PGA Ownership Report: Hero World Challenge

Here’s the data for this week’s $4 Fore at the Hero World Challenge!!

Name Ownership
Jordan Spieth 47.4%
Henrik Stenson 45.5%
Rickie Fowler 43.2%
Patrick Reed 41.2%
Bubba Watson 40.5%

Full field ownerships (for the $4, the $33, and cash games) can be found here!

And we have a co-ownerships matrix that shows who the highest owned pairs of golfers were in this week’s $4 Fore: (note that this table is set up to show the top 20 highest owned golfers, and, well, we only have 18 this week, so it looks a little junky! But, all of the info is there. I couldn’t change it all around knowing that this is the only week out of the year when displaying less than 20 would be cleaner!)

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SO! This is one of the more “interesting” weeks to be looking at ownerships. Perhaps it’s one of the less-interesting? It’s so different from a normal week I’m not sure exactly what we can take away – other than people are really excited to get Jordan Spieth back “in form” and not as excited as we’ve seen them about Tiger in the past! Let’s dive in and take a look

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Jordan Spieth 47% Cash 47% GPP – Spieth won overseas last time out, and people definitely took notice! There was a time when I first started playing fantasy golf (during his incredible 2015 run) when I told a buddy of mine “if Jordan Spieth is EVER below $13,000 and is NOT the highest owned player DO NOT let me play a single lineup without him in it” … and well obviously I quickly adjusted that strategy – but those memories are still very much in DFS’ers minds. He was a joke of a force in the game when DFS was at peak popularity for golf. And obviously he’s not done yet. It’s just a matter of knowing when and where! People were very happy to save money from the steep hike up to DJ this week, and I can’t blame them! But there’s a lot of guys in this field who have been littering their scorecards with top 5’s all across the world over the past few months!

Henrik Stenson 45% GPP 55% Cash – Henrik actually took the crown here in cash games, as I believe people are just more price-sensitive and building balanced lineups in cash. He’s one, like mentioned above, who has been littering his history with top 5’s since tail end of last PGA Tour season. He’s also “mister reliable” in theory so we see a lot of attention towards him in cash games, hopefully with his injury woes behind him.

Bubba Watson 40% GPP 45% Cash – It’s hard for me to say this, but I get to Bubba Watson and I want to be like “why did people stay off him a little bit?” Which is ironic because he’s FORTY PERCENT OWNED. But everything is skewed this week, obviously. People love their defending champs so much, and the price tag was so paltry … I’m surprised he didn’t creep up a little higher. Sure, the form hasn’t been there, but that doesn’t typically come into play when people see a dominant performance the year before. I mean, it should – but that’s priced into his salary. I honestly would have drafted Bubba at closer to $9,000. But I’m a total homer. Wishing him luck!

Hideki Matsuyama 38% GPP 45% Cash – I thought more people would latch on to Matsuyama, who is becoming quite the force – granted, he’s done well in a couple of tournaments with sub-par competition, but that cannot be said of the WGC event he took down, or the HSBC event, and especially not of a strong 5th place in the TOUR Championship. Winning overseas just says to me that things are still clicking, and, well – this IS golf – but I see no reason for that to stop here. I suppose he did do HORRIBLE last year at this event. But I’ve thrown that out the window – he’s playing entirely different golf right now.

Tiger Woods 25% GPP, 17% Cash – I really thought more people would go for it! Tiger had a good run there where he was just OBLIGATORY middle-pack-ownership because he has so many fans, etc., but eventually he fell off to where people were totally ignoring him. I believe his last event was the Wyndham 2015 where he performed quite well to the chagrin of many people who lost money on him leading up to that point. My non-scientific opinion is that Tiger didn’t come back until he was 100% ready, so, might as well give him 100% credit – and it’s not like he hasn’t played in hundreds of events before, I don’t think the “live competition” aspect is going to have much affect. All this said, I didn’t draft him either, but I didn’t play a lot of multi-entry GPP, and I didn’t have him in my top 6 for the money. Anyway, HE’S BACK! And the majority of the field decided to take a wait-and-see approach. If he makes any waves here, that approach will be out the window for weeks to come, for sure!

Good luck everyone!

About the Author

hokie2009
Sean O'Donnell (hokie2009)

Sean O’Donnell is a proud Hokie (Virginia Tech class of 2009, electrical engineering) as well as a Grateful Dead enthusiast. A fantasy baseball player since age 12, he has flirted with DFS in the past, but only this season stumbled onto the dearth of information that exists pertaining to daily fantasy golf and made a commitment to analyzing PGA tournament data on a weekly basis. When he’s not scouring the web for obscure PGA data, he works as a consultant for small businesses involved in research grants with the federal government.