Large-Field GPP Breakdown: FedEx St. Jude Championship

Playoffs!? PLAYOFFS!? That’s right — we’ve finally come to the end of the summer season, which means we’ve reached the FedEx Cup “Playoffs”, which the PGA tries to make us believe is the most important event of the year. That, of course, is an insult to the tournament that they just played, the Wyndham Championship, where we got to see the greatest play in the history of DFS, Brendon Todd, back up his projection and subsequently lose me a lot of money. I, for one, am glad to forget last week, and it seems like it was a fairly lukewarm week for the ETR subscribers as well. However, I have to give a shout-out to Discord member tresocho for taking down the $555 to the tune of $100K. His lineup did not have the winner, Lucas Glover, however, he did play two $10K players together and had the right hits down low otherwise. The power of leverage in the flesh, folks. Anyways, we welcome back the top players in the world for the FedEx St. Jude Championship and also a ton of huge DFS contests, so let’s get to the meat of this write-up.

Wyndham Championship – Recap

I posted my screenshot in Discord on Saturday, so I’ll just go ahead and say that’s my performance for the week. If you really want to know how it went, I had zero cashing lineups out of 150 going into the weekend but did come out around -85% because I was over the field on Glover. Had Russell Henley won? I would be absolutely toast. Here were my biggest stands on the week:

• Significantly over on Sungjae Im, Sam Burns, Austin Eckroat (flag plant), Bezuidenhout, Hideki Matsuyama
• Full X on Russell Henley, J.T. Poston, Benny An; way under on Brendon Todd; under on Denny McCarthy and Si Woo Kim but still had 15-20% of each

As you can see, it was a total disaster from the player pool. I picked the wrong contrarian plays, faded the wrong chalk, and even played the wrong chalk! Denny McCarthy‘s ownership came in at a ridiculous number, so much so that even Discord member MazeorBowie would have called him a “bad play”. And that’s saying something. Enough about me — let’s take a look at an actual winning lineup:

• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of 72%, with one sub-5% player in the course-history god Webb Simpson, who had a monster fourth round. Insane stuff. I wouldn’t have played it, and here we are in the losers’ circle.
• It skipped the $9K range as a whole. This continues to be a common strategy we see amongst winning lineups, which is quite interesting to me. Nothing tells me that it’s something we have to do, but it’s certainly something we should consider.

I’d like to forget the Wyndham and all who support it (especially Webb Simpson) immediately for my mental health. Let’s move on.

FedEx St. Jude Championship – Ownership Rules

As I mentioned in the intro paragraph, it’s a big week for the PGA Tour. We get the first round of the FedEx Cup playoffs, which lasts three tournaments over the next three weeks. This first tournament has been altered heavily, now featuring only 70 players with no alternates versus the previous version of 125 players with no alternates. For us DFS players, 55 players is a world of difference as we’re choosing our player pool, so we can’t look at results from past St. Jude tourneys, unfortunately. That being said, we can compare to the Sentry TOC, one of the few events with no cut and a limited field on the schedule. It is important to remember, however, that the Sentry only has 40 players involved. We can look at these lineups as a gauge on ownership.

Sentry TOC, 2022 – Large-Field GPP-Winning Lineup

Sentry TOC 2021, Winning Lineup