Cash Lineup Review: RBC Canadian Open

Our Adam Levitan devised a tried and true method for reviewing his NFL DFS cash lineups every week. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My goal here is simply to apply Adam’s structure to PGA DFS cash lineups.

To steal directly from Adam, I play around 50-75% of my action each week in “cash games.” Cash games refer to any contest in which roughly 50% of the field gets paid out, such as head-to-heads, double-ups, or 50/50s. 

Each week, I’ll review my cash-game lineup in this space. Sometimes I’ll lose, but hopefully I’ll win more often. Either way, I’ll post it here and give you my thought process. For more on PGA cash game strategy, see my How to Beat PGA DFS Cash Games article.

We saw another course that was new to the PGA Tour this week, as TPC Toronto hosted the Canadian Open for the first time. The popular narrative in the DFS industry was that TPC Toronto would play as a bomber-friendly birdie fest, almost like a Canadian version of Texas’ TPC Craig Ranch. While I certainly thought this was possible, and our projections did favor longer hitters, I didn’t want to lean too hard into the pure bomber narrative when we had never before seen quite how the course would play in PGA Tour competition. As usual, I opted to minimize volatility by prioritizing strong ball strikers who regularly hit fairways and are consistent on approach.

MY MUST PLAYS

• Without Scottie Scheffler in the field this week, we saw Rory McIlroy as the most expensive golfer on the slate at $11,900. While I would have loved to play McIlroy in a vacuum, I didn’t see the need to pay up for his elite salary in cash. As we discussed on Establish The Green, Scheffler is an every-week pay-up option because even when he doesn’t win, he still has such incredible odds to finish in the top five. On the other hand, McIlroy has a much wider range of outcomes, and it wouldn’t have been a surprise for him to make the cut but only finish in the thirties or forties on the leaderboard. After McIlroy, I thought the best cash options on the slate were Corey Conners ($10,100) and Shane Lowry ($9,900). Both are great ball strikers, extremely consistent, and were clearly a tier above the other golfers in the $10K and $9K ranges in terms of dependability for cash games. Given the plethora of value in the $7K range, I felt very comfortable starting off my lineup with two dependable players in Conners and Lowry.