Large-Field GPP Breakdown: RBC Heritage

There is no rest for the weary in the PGA DFS streets in the spring. Despite coming off of the biggest tournament of the year watching Rory McIlroy complete a career grand slam, we are thrown right into the thick of a signature event at the RBC Heritage, with over $20 million on the line for the best players on the PGA Tour. What a time it is to be a Golf DFS player, and the summer is just getting started as we shift our focus to the road to the PGA Championship in mid-May. Overall, the past week at Augusta National seemed to be a decently successful weekend for the ETR subs, as we saw a few newbies and old faces come back with some success. Hopefully we see some longtime Discord legends like younguns and Den Den stick around for majors season. If not, well, that would just be disappointing. Shout-out to all the winners this past week, and if you were new to the product, I hope we showed you what a valuable product this can be if you’re even mildly interested in playing Golf DFS over the summer.

The Masters – Recap

Of course, the story of the weekend was whether or not Rory McIlroy could complete his career grand slam and end his 10+ year major drought. He came in with a lot of momentum, with two victories on the PGA Tour in limited events played, so the general thinking was that this would be one of his best shots at the elusive green jacket in a while. The DFS crowd seemed to think the same, as his ownership came up to be the highest on the slate at 27%, even in the large-field Milly Maker. Because of this steam, I actually ended up with an underweight position on Rory, instead choosing to go overweight on Scottie Scheffler as I noted in last week’s GPP Breakdown. Outside of the results, I think the Golf DFS world is quite predictable in terms of ownership. People LOVE to lean into narratives and momentum, especially during the majors, and this was no different. Course-history players (Patrick Reed, Corey Conners, even Phil Mickelson) came up in ownership, and recent-form players (Sepp Straka, Russell Henley, and Conners) steamed pretty heavily as well. I ended up being underweight every single one of the players listed, which had its benefits but also downfalls, with Rory winning being the icing on the cake. I’m not too upset about the results from last week, as I felt that I played the slate really well. Sometimes the top chalk hits, and that is what it is. I had about 16% Rory, so I simply did not have enough shots to win money on the week. Let’s take a look at the winning large-field Milly Maker lineup on DraftKings:

• It was an unduped, 11/9/7/7/7/7 build that featured Rory/Viktor Hovland up top, with Justin Rose/Reed/Sungjae Im/Conners down low. By starting with Rory or Scheffler, there were pretty few paths to getting unique in terms of roster construction, but this user was able to find a way by going with a $9K player and skipping both the $8K and $6K ranges. Most of my Scheffler and Rory builds had at least one $6K player, so kudos to this person for being able to get a little bit different here.
• The lineup came in at ~81% cumulative ownership, smack in the middle of the 70-90% range that I was approaching large-field contests with. Despite the start with Rory, the lineup featured a few sub-5%-owned plays (Hovland, Sungjae, Rose) that allowed this lineup to shoot to the top. Once again, this illustrates why lineups matter way more than individual player takes — you could play a chalk Rory and Reed together, but combining them with multiple low-owned plays made this viable. It wasn’t the route I was taking, but that’s probably the reason why I lost money!

The last thing I will say about The Masters: There were multiple players that came in super low owned in the large-field Milly Maker that stuck out to me as great plays. A few of them were in the winning lineup, but we really saw the chalk condense as we added more casuals to the mix, and thus, more people relying on things like course history and recent form. My general feeling on this is that those people are double-counting the impact of these metrics, and the best DFS players will be able to exploit this by simply moving away from it. Too much of the field does not take ownership into account or does not know how to take ownership into account. If we continue to play the right way, we will eventually break through for some big scores.

RBC Heritage – Preview

We move on to the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town, one of the more historic venues on the PGA Tour. I’ve always found it weird that the PGA Tour decided to have a signature event immediately after The Masters, but then I think to myself that these guys can play a couple of weeks in a row, so whatever. Harbour Town is a very different track than we are used to, especially coming right out of Augusta. It is known for being a positional course, one that many of the players are going to skip the driver and go with irons off the tee. Because of this, people generally tend to say that “anyone can win” this event, as distance OTT means less. That’s more or less been true, but I will add some caveats to that in a second. Here are the past five winners of the RBC Heritage with scoring: