GPP Data Review: Valspar Championship

Whew! We have had plenty of narratives when it comes to DFS slates, but I’m not sure I’ve seen one dominated as much by the weather reports as this one. With DFS salaries dropping on Monday, there’s no way for them to dynamically adjust. However, sportsbooks were certainly on top of the perceived edge. At 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, virtually any contender in the AM/PM wave saw their outright odds drop 33-50%, while the afternoon golfers ballooned out to almost double their original prices. At minimum, it was projected to be a one-stroke advantage, with the forecast to have multiple days of splits, but Mother Nature had a different plan. The afternoon on Thursday played .1 strokes easier than the morning, and on Friday, which seemed to be the worst day, the projected better wave totaled a .58-stroke advantage. In aggregate, there was a .48 difference, which was significantly less than what the industry expected to happen. Mixing the volatility of golf with the fragility of weather, it makes for a lethal combination of variance, but what we knew in fact was that the AM/PM golfers were going to make up a significant portion of ownership.

Looking at the top 20 most-owned golfers from the large-field Sand Trap, 15 of them were from the AM/PM part of the wave. This led to 42% of lineups in the entire contest to have at minimum five golfers from the preferred end of the wave. Now, from an ETR projection standpoint, this actually doesn’t look significantly different than how we were looking at the slate as a whole. Of our top 20 values, just four of them were from the bad side of the wave in Shane Lowry, Corey Conners, Justin Thomas, and Lucas Glover. The field didn’t necessarily shy from these picks as one-offs, as they all were represented on this list, but beyond that is when the field continued to side with the AM/PM bunch. Let’s see how ownership compared to high-stakes contests.