Large-Field GPP Breakdown: AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

Hello again, ETR golf subscribers! We have reached the first “signature” event of the year with the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. My hope is that we’ll still have PGA DFS by the end of the year, because we’ve seen a few more defections from the PGA to LIV over the past few weeks, including top-20 player Tyrrell Hatton, who happened to be one of my favorite players to play over the past year. A quick comment on the state of professional golf — what a mess. I really hope that these people get this figured out, because the current state of golf is a sad existence. Let’s get these players playing in the same damn tournaments. It really isn’t that hard. I digress. We’re coming off a pretty successful week for subscribers at the Farmers Insurance Open, where we had a random Frenchman win (Matthieu Pavon) by potentially cheating (seems very suspect) and a leaderboard filled with randoms despite a decently strong field. These are the weeks we oftentimes ask for in DFS, as those are the easiest ways to win GPPs. Before we get into the excitement for Pebble Beach, let’s talk about the week that was. 

Farmers Insurance Open – Recap

I once again cut down on my entries as I work through bankroll management — I am a big fan of playoff NFL DFS, so I allotted much of my bankroll to that versus an early-season golf event. I cashed one of my five entries in the lotto where I had Hojgaard and unfortunately was done in by a missed cut by Ryan Fox. For the first time this calendar year, my flag plant “hit”, which was a nice feeling as well. With no NFL to compete with this week, I’ll likely get back to the MME style I played for the majority of last year. Let’s take a quick look at the winning lineup from the flagship GPP on DK to tell us whether or not we saw something “different” from the winner. 

• It featured a cumulative ownership of 80%, just on the cusp of being out of the 60-80% range I normally target in these full-field events. 
• The lineup fully skipped the $9K price range, which is always a strategy I like to lean into when creating lineups for GPPs. In fact, in this Large-Field GPP Breakdown article last week, I suggested the $9K range as the range I was most likely to fade given the player pool. We’ll see if there are any ranges that look weak this week and potentially a great way to get different. 

It’s a pretty normal week overall from the looks of it, despite the amount of longshots that littered the top of the leaderboard. This is why we target certain cumulative ownership ranges even in large-field GPPs — it is VERY rare that players are rostering anything close to the optimal lineup. Since this is a peer-to-peer game, our best shot at winning GPPs is to have set roster construction guidelines that will put us in position to beat the balance of the field without giving up too much projection. Winning lineups feature some sort of leverage plays, some amount of chalk, and generally small tweaks to get uniqueness.

Pebble Beach Pro-Am – Preview

We move on to the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where we get the best field the PGA Tour has to offer this year with its first signature event. The field is set at 80 players with alternates if anyone withdraws due to the “am” portion of the tournament. This is the first year that this event is playing as a signature event, so there will be a few tweaks this year versus the previous versions of Pebble Beach. Here are the changes this year: