Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Charles Schwab Challenge

One would think that at about the halfway point in a season, contributors could take a couple of weeks to “coast” and tank a few articles. I will not be coasting. We are back this week for the Charles Schwab Challenge, which features a really interesting field especially coming out of the second major of the year, the PGA Championship. It really was an exhilarating week last week, both from a golf fan’s perspective and a DFS perspective, but unfortunately for me it was not the winning week that I was looking for. Golf fans got to enjoy one of the four times this year that we’ll see both PGA and LIV players compete against each other, and the PGA of America did a great job inviting LIV players that they felt belonged in the field. They were largely right with their choices, as players like Dean Burmester, Talor Gooch, and others made the cut to give us some new names to sweat over the weekend. As with every week, we also learned a bit from contest winners and losers, and it seemed like a very successful week in Discord once again. The projections are poppin’ right now, articles are flowing, and fellow contributor Sky Hook is still losing to me in the contributor contest. We now have a new possibility for his costume next year — a Scottie Scheffler orange jumpsuit.

PGA Championship – Recap

Before we jump into this week, let’s first take a look back at the PGA Championship. Unfortunately for me, I went into Sunday with high hopes and a lineup in the top 15 in the large-field Milly Maker lotto, but ended up actually losing a little bit of money. The Large-Field GPP life strikes again. I was able to cash one of my $4,444 tickets, however, to generally salvage a week that I thought I was going to make money in. With almost double the amount of 6/6 lineups, I really just needed my guys to not implode over the last two days to make some $$, but Collin Morikawa decided to make one birdie on Sunday while his counterparts went -5 or better. While we didn’t produce a milly winner here at ETR (to my knowledge), it’s great to see the success from the subscribers, and hopefully the content continues to slap. Let’s take a look at the winner of the large-field lottery:

• The winning lineup played a 10-9-9-7-6-6 build, much to the chagrin of Discord mathematician harry_stamper, using a total salary of the full $50K. This lineup skipped the $11K+ and the $8K range as a whole, instead choosing to double down in the $9Ks with Viktor Hovland and Bryson DeChambeau. Interestingly enough, this lineup was not forced to go down to the $5K range either, even though there were some winning scores down there. As I continuously say — we play lineups, not players, and the way you are playing your players matters a lot in the grand scheme of DFS. For those that are throwing out MME sets, continue to evaluate your process and your lineups to understand if you are building sets that reflect how you would hand-build a 150 set, or close to it. If you look back at your lineups and think to yourself “I would never click that in a hand-build,” you are telling yourself that you need to improve your skill with the optimizer. Trust me, I am still going through this challenge. 
• The lineup also had a cumulative ownership of 58.6%, well within my range of 50-70%. As I mentioned in last week’s article, I wanted to adjust my cumulative ownership range down in order to get more leverage on the field with it being so large. It’s good to see that the winning lineup was in this range. 

The good news overall is that we don’t really need to play these major championship Milly Makers that much differently than the way we normally run our MME sets. The process should generally stay the same, just some numerical tweaks here and there should do the trick!

Charles Schwab Challenge – Preview