Large-Field GPP Breakdown: World Wide Technology Championship

Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time for four straight weeks of fall season golf, the most we’ve had consecutively since we ended the season back in the summer! Honestly, kudos to any of you who have made it this deep into the season. While I am still playing because I need to watch Sam try and crawl his way back into contention in our contributor contest, I truly appreciate those of you who love the fall golf grind. Even THE Kyle. One of the best parts about fall golf is that I often get to skip the “Recap” portion of the write-up because there are so few consecutive weeks of golf that it doesn’t make sense to write it up. I’ll be pissed next week when I have to. Anyways, let’s move to the preview portion of the article, where we’ll talk all things WWT Championship.

World Wide Technology Championship – Preview

DraftKings is offering what seems to be the normal set of contests here at the World Wide Technology Championship, meaning I will be competing for the $50K-to-first prize in a field of ~7,500+. This is much smaller than the normal “Sand Trap” that we see often on DK, which includes up to 18K or 19K entries. While I am bummed that DK took away the $100K-to-first lotto for the first time this year in the fall, I can’t really complain about competing with only 7K people for a pretty solid top prize.

Let’s talk about the WWT Championship. This is a long-standing event that used to be played at the “famous” Mayakoba course, until LIV Golf came in and decided to play their useless events there. The PGA Tour then shifted to El Cardonal, a Tiger Woods-designed golf course that features many similar aspects to Mayakoba. This week at “El Cardonal” will absolutely be a birdie fest, as we can see from the past two years of winning scores:

• 2024: Austin Eckroat (-24) def. Justin Lower, Carson Young by one stroke

• 2023: Erik Van Rooyen (-27) def. Matt Kuchar, Camilo Villegas by two strokes

Yep, you read that right. We’re going to have scores in the mid-20s at the very least, and I would not be surprised if someone actually broke -30. That’s how easy this course is. Speaking of which, McKinley calls out in his course preview that the fairways are quite large here, and the course as a whole simply does not have enough teeth to give the top players in the world a challenge in any way. As I usually say with these types of birdie fests, I am not going to be afraid to play some super low-owned, cheap players who still have winning upside that many optimizers won’t want to play. You can see from the past two years that there really doesn’t seem to be a narrative overall. But the fact that Justin Lower, Carson Young, Matt Kuchar, and Camilo Villegas all came in a close second over the past couple of years tells me all I need to know. I would not be surprised at all if some random $7K player wins at 5% ownership, and I sure as hell want to have a potential winner at that price and ownership. 

In terms of cumulative ownership, this full-field event with a cut is going to lead to some boring advice. I’ll be sticking again with the 60-80% ownership range, with rules and projection changes guiding me to uniqueness instead of worrying about singular ownership by player. Speaking of player ownership, Ben Griffin and J.J. Spaun lead the pack in terms of ownership at $10K prices. I was surprised to see both of these guys playing here, but maybe they both just like Mexican food. Either way, with the amount of ownership soaked up top, this is turning into another normal-build week where we get a lot of 10/9/8/7/7/7 lineups. The range that’s being forgotten will be the high $8Ks, where we have some interesting players who simply are not being given the chance. I’ll of course be covering some ideas later on in the article after we go through some evaluation of the chalk. 

Expected Chalk, How to Play It