Large-Field GPP Breakdown: PGA Championship

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Welcome to one of the four best weeks of the calendar year! The PGA Championship is upon us, so you know that means we have huge prizes on both DraftKings and FanDuel to compete for. For those of you who are attending the event, I will be there with Discord legends cnunn, brasi, and lsahr on Sunday throughout the day, so definitely give me a shout if you will be there! Assuming you want to see me, of course. But anyway, we have contests to talk about for the second major. Let’s get to it.

Truist Championship – Recap

While it wasn’t a winning week for me in the large-field lotto, I was able to cash my single entry in the contributor contest and win some smaller satellites for the $4,444 this week, so overall, it was a net positive, even though I likely will dud on these tickets. We didn’t have a lotto winner in Discord this week, but I did see a good amount of screenshots, which is always a good thing. A lot of my week rested on the hope that Rory McIlroy and Cam Young came up in ownership, which did NOT happen, and Cody continued to prove why he is the ownership king in the DFS streets. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup from this past week:

• The winning lineup followed a traditional 10/9/8/7/7/6 build. However, it had CY and Tommy Fleetwood up top, making it quite an expensive 10-9 start. Either way, we AGAIN see a week where the traditional build wins, which has been quite a common trend this year. While I do often talk about builds and how to get different, I do still upload a bunch of my lineups with traditional builds as well. I may need to keep leaning into that going forward.
• It had a cumulative ownership of 84%, right inside the 70-90% range that I normally target for signature events with limited fields. The lineup was unduped as usual, but again, we saw a mix of chalky (usually up top) and contrarian plays create a winning lineup. It’s always an important part of my process that I’m not taking too much ownership, but also not taking TOO LITTLE ownership.

I don’t know when the next signature event is, but hopefully we get a break from them after the PGA Championship, because I really hate the no-cut event sweats. Fridays with a cut are just so much better, and they make the weekend super interesting. Especially when Discord raccoon enthusiast Grex123 is asking about 5/6 lineup viability. Luckily for us, all the majors still have a cut, so we are on to Aronimink. 

PGA Championship – Preview

The PGA Championship often gets a bad reputation because it doesn’t really have a defining quality, which is kind of sad. I actually saw an interesting stat on X this week that the PGA Championship winner has actually had a worse score than the U.S. Open winner in the same year in five out of the last 10 years, despite the U.S. Open being known to be the toughest test of the season. Because the PGA Championship can basically be played anywhere, we get a variety of different courses, skills, and players who win or do well at the event every year. Let’s take a look at the past five PGA Championship winners. Please note that none of them were played at Aronimink, the site of this year’s tournament.

• 2025: Scottie Scheffler (-11) def. Bryson DeChambeau, Harris English, and Davis Riley by five strokes

• 2024: Xander Schauffele (-21) def. Bryson DeChambeau by one stroke

• 2023: Brooks Koepka (-9) def. Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler by two strokes

• 2022: Justin Thomas (-5) def. Will Zalatoris in a playoff

• 2021: Phil Mickelson (-6) def. Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen by two strokes

Despite not being known for its “toughness,” the PGA Championship has generally been “major golf,” aka we’re usually not looking at birdie fests here. Other than Xander Schauffele‘s win in 2024, the winning scores have been in the high single digits or low double digits despite us having a full field of 95% of the best players in the world. As McKinley noted in his Course Preview and Fits article, the only history we have here is the 2018 BMW Championship, before some renovations were done on the course. If you are interested in scoring environment, I would guess that we still see a lower double-digit winner here despite some of the narratives that Aronimink is about to play really easy.