Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Butterfield Bermuda Championship

Wow, that one-week break felt like forever. The world has changed since we last played PGA DFS — now, we’re competing against a full-fledged CFB, NFL, NHL, and NBA schedule. One might wonder how we even have enough money for all of this. It’s something my wife wonders about all the time, too. The answer is that we simply play PGA DFS against the golf touts who have no idea how to apply DFS concepts to their golf models. And if there’s any indication about how this week will go, this seems like a perfect week for us sickos who love to go against the field. Let’s get right into it.

Butterfield Bermuda — Preview

The Butterfield Bermuda Championship, which somehow has become a staple on the PGA Tour, is probably one of the weirdest events on the schedule. McKinley notes in his Course Preview that because it’s held in Bermuda, it’s an unbelievably variable event. On top of that, the field is almost always extremely weak and might be the stone-cold weakest of the year. That means this event will produce some weird results, as it has historically. And that’s music to a DFS player’s ears, especially when there’s a bunch of chalk condensing. Here are the past five winners at Port Royal:

• 2025: Adam Schenk (-12) def. Chandler Phillips by one stroke
• 2024: Rafa Campos (-19) def. Andrew Novak by three strokes
• 2023: Camilo Villegas (-24) def. Alex Noren by two strokes
• 2022: Seamus Power (-19) def. Thomas Detry by one stroke
• 2021: Lucas Herbert (-15) def. Patrick Reed and Danny Lee by one stroke

I mean, what are we doing here? This is a crazy event, and it’s going to impact how I approach the DFS slate. DraftKings has given us a $50K-to-first contest as the main lotto, which I will admit is pretty good considering the event strength and the fact that the other four major professional sports are still playing. Maybe when MLB is over, this will get to $100K to first, but either way, it’s fine. Given we have a full-field event with a cut here, I’m generally going to approach this slate similar to many others. However, one key difference — I will be targeting a 50-70% cumulative ownership range, and many of my lineups will actually fall below 50% ownership. We have already talked about the variance of this event. There are two ways to attack that: either by leaving salary on the table or holding your ownership in check. I’m choosing to do the latter.

To elaborate, think about how the field is playing this. Half the field likely has optimizers or sims that are reliant on projections. My lean is that most of the field understands the variability of the event but doesn’t know how to truly incorporate that into an optimizer or sim run that is entirely based on strength of projection. What will end up happening is that the field becomes more reliant on projections than they think they are. In this environment, the way I will force the optimizer to lean into variance is to level out projections while also keeping hard caps on my total lineup ownership. This will naturally cause me to play lineups I might be uncomfortable with, which is exactly what I want. The human is biased; the computer is not. Use this to your advantage.

From a roster construction standpoint, this looks like a cookie-cutter event. Because the talent level is so flat, people will fill out their lineup normally. 9/9/8/7/7/7 will be the go-to, but don’t be surprised to see triple 9 at the top, either. I actually don’t think the edge this week is in roster construction, but of course, I will have elements of it in my runs. We’ll talk about that a bit later.

Expected Chalk, How to Play It

You probably know what to expect out of this section given what we’ve talked about already. But which chalk will I be heavily underweight on this week? Let’s find out.

Kevin Yu, DK Price: $9,200