Large-Field GPP Breakdown: The Masters

One of, if not the best week in golf is finally upon us, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, it’s Masters Week if you somehow didn’t know from the 6,969 trend threads that have been posted on X in the past week and a half. For many of us, we’ve been playing in preparation for the many contests that are happening this week on DraftKings — including THREE Milly Makers ($10 entry, $100 entry, and $3,333 main event). It is shaping up to be an epic week, hopefully for more than a few subs. We ALSO will be having a “live before lock” type of show so Sam Brott can complete the Hot Ones Challenge today at 8:00 p.m. ET, where we get the whole crew, including me, so please tune in if you can! It’s going to be a ton of fun.

Valero Texas Open – Recap

I won’t spend too much time recapping the Valero for two reasons — first, I didn’t do very well and they nuked the R4 contests because of rain. Second, because I have a lot to get to for The Masters and don’t want to waste any more time than I already have (mostly playing MLB DFS trying to win Masters tickets). Here are the characteristics of the winning lineup in the lotto:

• The lineup followed a 10/9/8/7/7/7 build, so the normal build type that much of the field tends to fall on when building with optimizers. It featured Ludvig Aberg and Robert MacIntyre up top with a low-owned J.J. Spaun, filled out with three low $7K players to be able to fit the expensive guys in there. I do want to mention that the lineup featured Austin Smotherman, who finished T36. 
• It ended with a cumulative ownership of 59%, just under the 60-80% range that I usually target. I made some comments that ticket master laxachussetts might have disagreed with last week about how I didn’t believe that the trend of chalkier lineups winning in PGA DFS would stick. Here’s one week in my favor. Again, I simply do not believe that the field has gotten better at predicting winners or performance, especially because the sport is so inherently variable. I will, of course, continue to keep track of trends to see if I am wrong. 

I wanted to take a quick moment to point out that Smotherman was 7% owned across contests. His last time out, he was 25% owned at a higher price in a similar field. This is the beauty of Golf DFS — no matter what you think about Smotherman (I personally value long-term form and his is cheeks), the swings of ownership at similar pricing and field strength week over week due to one or two performances is wild to me. If you played Smotherman chalk two weeks ago and didn’t play him this past weekend, I have questions for you.

The Masters – Preview

On to Augusta National, where we’ve already seen plenty of cringe posts from the golf community about everything Masters, from Rory McIlroy‘s dinner selection to whether or not phones should be allowed on the course. We also have gotten PLENTY of trend tweets, where basically no one in the field can win at this point because they don’t hit all 69 of the correct trends. I don’t care about any of that stuff, and I am here to hopefully guide you on how to build potentially successful Masters lineups. Before we get into the DraftKings side of it all, let’s take a look at the past five winners at Augusta National and their scores:

• 2025: Rory McIlroy (-11) def. Justin Rose in a playoff

• 2024: Scottie Scheffler (-11) def. Ludvig Aberg by four strokes

• 2023: Jon Rahm (-12) def. Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson by four strokes

• 2022: Scottie Scheffler (-10) def. Rory McIlroy by three strokes

• 2021: Hideki Matsuyama (-10) def. Will Zalatoris by one stroke

We know what to expect at Augusta National. The winner is likely to score in the low double digits, par-5 scoring will be important, and all that other great stuff. There’s not much information to take from the above — we are getting one of the better small fields of the year with the addition of the LIV players, and someone good at golf is going to win. Course history will be jammed down your throat this week, but it’s important to remember that we don’t only need the winner in DFS. We need to build a lineup of six players who beat everyone else within the limits of the pricing structure. Watch how these narratives might impact ownership (Chris Gotterup can’t win because he’s a debutant, for example). The majors often bring a lot of casual play into the low-dollar tournaments, and we may see some weird ownership come through this week.