Cash Lineup Review: PGA Championship

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.

After a month of only no-cut signature events and the team-centric Zurich Classic since The Masters, we finally got another fun slate for cash games. This week, we had the PGA Championship, where I was genuinely happy to see Aaron Rai win. If you’ve been reading this column regularly over the past few years, you’ll know that Rai has been a staple of my cash lineups due to his consistent ability to find fairways and gain strokes with ball striking. (Unfortunately, he was not in my cash pool this week, given the lack of public clarity surrounding his recent neck injuries.) While I’ve always appreciated his ability to provide a solid floor in DFS cash games, I certainly never thought he would be a major champion.

The PGA Championship at Aronimink was particularly interesting for cash this week because nobody knew exactly how the course would play stylistically. The only “recent” tournament data we had to work off of was from the BMW Championship in 2018, when the course was extremely wet, shorter, and played to a winning score of -20 — not exactly a major championship setup. There was a lot of buzz in the industry this week about whether the course would favor a “bomb-and-gouge” or “hammer fairways” style of play, and I expected that many of my opponents in cash would lean heavily into one style or the other. My goal in constructing my cash lineup this week was to create the most robust lineup I could that I would be happy to use regardless of how the course ultimately played.

MY MUST PLAYS