Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Shriners Children’s Open

Well, it’s certainly been a hectic week for me, so my apologies for the tardiness of this article. What I will say is that typically, I enjoy writing this article after we get projections, knowing that our guy Cody Main is one of the best in the industry at projecting ownership. In large-field GPPs, ownership is king — whether that be individual player ownership or cumulative ownership for your lineup. We’ll obviously talk more about the Shriners later on in this article, but I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to those who continue to subscribe to ETR Golf in the fall season. We saw a good amount of screenshots in Discord last week for Sanderson Farms! Let’s continue that trend for another shitbag event this week. Before we move on, though, I’ll recap my week that was.

Sanderson Farms – Recap

I felt really good about the way I played at Sanderson Farms, but unfortunately, it didn’t mean I profited on the week. I’ll spare you all the screenshot in the interest of time, but I ended up about -30% on the week, with a spread that was actually quite good and geared toward the top. I was slightly over the field on 6/6 and 5/6 lineups, and I had a lineup that reached as high as 12th on Saturday PM, but alas, it was not meant for victory. Here were my biggest stands on the week:

• I had 50% Ludvig Aberg, 40% Tom Hoge, and then a variety of different players all in the 20-30% range.
• I had a full fade on high-priced busts like Emiliano Grillo, SH Kim, and Doug Ghim, however, I did not have any Ben Griffin and was at about 18% on the eventual champion, Luke List. 

After a year of playing Luke List with a heavy projection, List was not someone that I wanted to be too far over the field on last week. Now, looking back, that was obviously a poor decision when he projected out to be one of the better plays on the slate. Leave it to the fall season to give us some sicko results. Anyway, I think overall we have to be pleased with the projections, as we oftentimes say that the “shitbag” season is where we make our money. It certainly seemed to be the case last week, and I’m feeling good about our momentum going into this week.

Shiners Children’s Open – Preview

As always, you’ve probably read Tom’s preview by now, so I won’t get too far into the details of how the course is going to play out. What I will say is that we have a good, old-fashioned birdie fest at TPC Summerlin this week in Las Vegas. The Shriners has been a long-standing event dating back to when Tiger Woods was in his prime, and he actually picked up his first win here 17-18 years ago. Here are the past five winners of the Shriners and their scores:

• 2022: Tom Kim, -24, three strokes over Patrick Cantlay and Matt Nesmith

• 2021: Sungjae Im, -24, four strokes over Matthew Wolff

• 2020: Martin Laird, -23, playoff over Austin Cook and Matthew Wolff

• 2019: Kevin Na, -23, playoff over Patrick Cantlay

• 2018: Bryson DeChambeau, -21, one stroke over Patrick Cantlay

This has nothing to do with this year’s event, but it’s kind of funny how Patrick Cantlay has come in second on three separate occasions here over the past five years. As you can see, points will be scored here. This is a very straightforward course and one that will not be that challenging to pretty much every golfer who tees it up this week. You’ll see a wide variety of golfers can win here as well — Tom Kim is a much different golfer than Bryson DeChambeau, for example. Generally, I’m approaching this week trying not to get too into the pure golfer takes and simply playing it from a DFS perspective.

Similar to last week, we have our basic set of GPPs for another fall event. DK is offering the $25-entry, $100K-to-first “Sand Trap Special”, where I as always will be firing 150 entries because I don’t learn. I’m not going to be getting too crazy with my cumulative ownership. We actually had quite a chalky lineup win last week, getting up to 85% cumulative ownership, showing that these lineups can still be unique despite being higher than my range. I expect my lineups to all fall within that normal 60-80% cumulative range, and I will of course be trying to have at least one golfer who is relatively “low owned” as well. I think the thing to remember about these “birdie fest” events is that there is a LOT of variance involved. Anyone can really win, especially with the types of fields that we are getting. We saw Ben Griffin, Scott Stallings, Luke List, Ludvig Aberg, AND Henrik Norlander all enter a playoff last week. Norlander in particular has not done anything on the PGA Tour for years. It just goes to show how variable the game of golf really is, and why the DFS product should always feature some sort of edge. 

Funny enough, the roster construction has a very similar feel to last week as well. This week, we do have two “studs” at the top with Ludvig Aberg (again) and Tom Kim (last year’s winner). I, for one, was surprised to see that Aberg was priced over Kim. We do have a little bit of extra depth up top too — Si Woo Kim will project to take on major ownership as a well-known name, along with Eric Cole, Nicolai Hojgaard, and Grillo following him. This week will play out slightly differently because of this — I expect the $8K range to generally go under-owned. Last week, we saw the high $8Ks go under-owned but the low $8Ks still take on some ownership. We will get a couple of chalk pieces in the $8Ks, but my guess is that people will definitely not double-click in that range. I’ll talk a little bit more about some ways to get contrarian in the final section of this article. First, let’s get to some chalk players and how I’ll be approaching them this week.

Expected Chalk, How to Play It