Cash Lineup Review: Waste Management Phoenix Open

Our Adam Levitan devised a tried and true method for reviewing his NFL DFS cash lineups every week. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My goal here is simply to apply Adam’s structure to PGA DFS cash lineups.

To steal directly from Adam, I play around 50-75% of my action each week in “cash games.” Cash games refer to any contest in which roughly 50% of the field gets paid out, such as head-to-heads, double-ups, or 50/50s. 

Each week, I’ll review my cash-game lineup in this space. Sometimes I’ll lose, but hopefully I’ll win more often. Either way, I’ll post it here and give you my thought process. For more on PGA cash-game strategy, see my How to Beat PGA DFS Cash Games article.

It was another fun and exciting finish at TPC Scottsdale for this year’s Waste Management Phoenix Open. The WMPO is one of my favorite tournaments each season, and it arguably does more than any other event for bringing new fans to the PGA Tour.

I really struggled to build a cash lineup this week, as I’ve found it difficult to adjust to DraftKings’ new aggressive pricing structure with Scottie Scheffler above $14K. I regularly wrote over the past two seasons that Scheffler should be a cash lock every single slate until DraftKings decides to price him higher, and that day has finally come. Additionally, many of the value plays whom I have regularly relied on for cash (e.g., Aaron Rai, Denny McCarthy, Ryan Gerard) weren’t in the field, which left me in an even more uncomfortable position.

The other defining factor of this slate, at least from a pre-lock perspective, was the variation in the wind forecasts. We typically have a pretty strong sense of how wind will or will not impact a slate before a tournament starts, but this slate was unique in that weather modelers were forecasting two binary outcomes. The first was that the wind wouldn’t play much of a factor, and the second was that extreme wind on Thursday morning would provide a sizable advantage to golfers with tee times in the PM/AM wave. Notably, nobody was forecasting anything in between those two outcomes as a middle ground. My interpretation was that there was probably around a 33% chance that the PM/AM wave would have a stark advantage, and I wanted to lean into that wave for cash purposes.

MY MUST PLAYS

• As noted above, I really wanted to play Scottie Scheffler ($14,500) as usual. However, his lofty salary left only $7,100 remaining on average for each of the final five golfers, and I didn’t think there was enough value on the slate to take on his salary from a cash perspective. Once I ruled out Scheffler, I knew I wanted to start my lineup with Si Woo Kim ($9,900). Kim had been the best ball striker on Tour to start the season, and that had led him to finishes of T11, T6, and T2 to start the year. Although I’ve generally been hesitant to rely on Kim in cash, given the lack of other safe options and his incredible recent form, I had no issue prioritizing him on this slate.