PGA Mass-Entry Lineup-Building Strategies
The odds of winning one a tournament with thousands of entries is small. In fact, the odds of winning the Millionaire Maker event for the PGA Championship with a single lineup is 1:188,900. It’s not impossible, but you aren’t going to accomplish that feat by targeting a bunch of players that everyone else is also targeting. The reasoning is simple: if you have a golfer that is 50 percent owned and he plays well, you are only getting an edge on half of the field.
The key to finishing high in these big tournaments is to pick the winner, as well as the right contrarian plays. There are a lot of ways that you can differentiate your lineups each week, but not all of them are profitable strategies. In this lesson, I’ve broken down my five favorite strategies for attacking these big events. These strategies can be used together or individually.
Loading up on the Favorites
When you are competing against thousands of lineups, it is an absolute must to pick the winner. Even if you have the rest of your lineup finish in the top ten, you are not going to win a million dollars unless you have the winner in your lineup. There is the occasional major championship where a sleeper wins the tournament (i.e. Zack Johnson at the 2015 Open Championship), but for the most part, we see the crème of the crop rise to the top of the leaderboards in the world’s best golf tournaments.
These tournaments and courses are built to bring out the very best in the field and as a result, we typically see the favorites perform well in the majors. Loading up on the mid-range fantasy options is a good cash game strategy, but it can work against you in tournaments because you aren’t giving yourself a good chance to pick the winner. For that reason, a common strategy of mine in these big tournaments is to have a ton of exposure to each of the top favorite in the field. That way, you give yourself a good chance of picking the winner, and it forces you to take some chances with your value plays.
Fading the Popular Plays
This may sound like it goes against the first piece of advice, but generally the favorites don’t have as high of ownership as you would expect. Their high salaries hurt their appeal to a lot of people because the average fan wants to fill out a roster with players that he or she has heard of. The popular plays that I am referring to are the ones that are on everyone’s radar. These picks are easily identifiable by reading the expert picks posted here on RotoGrinders or on any other daily fantasy site.
These popular picks are just fine to target in cash games, but it can be beneficial to fade them in large tournaments. There are no sure things in daily fantasy golf, and if you can fade a player that is 35 to 40 percent owned and he ends up missing the cut, you will have a big edge on the field. Now, if you decide that a certain pick is too good to fade, you may want to consider having more exposure to him than the field. So, if you expect a player to be 30 percent owned and you are high on him, you may want to take a bullish stance and own him in 50 percent of your lineups.
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Heavily Targeting the European Tour Players
High payouts in these big tournaments attract a lot of casual golf fans and even people that don’t really follow golf at all. With such an influx of new players, it often leads to the big names in golf being over-owned. It also leads to the European Tour players to go vastly under-owned. Most hardcore golf fans couldn’t even tell you how well certain players are doing on the European Tour, even though some of the best golfers in the world play almost exclusively across the pond.
When looking for European Tour players to target, there are three main areas that I look at. The first and most obvious is the Vegas Odds. The second thing to look at is recent performance on the European Tour. All it takes is a simple google search to pull up the leaderboards from recent European Tour events. The third thing to look at is the European Tour’s statistics. They are not as advanced as the PGA Tour, but they are still very useful and you will see some similarities to that of the PGA Tour (Driving Distance, Driving Accuray, Greens in Regulation, etc.).
Leaving Cash on the Table
As a daily fantasy sports player, it can be a little unnerving leaving cash on the table when building a lineup, but this is a strategy that I use more and more frequently when building tournament lineups. Odds are, if you are going to create a team that has $0 left on the table, there is a good chance that someone else is going to have the same lineup as you (especially if you don’t go out of your way to be contrarian). Winning a million dollars is the ultimate dream, but how bad would it suck to have to share it with five other people who all had the same lineup as you?
Leaving cash on the table allows you to have different combinations of players than the rest of the field. It also gives you a better chance of creating that optimal lineup. Odds are the best possible team that you can create in a given week isn’t going to be one that leaves exactly $0 on the table. The hard part is getting over that mental block of leaving salary on the table. There always appears to be an upgrade that we can make, but there is rarely that perfect combination that uses all $50,000 of the salary cap.
While I usually like to leave as little cash on the table as possible for cash games, I don’t mind leaving a lot of cash on the table in these big tournaments events. It will allow you to have different combinations of players than the rest of the field.
Grouping Players by Tee Times
If you have read the first PGA course, then you know how important it is to check the weather each week. Weather can provide a huge advantage for either the morning or afternoon wave of tee times. Grouping players by tee time can be a nice strategy to try to take advantage of any weather issues that can occur on Thursday and/or Friday. Now, we don’t want to group all of our lineups by tee times, but grouping a few lineups that way can help put your lineups in the best possible position in terms of weather for the morning and afternoon splits.
In Notorious’ Daily Fantasy PGA: Attacking Multi-Entry Tournaments, you’ll learn:
• How the payout structure of high-payout tourneys works
• What percentage of your bankroll you should be investing each week and in which game types
• The different strategies you can use when filling out multiple lineups
• How to predict ownership and know where you can gain an edge by investing
• Tricks to help track your exposure to each individual golfer.
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