Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Cognizant Classic

If my flag plant misses the cut this week, I may have to cede writing this article to someone in Discord. All jokes aside, it was a not-so-fun week at the Mexico Open, where Jake Knapp won the whole thing at chalk while our projections were underweight on him. Thus, we didn’t see too many screenshots in Discord or on X, but I have a good feeling about the Cognizant Classic this week. We are moving the golf to Florida, where we will get off poa greens and move to the more traditional Bermuda grass, which is music to our ears (and a lot of the golfers’). While I’m here, I have to give a shout-out to Golf DFS legend cdumit, who won R3 showdown and came excruciatingly close to winning R4 as well back to back but got a bit unlucky at the end to not take down the main showdown lotto. As always, let’s dive into the past week before moving on to the current one.

Mexico Open – Recap

The Mexico Open every year is defined by how you play the top guys, and this year it was literally only Tony Finau that we had to make a big decision on. I wrote in my article last week that I would be employing a full fade, and I did. That did not come back to hurt me, despite Finau being in the winning lineup. He was not in the optimal and there were definitely better combinations of players out there given his T13 finish. I also advised to be overweight Stephan Jaeger, even at chalk, and that turned out well also! Jaeger finished T3 and was in optimal lineups. I missed registering for the DTG, so I played the Full Round Special instead. I had a few good lineups, but nothing to write home about, mostly because my flag plant of Vincent Norrman missed the cut on the number. Let’s take a look, as we always do, at the winning lineup from the main flagship GPP.

• It featured a stars-and-scrubs build, with Finau and Jaeger up top and THREE $6K players down below.
• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of 85%, just outside the range we normally target, driven by both Knapp and Valimaki chalk making it, with Finau and Jaeger up top. I targeted 50-70% last week thinking that Finau would come up in ownership and I wouldn’t be able to consistently get in the 60-80% range, but this DK player found a way to get a unique lineup with all four of those players.
• As mentioned, this user skipped everyone from the $7-8.5K range. Pretty incredible stuff here, and it shows how roster construction continues to be a way to get unique in large-field GPPs. For those of you that use The Solver, I am not opposed to boosts and docks within price ranges in order to skip other ones. You will get unique builds this way.

While the week didn’t turn out exactly the way some of us wanted (I was rooting for a Finau sub-20 finish), we still know that golf is an extremely volatile sport. At high ownership levels, there are very few players that are not “fadeable” in some way. We’ll talk about that again this week at the Cognizant Classic. Another thing I also want to point out — I had expected Finau’s ownership to come up to almost 40% or higher. He came in at 30% in the main DK contest. If you are able to get ahead of some of these ownership variances, your edge on the field is huge. If I would have known Finau would have come in that low, I probably would have went overweight and potentially locked him in.

Cognizant Classic – Preview