Large-Field GPP Breakdown: PGA Championship

Here we are, at the second major championship of the year! The ETR crew seems to have done really well last week, and it’s great to see us all get some momentum going into a great set of contests for the PGA Championship. Congrats to my fellow contributor Sky, who took home $30K in the $555, which is a pretty damn good score. Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t the lineup he played in the Long Drive SE, and he continues to trail me in our H2H contest. With the huge prize pools this week, Sky has a chance to make up a ton of ground with a nice performance. Let’s pray for him, otherwise the Discord might need to start picking costumes for this guy pretty soon. We have a ton of juicy narratives this week, and I am excited to get into them later on in this article. First, let’s talk a little bit about the Wells Fargo before we try and become millionaires once again.

Wells Fargo – Recap

It was a very good week for ETR subscribers, where we saw low-key DFS legend DOMS win the Drive the Green, discord user cptrey2 come in second in the Sand Trap for $75K, and multiple other wins in both classic and showdown coming through. For me, I had a very, very slight loss in the Sand Trap, which was disappointing because I had 60% Rory and 25% Xander, but at the very least I was able to grab a $4,444 ticket for this week to make the week pretty successful overall. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup in our sixth signature event of the year to see if we can find anything interesting.

• The winning lineup featured a Rory/Xander pairing with three close to min-price players in Woodland, Dunlap, and Grayson Murray. I mentioned in this article that Rory/Xander lineups were a very interesting way to play the week, and that turned out to be true as the duo finished first and second to vault those lineups to the top. This pairing was definitely low-owned, which meant that any lineup with the two did not have to beat a ton of lineups to make it to the top. This is why this user got away with playing Woodland, Dunlap, and Murray down low, because the pure uniqueness of the lineup allowed for an easier path to the top.
• They finished with a cumulative ownership of 71%, despite playing Rory/Xander/Benny An, all because the three low players played were all sub 2%! We again see a signature event with a cumulative ownership winner come in the 70-90% range, and I will continue to advise this range for signature events in the future.

I want to touch on the Xander/Rory thing because I think there are some important learnings about playing this type of stack for similar types of events. The stack was played in 1.87% of lineups in the Sand Trap, meaning you were able to play two heavily owned players while still being super unique. However, as Discord user Rod pointed out, this type of build did force a lot of lineups into the same players down low. There were a decent amount of duplicates with players like Pavon, Cam Davis, and Nick Taylor along with the X/Rory pairing. My advice going forward with these types of lineups is to heavily boost sub-3% players in these lineups, because it seems as if those 5% plays down below become 15-20% owned. You have to be conscious of roster construction in all of your lineups, which is why I constantly say “play lineups, not players” to anyone that will listen.

PGA Championship – Preview