PGA Ownership Report: Honda Classic

Here’s the data for this week’s $3 Birdie at the Honda Classic!

Name Ownership
Sergio Garcia 27.7%
Brendan Steele 27.3%
Russell Knox 25.9%
Charles Howell 25.8%
Rafa Cabrera-Belo 23.4%

Full field ownerships (for the $3, 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 $3 Birdie:

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Wow! For the first time in seemingly forever, we’ve got some “normal” ownership levels to look at. Nobody pushing 40% in GPPs or 70%+ in cash games! Let’s dig in.

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Sergio Garcia (27% GPP, 48% Cash) – The highest owned player this week is Sergio Garcia! Second place last year, coming off a recent win in Dubai, and not quite the most expensive guy … makes enough sense. For me, Sergio always gets bolstered by mediocre European events, and I tend to never choose him as often as most, but he’s seemingly certainly a fan favorite when he gets a little momentum, DFS loves to show some love. He’s come out the gate hot, so it looks like the bar will be set high this week.

Brendan Steele (27% GPP, 47% Cash) – Right next to Sergio is a guy who was MASSIVELY owned last week, and didn’t do BAD but didn’t make anyone rich, either – Brendan Steele. I was curious how that would affect this week … since he’s in another really good spot here with a pickable salary … and I guess the result is what should have been expected! The edge is taken off the hysteria, BUT he’s still universally a guy that people decided to build around.

Russell Knox (26% GPP, 53% Cash) – Mr. Knox came in as this week’s highest owned cash game golfer. Typically more often this will be somebody in the lower $8,000s and Knox was $9,000 this week, so having him and Sergio on the same team still leaves a bunch of mid-$7,000s guys, so I can see how that was a comfortable setup for many. Knox is coming off of a missed cut so to me it’s a little more surprising that so many would hitch their wagons in cash, BUT, he finished second and third the first two times he played here, so that wins out, this week, it seems!

Charles Howell (26% GPP, 46% Cash) – So, these are not “low” ownerships by ANY means, but above the other three guys, this was the one I would have expected to really be at the top of the ownership tables. I suppose there were a LOT of guys with multiple top 5s floating around, but Howell is just SO cheap. And to me he’s been red-freaking-hot. I suppose the story goes that he does that on the West Coast and now is the time to temper expectations. I don’t really play that way, and I signed up for a bunch of Howell this week. He’s just so so cheap. I’m not sure how 54% avoided him in cash. Howell will forever be a mystery to me! Just when I think his ownership is going to skyrocket through the roof, it slows down a little bit, and if I try to think he’ll do poorly, he’ll be the highest owned guy and finish in the top 5. Oh well, such is DFS Golf!

Adam Scott (20% GPP, 13% Cash) – The first thing I think of is this is continuing last week’s “trend” (I use that word loosely) of people just kind of not wanting to start their lineups with the most expensive guy. Scott checks all the boxes here, and that’s why he was top salary, and I expected him to be a little more popular quite honestly. Paying down in cash makes sense, but I think anyone who took him in the $3 birdie and is seeing him as the seventh-highest owned golfer is quite pleased. He absolutely dominated here last year, more than his final score would indicate, and I feel like it’s one where 80% of us will be going “Duh, of course!” if he wins again, despite having gone further down the list when we made our lineups!

Wow! Another exciting week of great golf is ahead of us. 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.