Large-Field GPP Breakdown: 3M Open

I can’t believe that we’ve already reached the end of major season, especially because I’m not a millionaire just yet. But we still have one more Milly Maker weekend to go (the BMW Championship), so the trek and the dream continue on for us PGA DFS players. Unfortunately, Discord legend TeejayOrTJ did not win this week, but the good thing is that we had plenty of winners in Discord and on X. It always feels good and validating to see various screenshots from ETR subs, so let’s try and do that again this week. In the meantime, let’s see if we learned anything from The Open.

The Open Championship – Recap 

I actually think I played The Open quite well, identifying good and bad chalk correctly, but didn’t have the right combinations or enough Ryan Fox to make a true run at anything. I said on the 19th Hole that there was a strong possibility of steam throughout the $8K range and $10K+ range, which pretty much happened. The $8K range in particular was overplayed — players like Chris Gotterup, Wyndham Clark, Viktor Hovland, and Robert MacIntyre ALL approached or broached the 20% ownership line. This meant we had a bunch of people funneling $9K ownership away into the $8K range. Double this down with the Justin Rose steam, and we got low-owned Xander Schauffele, Ludvig Aberg, and Cam Young along with Jon Rahm in large field. So many of my lineups had three of those guys, and it helped me finish with a solid top-1% rate. However, I did not win, so let’s look at the winner of the large-field Milly:

• The lineup went with a 10/9/9/7/6/6 structure that actually did not include Si Woo Kim, but it had Fox and Sam Burns, which got them over the edge. This is a great illustration of how leverage plays a part in your path to the top. Fox was 2.5% owned in the Milly Maker, but that still equates to about 3,000 lineups. The combination of Young/Rahm/Tommy Fleetwood wasn’t likely played by any other Fox lineup, and thus made this lineup truly unique. Notice how even with 110K entries in the field, rostering Rahm and J.J. Spaun still achieved the result of $1 million.
• It came in at 74% cumulative ownership, just slightly above my range, but it did have Rahm come down in ownership from his projected number. With the pricing structure of the tournament and with many lineups simming well in the 80-100% range, I should have thought about this and been more in the 60-80 range than 50-70. Knowing that the field would probably be higher in ownership than usual, making some adjustments and trusting my rules would have been the way to go.

There was a lot to learn from The Open just from basic observations, but one of the things I’d like to really shout-out is that there seems to be a decent amount of people in Discord actually doing post-lock and post-tournament analysis. One of the most important things about my process is learning from the mistakes and wins of the past week, so I’m glad that many of you are doing that.

3M Open – Preview