Cash Lineup Review: Sony 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.

PGA DFS is back! If you’re new to PGA DFS, I recommend taking a look at my aforementioned How to Beat PGA DFS Cash Games article for an overview of how I approach these contests.

The first events of the season for PGA are always especially volatile, as there are more unknowns coming into the first event than at any other point in the season. How much work has each golfer put in over the offseason? Are they dealing with any lingering injuries we don’t know about? Have they overhauled their equipment? Are they working through a swing change? Unlike other major sports leagues, like the NFL, there is little to no preseason period with widespread media coverage for the PGA Tour, so we simply have to make the best assumptions we can.

In addition to this offseason uncertainty, there were two other notable factors I was weighing in cash this week at the Sony Open. First, we had a significant number of players making their first PGA Tour start after graduating from the Korn Ferry or DP World Tours. Although some of these golfers projected solidly, I preferred to take a wait-and-see approach with them for cash purposes. The other notable factor was the weather split we projected, which favored golfers with tee times in the AM/PM wave. There were several value golfers I had a lot of interest in for cash, but I didn’t see a need to take on the additional weather risk in cash games. Putting all these considerations together, I was left with a particularly small pool of golfers for my cash lineup at Wai’alae.

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