Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Farmers Insurance Open

For someone that already struggles to get articles out on time, this Wednesday morning lock is really messing with me. Luckily for me, that means projections will come out a day early and I’ll actually be able to look at them as I write this article! The Discord should be happy and maybe that will change my flag-plant streak that seems to have carried over from the NBA streets (we’re turning it around this week). I was in Vegas last week, so I ended up only making a few lineups overall, so for the sake of time I’m going to be skipping the recap of my play, but I will still go through the week that was.

Amex Open – Recap

While I didn’t have much action in the Amex Open, I know a lot of subs did! And from what I saw in Discord and on X, it was a pretty successful week for you all. You love to see it. When low-owned, low-priced ETR smashes like Kevin Yu finish in the top five, you know it’s going to be a good week for the people. Obviously, there was a lot of chaos last week, as University of Alabama amateur Nick Dunlap won the whole tournament outright over PGA Tour veterans like Sam Burns and Justin Thomas. It was a crazy week overall and it definitely seemed like a great week to be contrarian! Let’s go quickly through some highlights of the winning lineup in the flagship GPP on DK.

• It featured a “stars-and-scrubs” type of build, with Xander and JT up top (both over $9,800) and fully skipping the $8K range to jam in four $7K players with the studs. If you remember from last week’s article, I suggested skipping the weak $8K range altogether in order to get a little bit different off “normal” builds. I’m glad to see that strategy paying off!
• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of ~57%, just outside the 60-80% range we normally target. Oftentimes, I’ll find myself using 50-70% as my personal range, especially if I’m playing players that have the chance of taking on more ownership than we might project. While Cody is the best in the business, there will always be slight changes to ownership when the cards flip and it’s important for me to be on the more contrarian side of the coin. 
• The lineup did NOT have Dunlap, as he came in at 0.23% owned and was not a factor in large-field GPPs. This is a reminder to all that we play a peer vs. peer game and NOT a prediction game. While having Dunlap was obviously a good thing, for these super longshots that no one is playing, you don’t have to have them in your lineup to best everyone else. It’s important to remember this when building, as people will sometimes get way too cute and be heavily overweight a random player. The upside you’re getting on that is not worth the risk — it doesn’t matter if you win a GPP by 50 points or 0.5 points. You don’t get extra money for making a crazy call.

As expected from last week, we got a pretty “normal” set of characteristics out of our winning lineup. I expect more of the same this week, which I will get into.

Farmers Insurance Open – Preview

We continue our West Coast swing this week with the Farmers Insurance Open, where I am hopeful that we’ll finally see some reasonable winning scores instead of the -30s that we’ve been seeing the last couple of weeks. If you’re not familiar with golf, the Farmers Insurance will be played at the famous Torrey Pines Golf Course, which has two courses (North and South). Get more of your course information with Tom’s Course Preview! Here are the past five winners at Torrey Pines below:

• 2023: Max Homa (-13), two strokes ahead of Keegan Bradley 

• 2022: Luke List (-15), playoff over Will Zalatoris

• 2021: Patrick Reed (-14), five strokes over five different players 

• 2020: Marc Leishman (-15), one stroke over Jon Rahm

• 2019: Justin Rose (-21), two strokes over Adam Scott

As you can see from the past winners other than 2019, we should get a fairly reasonable result here. I’m not sure what happened in 2019, but obviously there must have been perfect conditions. 

Taking a look at the field, we always seem to get a pretty strong one here at Torrey Pines, I’d imagine because of the history of the course. When Jon Rahm used to care about legacy, this was one of the courses he mentioned as “meaning something” to him. This is as close to a “Signature Event” field as we’re going to get. One could argue that the field this week is slightly stronger than last week’s, even without Scottie Scheffler involved. That’s great news for me, as I know how I’ll be approaching this event. We’ll continue to use the 60-80% cumulative ownership range as our target, and I’ll probably be targeting a little bit lower (50-70%) to max out the possible leverage I can get knowing our ownership projections are the best in the business. Because of the similarity of the field, I do expect DFS players to once again target those “normal” builds when building, allowing us to get different with roster construction if we so please. The difference between this week and last is that I think the $8K range is a bit stronger than last week’s, despite losing Eric Cole to the $9Ks. For example, we saw Shane Lowry up at $8.7K last week, but he’s priced at $7.8K this week. I’ll get into some roster construction stuff later on in the article.

Expected Chalk, How to Play It