Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Charles Schwab Challenge

The PGA Tour season continues on in Texas this week, heading over to Fort Worth for the Charles Schwab Challenge. For a second, I thought we were going to get another diluted field, given the amount of golf the top players have played over the last few weeks, but I’m impressed by the amount of top talent we are getting. We are coming off a Tier 1 birdie fest at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson last week, and it will be nice not to have to sweat out eagles for every single player on the course here. Now that we are entering the summer months, there should be a lot more focus on Golf DFS, so hopefully you all are ready for the grind. I know I am.

CJ Cup Byron Nelson – Recap

It seemed to be a pretty good week for ETR subs who decided not to play Scottie Scheffler (not Discord user vishy, unfortunately). At a crazy price of almost $15K, Scottie was the talk of the week because of how he forced you into a very specific type of lineup. Combined with an extremely weak field, it ended up as a no-brainer to fade, as I mentioned in my article. That turned out to be the right decision, as Si Woo Kim + Wyndham Clark lineups blew Scheffler lineups out of the water. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup in the Sand Trap:

• It featured a classic 9/9/8/7/7/7 build, not dropping into the $6K range at all. There was some chatter about limiting your $6K players last week because that’s how Scottie lineups would end up beating you, but I believed that wasn’t necessary, given that you probably needed to play three of them in the same lineup to fit Scheffler. That being said, I personally used a max-1 rule on the $6K range, simply because they projected so poorly.
• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of 78%, just within the 60-80% range that we outlined in the article, despite using a 35%-owned Si Woo at the top. I talked a little bit about how I thought SWK would come down in ownership a bit while Scottie came up, and Scottie basically held at 27% ownership while SWK did come down from the initial 40+% projection. When players who aren’t Scheffler get that high in ownership, the field tends to level them off a bit, whether it be because of sims or just the thought that “they can’t play a 40%-owned player.” This was important when building lineups, especially if you use an ownership cap, because you would have been forced into super contrarian lineups with SWK. Remember this when building.

There’s not much else to say about last week, so let’s move on to the Charles Schwab and forget TPC Craig Ranch ever existed.

Charles Schwab Challenge – Preview

As I mentioned, we move to Fort Worth, Texas, to play the Charles Schwab Challenge, where we get a pretty decent field, especially at the top of the player pool. The Charles Schwab has been a long-standing event on the PGA Tour that was recently picked up by Charles Schwab in 2019, but it has been played at the Colonial Country Club for decades. For those of you who are actual golf fans, this is the tournament where the winner gets to don a plaid jacket and maybe gets to shoot a cannon. Discord user laxachussetts can correct me on that one. Anyways, for those of you looking for more information on the course, check out McKinley’s weekly Course Preview and Fits article as always. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there will be an overarching narrative that the field overplays this week. Here are the past five winners of the tournament:

• 2025: Ben Griffin (-12) def. Matti Schmid by one stroke

• 2024: Davis Riley (-14) def. Keegan Bradley and Scottie Scheffler by five strokes

• 2023: Emiliano Grillo (-8) def. Adam Schenk in a playoff

• 2022: Sam Burns (-9) def. Scottie Scheffler in a playoff

• 2021: Jason Kokrak (-14) def. Jordan Spieth by two strokes

It’s actually quite a crazy set of winners here at Colonial Country Club, with a variety of skill sets and skill levels. Shout-out to Davis Riley for winning over Scottie Scheffler by five strokes, which probably made Discord coach Studewood very happy. Either way, we should get a pretty good test of these players’ all-around games this week. It will be interesting to see where ownership lands and if any narratives take hold as we get closer to lock.

This will be our third week in a row with a full-field cut event, which should be music to any golf fan’s ears. With 130 players and the normal T65 cut, I won’t be straying far from my 60-80% cumulative ownership range in large field, and potentially slightly higher in small field. As always, my lower threshold will dip below that 60% mark, but you likely won’t see many of my lineups get above 85% even with post-lock ownership adjustments. My results over the last few weeks have gotten better, so I have hope the early-season jitters were just an anomaly.

In terms of the player pool, this is actually quite an interesting field that was causing me to think about roster construction a bit. The top of the field has seven of the top 20 players in the OWGR — Ludvig Aberg, Russell Henley, Robert MacIntyre, Justin Thomas, Hideki Matsuyama, Ben Griffin, and J.J. Spaun. Rickie Fowler, who has been playing lights out this year, rounds out the $9K range, making a very nice start for any lineup out there. I’m expecting this week to follow a similar build to what won last week — 9/9/8/7/7/7, or something along those lines. A start with Aberg likely means a lot of those lineups will be 10/9/8/7/7/7, which is something to keep in mind. Given the normal characteristics of the field, there aren’t many “leverage price ranges” that are being underplayed because of slate pricing, so we’ll have to find our leverage the traditional way — with roster construction and singular low-owned plays. 

Expected Chalk, How to Play It