with the course and the event is a big deal in my eyes. For starters, this is a unique course that features risk/reward holes and tricky greens. All three par 5s are reachable, but there’s trouble lurking if you don’t hit a good drive and a good approach shot. The 17th hole is driveable, but there is water on the left side and behind the green. More importantly, this event has an atmosphere unlike any other. I mean, Harry Higgs and Joel Dahmen took their shirts off and started drinking beer on the 16th hole…DURING THEIR ROUND. The atmosphere can cause a bit of shell shock to golfers playing the event for the first time.
As far as course fit, I’m looking for good drivers of the ball, good iron players, and good scramblers. We’ve seen bad putters have success here (Scottie Scheffler, Hideki Matsuyama, etc.), but golfers will need to be precise with their irons to get close to these tricky pins and be good around the green when they miss with their approach shots. The better a golfer is tee to green, the more I like their fit for this course. We can expect the winning score to be in the 15-to-20 under par range, so the course plays a little more difficult than most of the ones we have seen on TOUR this year.
PGA DFS Picks: DraftKings & FanDuel Core Plays for the WM Phoenix Open
Field Size:
- 132 golfers
Cut Rule:
- Top 65 and ties
Weather Forecasts
- Roth’s Forecast (link coming soon)
- Windfinder
- Accuweather
TPC Scottsdale
- Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
- Par 71 — 7,261 yards
- Difficulty: 2023 (17th), 2022 (26th), 2021 (42nd), 2020 (18th), 2019 (24th)
- Fairway width in landing areas: 33 yards
- Green size: 7,100 square feet
- Grass type on greens: poa annua
Event Notes
- Only 1 course this week… HALLELUJAH!
- Most attended event of the year, it’s an absolute party
- Average driving distance here last year was 303.5 yards
- Definitely a driver-heavy course, but you don’t have to be a bomber
- Features three par 5s and a driveable par 4
- Tough to get approach shots close to pins
- Bad putters have excelled here, but a tidy short game is needed
- Winner should be in the -15 to -20 range
- Experience with desert golf and with this party atmosphere help
What to Look For
- Strokes Gained: Approach
- Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee
- Bogey Avoidance
- Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green
- Ball Striking
Core Plays
Scottie Scheffler
DraftKings — $11,600 / pOWN: 37.1%
FanDuel — $12,500 / pOWN: 44.5%
SG: OTT — 1
SG: APP — 1
Bogey Avoidance — 1
SG: ATG — 3
SG: Putting (Poa) — 51
Stat Rank — 1
Noto Rating — 99.0
I have both Scheffler and Justin Thomas tagged as core plays this week. It’s hard to build a lineup with both, so I plan to build two main lineups (one with Scheffler, one with Thomas) and then have somewhere between 50-75% of each in my MME builds. I don’t necessarily love the range right below them and view these two as the clear top plays. Scheffler has won this event in back-to-back years and is looking to become the first golfer since Steve Stricker to win the same event three times in a row. He’s the best in the field tee to green and is 1st in three of the five stat categories that I am prioritizing this week. He hasn’t finished worse than T31 since the 2022 swing season and hasn’t missed a cut in over 18 months. His best putting surface is poa annua, and he clearly loves this course.
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