Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Fortinet Championship

I can’t believe I am saying this, but we are BACK. It’s fall golf season, folks, and let’s hope it’s as profitable for us as last year was. Despite NFL season being upon us, we are blessed with a $100K-to-first flagship GPP, which you all know gets my blood flowing. While Discord has certainly lost its fair share of personalities, we march on with those who bought the annual subscription. Personally, I’m refreshed after a month off from the PGA DFS grind and ready to get hurt by Justin “The Thumb” Thomas once again. Since we haven’t had an event in a month or so, I also don’t have to post my results from the last tournament, which is a really good thing for my reputation! Instead of talking about recaps, let’s dive right into the first event of the 2023 fall season.

 

Fortinet Championship – Preview

Everything about the Fortinet is pretty vanilla, honestly. The course is quite straightforward and we will definitely be getting a birdie fest this week. Here are the winners of the past five years of the Fortinet:

• 2022 – Max Homa: -16, one stroke above Danny Willett
• 2021 – Max Homa: -19, one stroke over Maverick McNealy
• 2020 – Stewart Cink: -21, two strokes over Harry Higgs
• 2019 – Cameron Champ: -17, one stroke over Adam Hadwin
• 2018 – Kevin Tway: Playoff over Ryan Moore and Brandt Snedeker

As you can see from the past winners, we’re going to see a score in the high teens and maybe even in the 20s, depending on the weather this year. In the past two years, we’ve gotten some tougher weather, but we’re not talking about changing Silverado to Augusta by any means. I won’t go deep into the course and, as always, I will direct you to Tom’s Course Preview to get more detail on it. What I can tell you is that wedge play and putting seem to be pretty damn important this week. But anyways, getting into the field — if you’ve been following the PGA throughout 2023, you’ll know that every player that made the top 50 in the FedEx Cup playoffs will make it into the “signature events” in 2024. This basically makes these fall events the equivalent of “practice events” for those guys. We can expect that those top 50 players are going to play maybe two fall events max, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them don’t play any fall events at all! Instead, we are blessed with $10K Stephan Jaeger and $9.4K Brendon Todd!

Yeah, it’s a bit of a soft field. The problem with these weeks that I’ve noticed from previous seasons is that the “elite” players are simply not priced high enough. I would have loved to see Max Homa at $12K, for example. That feels like a much more appropriate price for him (and is a preview of my expected chalk section). On the other end of the pricing spectrum, we get a bunch of unknowns and bad players all priced in the $6Ks. Most, if not all, of these golfers are overpriced. So this presents us with a little bit of a conundrum — should we jam high-priced players and take our chances with the scrubs down below? Or play more balanced and hope not to get buried by elite talent? I’ll discuss this more a bit later, but what I will say is that outside of Max Homa, there won’t be anyone that gets too ridiculously out of hand from an ownership perspective. This leads me to believe that the appropriate ownership range of 60-80% will hold true here. It looks to me like there will be specific pockets of chalk throughout the price points, but the low-$9K price point range is the one that sticks out to me as underowned. The low-$8K range might get squeezed a little too, depending on what you think Taylor Montgomery’s ownership is as well. Let’s talk about some chalk pieces and how to play them.

 

Expected Chalk, How to Play It